Interview of Maurice Bloch

1.1. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE ONE MARCH 6, 1987

GALM

Professor Bloch, we begin these oral history interviews by asking the person where they were born. Where was that in your particular case?

BLOCH

I was born in New York City, and until I came to live permanently in California, that was my base of operations. As my professional life grew, I did leave for limited periods to teach in places like Missouri and Minnesota for training outside of New York City, but basically that was where I lived and worked for the best part of my early life.

GALM

What part of New York City did your family reside in?

BLOCH

They lived in different parts. At one point we lived out on Long Island, but in the last years we lived in Manhattan. My parents lived in Manhattan almost all their lives. My mother, Rose [von Auspitz Bloch], who passed away just this January, was born in New York. Her family came as immigrants to this country, her mother I guess in the 1880s and her father not long afterward. They were married in New York and lived there all their lives.

GALM

Okay. Why don't we begin by talking more about your mother's family? Where were her parents born?

BLOCH

Her father was born in Austria, and her mother was born in Hungary, which in their day was all one area. My grandfather's real name was von Auspitz. They were evidently a fairly prominent family in Austria, but I've only found that out in more recent years, because I didn't really know my grandfather. He died long ago, and I just barely remember him.

GALM

Do you know his name?

BLOCH

Yes. His name was Julius Leo von Auspitz. I have found some bibliography relating to that family with some idea of why he came to this country rather early in order to escape then in some way. Because they were even involved on top levels in the old Austrian Empire, in parliament and so on. We've had some people on our faculty who brought me up to date about that family, things I never knew. Finally I was led to a publication about them and about their interest in art, which particularly interested me. They evidently had a house in Vienna with murals by [Gustav] Klimt and this sort of thing, all of which fascinated me. Because up to that point it was my feeling that I was the only one really interested in art, but evidently it was a built-in factor that I wasn't even aware of. All I knew is that the family was chiefly interested in music and the theater, and I was brought up in that kind of atmosphere. My mother was a singer who decided when she got married that she was not going to continue that career, that she wanted to devote herself to her husband and a child she had soon afterward, and she felt that was the way she wanted her life. As a matter of fact, from that time until she died at the age of ninety she was absolutely remarkable in the way she kept on learning. Art became very much part of her life. It was art and music, and I kept on being impressed right up almost to the last day. I mean, her reactions, her sense of quality in dealing with works of art, and her knowledge kept on growing over the years. So she really didn't miss anything. My father [Leonard Bloch] was not too far different from that. Both of them played a tremendous role in my life, and without them I rather doubt that all of the things that happened could have happened. But at the same time I must credit other members of that family, my aunts and so on. One aunt was a professional singer, and she then became a publicity director of the Roxy Theatre in New York. So I was always involved with theater, always seeing the best that was around, and involved with music and so on. I had a rather full and fascinating early life.

GALM

What was her name?

BLOCH

Her name was Isabel Austin. That was her professional name.

GALM

Now, that was your father's—?

BLOCH

That was my mother's, see, she changed the name from Auspitz to Austin, which is easier to deal with, and that was her professional name. But she was the one who really became very interested in my life at that time, which was meant to be, everybody thought, as a professional painter, not an art historian. So my going to art school, which my father felt was not a terribly reliable career— I went to the commercial side of it; I went to the National Academy [of Design]; I went to the [New York] Art Students League. But in order to appease him and make him happy, I went to college at night. So I could go to art school by day and college at night. That was the story of my life for quite a while.

GALM

What was your father's occupation?

BLOCH

He was in the retail furniture business on a managerial basis, for the most part. A very good businessman, but a very practical man, who also, incidentally, became very much interested in what I was doing. He learned a great deal about identifying himself with works of art because he saw mother doing it, and I think the two of them became competitors, in a sense, in becoming interested in what I was doing. But he was much more interested, I think basically, in my writing. From the beginning, even in public school, he directed everything I was writing, would go over it and try to get me to use grammar properly and to write well, to write imaginatively, I think back on it now, because that began very, very early. I remember the first thing I ever won was a medal for an essay on fire prevention in public school. I had to go down and get it from the mayor, and that was a very proud moment for him, because after all, he was in back of me, pushing me and making certain that I did it right. He continued to do this right until the time they were out here, and when I was doing some major work, he involved himself very much in being an editor. Even though he didn't have specific training in this, he wrote beautifully. He wrote with a Spencerian hand. When he finally was convinced that I wasn't really going to be an artist— He was proud of what I did, and anything I did in that direction was just fine. But he was much relieved when I decided that I would be an art historian and that I would confine my life to writing. He was very, very happy about that.

GALM

Where did his parents come from?

BLOCH

He was born in Holland. He was born in Amsterdam, and his parents brought him to this country when he was three years old, again to New York.

GALM

And what were they involved in?

BLOCH

My grandfather was a manufacturer of cigars, which for many Dutch people was a way to go. He had to support a large family, and when I really came to know him well, he had a shop in New York and my father worked with him to handle the bookkeeping of that, which he did right until the time they both retired from business.

GALM

So your father's name was Leonard?

BLOCH

My father's name was Leonard.

GALM

And your paternal grandparents names' were—?

BLOCH

Their names were Emanuel [Bloch] and Sarah [Bloch].

GALM

Did you know both of them?

BLOCH

Oh, yes, absolutely. You know, as of today, I'm probably the oldest living member of that generation, and they all have to come to me to find out what anybody looked like, because I knew everybody. I knew my grandmother, I knew my great-grandmother on my mother's side. My grandmother had six sisters. I knew all of them, with the exception of one who died very young. And I knew my father's family, although there were two members who died fairly young, so I didn't know them. But basically I came to know all of them and know them very, very well. Because my great-grandmother died when I was nine, I think, so I knew her very, very well, and my grandmother certainly.

GALM

Was the idea of family very important growing up?

BLOCH

Family was very important in those days. They were very tightly knit; they all lived in the New York area. There were one or two of my grandmother's sisters who lived out of town. One lived in Denver. In those days you went to Denver if you had any problems with your lungs, and her husband had. That family still lives in Denver. Another sister lived in Saint Louis, and the members of that family still live there. And another of her sisters, her elder sister, lived in Pennsylvania in the area of the state college [Pennsylvania State University], and that family became very prominent at Penn State. There's a library there in the name of that daughter. But I knew all of those people, because they'd come to New York on visits. Then later on I visited them, so I came to know them quite well.

GALM

Were you an only child?

BLOCH

I was an only child and the eldest grandson.

GALM

So where did you first go to grammar school? Or did you go to many different schools?

BLOCH

No, two or three public schools. They were in the Bronx, as I remember. Then I went to high school also there. It was way up in the Gun Hill Road area of the Bronx. So all of that preparatory school was in the New York area.

GALM

Were there teachers that might have stood out that might have influenced you?

BLOCH

Well, yes. Without mentioning specific names of people—although those I could probably dredge up in my memory—I think the teachers of course that appealed to me most were the art teachers. I won prizes for what I was doing at that time, and that's what stimulated my interest in being a painter. I can't be sure that I remember their names specifically, because there were several of those. I was particularly attracted to them, and they encouraged me.

GALM

Would these have been mostly women? Or men too?

BLOCH

No, those were all women teachers. There were relatively few male teachers in my experience in those days. Maybe you got one in the shop or in the gym. In high school you began to meet more male teachers. I remember there was a teacher of Latin who was a male teacher. That was very good for me, because that was my first experience with a language that was later on to play a role in my life. French became my second language. That continued on into college, and I had several teachers. Strangely enough, most of them were not Frenchmen or Frenchwomen. They were Spaniards. So that took me a long time to get the pronunciation straight.

GALM

[laughter] Yes, I'm sure.

BLOCH

It was very interesting. I was speaking French with a Spanish accent. But they were good teachers. Apart from that, I remember there was a teacher of history who was particularly influential because she really knew how to present the material. I think the problem is that they were good, serious teachers—and most of them rather stern disciplinarians—but they weren't terribly creative teachers. And if they weren't, I really had a struggle. Where they were, it was wonderful.

GALM

Were you taking any art classes outside of school in those early years?

BLOCH

Not until high school. First of all, you couldn't get into any of the schools until you were a teenager.

GALM

I was wondering if there were any Saturday museum classes that you might have gone to.

BLOCH

I went to the museums, but I don't remember any specific classes that were available to us. I must have been about sixteen, or something like that, when I went first to the National Academy. I may have clipped off a couple of years in order to get in. I'm trying to think of the chronology of it. I did go at one point to Parsons School [of Design], which was a commercial school, and that was a Saturday affair. I think it was before the National Academy. Because you just started a spark in my memory that I did go to a private school, but it was a commercial school. There again, I think that was to satisfy my father. Because I was certainly drawing, freelancing. What I was doing in the schools and getting praise for certainly stimulated his thoughts. My aunt got into the act as well to encourage me that I should pursue an art career. But he, being a practical man, the idea was how about commercial art. So I think my going to Parsons, which he had to pay for, was okay because there was a possibility of a commercial career. I didn't find it particularly exciting. I was the youngest, as I remember. There was a lot of people at that school who were adults who thought I was the cutest thing in the world, came around and patted me on the shoulder, and I didn't find that particularly attractive. I didn't learn a great deal. So I decided I wanted to go to the National Academy, which was an academic school where I would get the kind of basic training that artists have received on a very similar basis for a hundred years or more. Actually, that was a very important phase of my life, because even when I started to write about artists, the same artists a hundred years before were having the same kind of training. As a matter of fact, the same kinds of materials were still available. There was the cast class, the drawing from the cast. Those same casts were there a hundred years earlier. It enabled me to really have the kind of insight into the kind of training that was available at the very beginning of the National Academy, which was still continuing in my lifetime. So it played ultimately a dual role in my life. It was very good for me, very good training, but of course it was leading to a painting career. I wasn't that attracted to the commercial aspect of it, although the same aunt that I mentioned to you, who was in the theater during those years, got me various commissions to do commercial work. They were mainly in the area of portraiture, which always interested me particularly. [The portraits] were intended for these flyers that accompanied motion pictures. She had those connections, and she reached out and tried to help me to get these commissions, I also did some illustrations for the newspapers.

GALM

Do you recall what newspaper that was?

BLOCH

I think in those days it was probably the [New York] Sun, which was a very good newspaper in those days, with excellent art reviews. What I did were portraits of people who were appearing in motion pictures. They would always have a photograph or a drawing, and they wanted to have a drawing because it had a certain amount of class, you see. So I got some of those commissions.

GALM

Were you also reading much during your childhood?

BLOCH

Oh, a great deal.

GALM

Do you recall what things you might have been reading?

BLOCH

No. I used to keep a record of what I read. It was a very thoroughgoing kind of thing. I remember there was a teacher named Rosenzweig, and he was one of those creative types of teachers in these early high school years who asked us to give reports. They were book reports or reports on things we had read, but most of the time it had to do with books. And I remember I was chiefly interested in biography, which is interesting because ultimately that was what I was doing as an art historian. And then reading Thomas Mann, Knut Hamsun, Franz Werfel, Lion Feuchtwanger. (Little did I know that I would eventually know Madam [Marta] Feuchtwanger quite well. ) About that time I also ceased doing the commercial work. It wasn't that profitable, and I was concentrating on my painting career. But I also began to do drawings of celebrities, most of them based on secondary materials I could find and bring together and create from that original portraits. I would then send them to them, or try to meet them, and have them autograph them or approve them. That was the beginning of a collection which I eventually called "my father's collection," because that was his one great link, you see. It was both literary and it was art, and it was the kind of thing that appealed to him. I guess I was always trying to find some area in which my parents would find a positive role, so that we would share.

GALM

Who were some of the people that you did likenesses of?

BLOCH

Well, it began with someone like George Bernard Shaw. The early ones were very quick and linear sketches. Remember these were always people I was reading as well, you see, so you can really find out what I was reading by that. It wasn't just literary people. There were musical people, there were artistic people, there were scientists. You really get a clue as to what I was reading and becoming interested in. George Bernard Shaw signed the first one and said, "This might be worse." But afterward I did two others of him, way up until the 1940s, and each one he signed with a great flourish. So he eventually approved those three portraits I did of him. Why I did three portraits of him I don't know, but he was a fascinating individual, and he replied very promptly. Then there were people like Werfel, Feuchtwanger, Thomas Mann. All those people I was reading were there. Emil Ludwig, I remember that. Andre Malraux, Romain Rolland, H. G. Wells—those were among some of the literary people. Some of those are still in this collection I still have. Where it will go I don't know. It's become a rather valuable collection, but a rather private thing. We have never exhibited any of it. And then in music, beginning with people like Rachmaninoff, Paderewski, Toscanini, Stokowski— I could go right on.

GALM

Did they also sign them?

BLOCH

Oh, absolutely. Arnold Schoenberg (whose name, really, I only came in closer contact with when I came here, because I know people related to him here) with a great big bar of music, rather stunning. And Stravinsky more than once. I tell you where it really began. It began with George Bernard Shaw. But the one really great experience that I had was I did one of Josef Hofmann and sent it to him. He had his manager get in touch with me and said that he liked it so much he'd like to use it on his Carnegie Hall program, and that was followed with tickets to the box and coming down to meet him. My aunt was thrilled, because her interest in music tied in with that. So I met the great man. That wasn't the first, and I met others after that, but him in particular. I think what happened was afterward when I really got enough courage, I began to do crowned heads, you see, and I would get fascinating letters. Well, Paderewski, getting back to that, his secretary wrote and said would I please do a copy of it, because he would love to have it. That was repeated several times when I began to get involved with crowned heads and presidents and great men like that. It was very, very interesting. Nobody really ever refused, even people who are most, most difficult. I'm probably forgetting some of the biggest names who were involved.

GALM

So you started doing these at about what age?

BLOCH

Well, those I must have begun about the time that I was going to the National Academy. It must have begun around that time.

GALM

During your high school years.

BLOCH

Oh, yes, absolutely. And it continued. As a matter of fact, it still continues. I think the last one I did was Jimmy [James E.] Carter. I remember my mother was very much involved with that, very excited about that. I haven't had that much time in more recent years, and my eyes aren't as good as they were. I used to work in pen and ink, the kind of thing that you need the greatest eyes, and now I'm doing much broader things. But it still is a part of my life, and I still hope to do more of these up ahead, just as a diversion from writing.

GALM

Now, the reading that you were doing during those early years, were these authors that your parents were also reading?

BLOCH

No, they weren't. I'm really not so much aware of what my father was reading. I think he read on a much more popular level. He was a busy businessman who worked from morning till night. Those weren't the days when you had those tight union schedules. He was gone at seven thirty in the morning and I might not see him till ten o'clock at night. He was a man that devoted himself to his work. But the beauty of the relationship I always had with my parents, and particularly, as I remember, with my father— After all, I didn't see him all day; I was working or going to school. His assurance to me from the beginning, when I decided to go on to graduate school— At the school I was going to, the Institute of Fine Arts [New York University], very few people completed a Ph.D. in less than fifteen years. So it was like going to a monastery. I mean, you were there at eight in the morning and you didn't leave there till eight thirty, nine o'clock at night. It was a school where there were only fifty students, and they were all scholarship students. And we worked—we didn't have much of a social life. But when I got home and he got home, my mother always saw to it that we had a family get-together. Nobody just went to bed and disappeared; we waited up for him. Then we ate, or whatever it was, and then we talked about the happenings of the day. What were you doing? He would discuss his experiences and so on. There was always the sharing, and if it was a matter of reading, we would discuss that too. And certainly there were the weekends. So it was a complete kind of family relationship. We knew exactly what we were doing, and we were all interested, the three of us, in what each of us had to say or to do. But my father's reading had to be the kind of thing he could digest in his spare time, because there were other things he needed to do. He had to take care of his family's business, their bookkeeping, he had to take care of our family affairs. And he did all that all the years that I knew him until he died. So I was so spoiled I didn't know anything about gathering material for an income tax. He did all those things. All I could do was follow his pattern after that. Each of us had a responsibility which we did, and we really didn't interfere with that. Each person had his responsibility at home, but we were all interested in each other, so I would be reporting to them what I read if I had read something interesting. But the reading habit, I think, began in the high school that I mentioned to you, in a particular class where we had to make oral presentations and written reports. I dare say that my father read all those. That may have been another way, because he read everything I wrote. He insisted on that.

GALM

Were there any childhood friends, high school friends, grade school friends who shared your interests?

BLOCH

Oh, yes. I had several friends. There were not a great many. They were close friends who shared a variety of interests. Very early I became interested in the decorative arts, as well as in painting. That also began about that time. I'd go to all the auctions, and I'd go to all the exhibitions. I had friends who went with me. I think they were curious to see what I was doing, and they became attracted to it. So we shared that kind of thing. I'd go to antique shows, and I went to all the auctions in New York from the time I was ten years old. The galleries in those days, all up and down Fifty- seventh Street, were rather open. I mean, they saw these little kids coming and at first they were a little amazed, but once they saw we were serious and curious, they would let us in. Because they would charge admission; we didn't have the money. There was one gallery named [Gallery of] P. Jackson Higgs, which was very elegant, an à la Duveen [Gallery] kind of thing, with all the velvet walls. They'd have one painting on exhibition. I remember it was the so-called "Urbino Madonna of Raphael" which was being shown. Well, I went. That was a dollar admission, but they let us in for nothing. And others would pull out things. It was a whole variety of things. I became very interested when I was fifteen, sixteen, in porcelain, and I did a manuscript on the history of porcelain, with all the marks. I knew much more about it then than I do now. It was never published. It just was a typescript kind of thing. The one thing I learned in public school was how to type. Thank God! Because that became a very valuable tool. Some of my teachers couldn't type, and they'd ask me to type for them. This was in public school. There was a class, and I took it.

GALM

These interests, you know, seem to be fairly rarified for a teenager. Was there anyone who was leading you into these, or were these things that you sort of sought out?

BLOCH

I think I sought them out, but I was always encouraged. My grandmother, for instance, became interested in what I was doing. If it was a distance away, she would travel with me to go. She also would go to theater with me, because I was too young to be allowed in by myself. And so, poor thing, she had to sit through things she really didn't care about, because my aunt would get me into things like Cyrano de Bergerac with Walter Hampden—I remember that distinctly. So it wasn't always Alice in Wonderland. It was some rather serious things. And of course mysteries, mystery plays. I always was deeply interested in those things, and my grandmother didn't like these horror things at all. But there were some rather famous ones that were being shown over and over again: Doctor I [by Howard W. Comstock and Allen C. Miller] and The Blue Ghost [by Bernard J. McOwen and J. P. Riewerts]. There were famous actors doing these things, so it was important. It was very diverse. I think my interests went all the way from something like that to Molière. I became very fascinated by the Molière comedies, and my aunt would see to it that I got in to see them. You know Anthony Perkins? His father, Osgood [Perkins], was the great Molière performer, and I saw him. Actually, I think Anthony Perkins either wasn't born yet or was very young. He really never knew his father, but he was a great, great actor. I saw all those things really from a very young age. I was introduced to a lot of these things, and somehow or other it all came into play later on.

GALM

You'd mentioned that your mother had thoughts of pursuing a singing career and then decided against it.

BLOCH

Yes, she did.

GALM

Had she studied professionally?

BLOCH

No, she hadn't. She had a natural voice, a coloratura soprano and a very good one. But by the time I was growing up, she had completely abandoned all that. I mean, she would just sing for us. I think she was very shy, and that shyness continued, I must say, till she came out here. She had three sisters who were very strong women. One had been a teacher; one was, as I told you, a singer who then went into publicity; and another one was a businesswoman. She was the one who stayed home. She decided that's what she wanted to do. The others were very, very strong, very positive, very aggressive ladies, and I have always felt that that kind of held her back, that their presence—and it was a close family—made her feel a little less secure in doing what she might have done. But she always said that, no, that was her choice. She said that up until very recent times when I'd ask her about that. I said, "Why, why, why?" Because I knew she had a beautiful voice, and even her sister who sang said, "You've got a far better voice than I have." But they all sang at home, and they all played the piano, and she did. Some had professional training? she played it just naturally. All these things came to her with great ease but she didn't do it. I think there was a shyness and the sense of all that family around her. But when she came out here and she was free of all that (by then she was already a mature woman; my father was close to retirement), she became very much interested in university life and became a very good hostess and was not bashful at all. I remember when we had Dr. [Franklin D.] Murphy come to our home in those days and she handled the whole thing. She was a little bit in awe, and then she said, "Well, why am I in awe?" And she liked him so much and got to know Judy Murphy quite well, and then of course the Speronis [Charles and Carmela], and so on. Very interesting people finally came to the house, and she was very, very much at ease with all that. She began to tell me, "I don't know why I was ever like that before." [laughter]

GALM

Maybe it was the California ambience.

BLOCH

Well, she loved California. But no, it was something else. As I told you—and I mean this with great sincerity, and I'm convinced that this happened—she really kept on growing. I've always said she was the best student I ever had. She kept on learning. People say, "Oh, you know, after a certain age you don't grow." But that is not true. It has to do with you.

GALM

Was music an important part for you growing up? Did you take lessons?

BLOCH

I started to, but then I didn't really pursue it. There were too many other things going on. I would say to my mother, in particular, I'd say, "You know, I love music so much. Why?" And she said, "Well, you're doing enough. It isn't necessary." But I said, "I would have liked to have learned to do something quite well in the musical area." She said, "Well, you have a good voice." But I said, "That's a family trait, but I use it to speak." I too was bashful about that kind of thing, going out and singing publicly. But she always felt that I had a good enough voice to do that if I really wanted to, and she wouldn't hold me back and neither would my father. But I was busy enough with a career. Because what happened there, and I should backtrack to that, was that after the National Academy, I continued a college career. I told my father that I would do this but I would like to continue my painting career. He was relieved that I was thinking of teaching or doing something that would support me later in my life. He was very worried about that, being, again, very practical. You know, the Dutch are practical people. So when I said, no, I was going to go to college, he was very relieved. The City College [of] New York became very, very difficult, because that was at nighttime, and it was not a very happy kind of experience. It was very demanding. You couldn't really get into City College without very good scholarship averages from your high school, and once you were in City College you could get into any college you wanted to because it became known as a rather demanding kind of curriculum and standard. But I wasn't too happy there, because I was sort of being pulled apart, and the whole idea was to try to find some way of bringing both of those careers into focus. What happened at about that time—and this was in the late thirties—I came upon a school at NYU [New York University], the School of Architecture and Allied Arts, which was a professional school at NYU that combined training in architecture with architectural history and also allied arts. The architectural students had to learn how to draw too, you see, so they had classes in art to which design students came and painters came and so on. That seemed to be an answer to my prayers. I discussed this at home, and my father agreed. He had to support that initially, and he agreed to do this. And they simply combined all the credits I would have gotten from going to the Academy with what I had gathered at City College. So I was entered on a program that was ideally suited to me because it combined art history to the extent of architectural history, which from that point on became very important to me, not for my whole career, but for my teaching career. I took that and some architectural design and certainly the art program that they had. They had some very, very good teachers. Then I combined that with credit I could receive from going to the Art Students League. That is what I really wanted to do, and so in the summers I would go to the Art Students League.

GALM

Who were some of the teachers at NYU that—?

BLOCH

Well, at NYU I think perhaps the best-known artist I came to know was [F.] Winold Reiss. Now, Winold Reiss was an Austrian from the Tirol who became famous as the man who designed the Longchamps restaurants. He too combined a career. He also was a member of an Indian tribe, because he did drawings of the Indians, and those hung in those Longchamps restaurants. If you'd go into the Longchamps restaurants in New York in those days, he did things that nobody had ever seen before in restaurants. There were mirrored walls and a use of a wonderful, warm red throughout and then these portraits of the Indians that he did. He's now becoming recognized as a serious artist. In those days there wasn't that much interest in it because they regarded him as a kind of industrial designer. But it was very fascinating. He was something of a ham, and so we had that benefit too. He'd come in with his big cape and all that sort of thing. We had to do life-size drawings. I came out of the Academy, where we didn't do life-size drawings, but we did charcoal drawings. So I had the whole thing from the cast drawings on to life drawings and the whole rotation that you did at the Academy. But that didn't agree with him, because he went in for color, you see, and on a large scale, because he was a mural painter as well. So he finally got me to work this way. He also taught the courses in design, which I took, and he seemed to be very impressed with what I was doing. So some of my drawings got into a book he did on design—without credit. They just simply took your things in those days. He certainly approved of the drawings so much, but they were drawings of the model. You can imagine these life-size drawings in color of nudes—and I left nothing out. He decided that they were good enough to do a special exhibition. The school of architecture was in an office building on Forty-second Street, right opposite Bryant Park. The gallery, so-called, was really off the elevators, and so all these drawings were hung as you got off the elevator. The dean's wife, who was a rather prudish lady, came off the elevator one day, so they were down twenty minutes later. [laughter] But there were some very interesting aspects of that of quite another kind. After all, we were kind of an academic school, a beaux-arts school of design really. Many of those students of architecture won Prix de Rome and so on. And the allied arts group, who were much more involved with free design and in actual drawing and painting from the model. How those two managed to coalesce is something I can't figure out really to this day, except that the dean did enjoy visiting the life class.

GALM

Who was the dean?

BLOCH

His name was [E. Raymond] Bossange, and he was a real beaux-arts man, quite an elderly man at that time. Quite different from Winold Reiss, who was a rather free spirit. Incidentally, he [Reiss] finally said to me, "Bloch, you must come to—" He had a school among the Indians, summer class. He said, "You must come to my class." So I said, "Mr. Reiss, I really can't afford it." He said, "You do not have a grandmother who can support this?" I never really did go, but I did have his approval finally. It wasn't easy, because I came out of such an academic background. But it did free me during that time, because he was really the only academic artist I could work with. The others were not like that. I wanted really the kind of training I received at the Academy, because I had some of the best teachers of the day.

1.2. TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE TWO MARCH 6, 1987

GALM

Dr. Bloch, you were talking about the teachers at the National Academy of Design.

BLOCH

Yes. They impressed me, because they were famous artists of course. And just as they always did, they were not there all the time; they came to offer criticism, which was the typical procedure. They weren't there all the time. There were some lesser-known teachers who were there more frequently, teachers of drawing. Among them I remember Charles Louis Hinton, who was a numismatist and whose name I came came to know better later on. He taught us anatomical drawing and that sort of thing. And there was another artist named Alice [H.] Murphy who was there all the time too. These were teachers on the basic level. Then when we got to the life class, of course, we had the well-known artists of the day, who came to offer criticism. I remember the first teacher I had was Charles [C.] Curran, whose name has now become much better known. But it was sort of the last year of his teaching (he was then in his seventies). Now he's regarded as one of the impressionists, although he never regarded himself as that. Then there was Henry [R.] Rittenberg, there was Gifford [R.] Beal, there was Leon Kroll. These were all the artists who were then prominent or had— In Curran's case, he had already been prominent and was no longer that active, although he was still painting. So I came to know some of those people, as well as the people who were running the Academy in those days. You began to see some of the great old boys coming in to visit and give lectures, and some of those lectures would— It's just another story, but I won't go into that here. But we were exposed to a lot of interesting things, apart from the experience of working with these people. When I went to NYU, I felt that just someone like Winold Reiss and then some lesser artist was not what I really wanted. I wanted to continue, as long as I still had the opportunity, to work with well-known artists. Hence the Art Students League. There I worked primarily with Robert Brackman.

GALM

Was that only a summer activity?

BLOCH

If I wanted to get the credit, I was only allowed to go in the summer. Because NYU was very concerned that you matriculated there, and if they would give me the credit, it was only for that. I would then have to bring the work and have it juried and approved. But being the kind of person I was, I really was so determined to get the best of what I could put my hands on that I really didn't think much about their feelings in the matter, as I think back on that today. But they didn't object greatly. Brackman was a wonderful teacher. It was about that time that he was painting the Lindberghs [Charles A. and Anne Morrow], and so we knew all about that. He was a very prominent portrait painter, and portraits always interested me. And he liked what I was doing. But I was told early on not to tell him that I was getting credit, because he didn't like academic people. But then came the day when I did have to tell him; otherwise I wouldn't have a letter from him. So he blanched a little, I remember. Because he asked me, "Are you coming back this fall to work with me? I like what you're doing." I said, "I'm sorry to tell you, Mr. Brackman, but I go to college." And he said, "Oh!" But he said, "Well, get finished with that and come back." Of course I didn't. What happened after that was that I decided to go on to graduate school. So once I had completed my work at NYU School of Architecture and got my degree, I began seriously my postgraduate work at the Institute of Fine Arts. Now, some of that had begun while I was still an undergraduate. I was allowed to take some courses on the graduate level, and that really caught me. Then I was determined that I wanted to do that. Of course, again, my father was thrilled that I was doing that and that I wasn't going to follow a painting career seriously, that I was going to do that for my own pleasure. I had visions of being able to combine the two.

GALM

Let me ask a question that sort of goes backward. Did the Depression have any impact on your family or your growing up?

BLOCH

Well, of course I was aware of it. It didn't affect me at all. It unquestionably affected my father, although he was never without a position and always did very well. But I wasn't working, and he insisted that I follow my desires. Especially when I decided I was going to go on and become a teacher. Because that was the whole idea, that I would have a professional career and that teaching was the logical thing at the end of the road. He said, "No, I want you to do that. " Of course, what I was doing, I was getting scholarships. After the first year at NYU School of Architecture, I was on a scholarship basis. But I had to do some work for that. Plus I did some work in addition to that, and I think there was some funding through the government that enabled me to work on an hourly basis at the university. All these [jobs] were done right there. So it did help pay the bills. It was nothing like what it would cost today, but it seemed like a lot in those days. So I did my part. And of course some of that commercial work I had been doing I tried to continue, and that brought in a little bit. But even when I gave up the night kind of thing, I was still working all day and into the evening at school, because the idea was to try to finish.

GALM

I noticed that you spent a year at Harvard [University]. What was that?

BLOCH

The Harvard was part of my training on the graduate level. When I started at the Institute— And the thing that was so important about that, remember, those were the days when the great scholars were no longer able to stay in their countries. Some of them had been in concentration camps, but others had left the country. The Institute was a particularly interesting school. It was founded by Professor Walter Cook, who was a specialist in Spanish medieval art. He was one of those remarkable people who wanted to form a school where a small group of students could gain professional training on a very top level. So he reached out for all of these refugee scholars he could get. Some of them he helped out of concentration camps and brought them to this country. So this was a moment in history, in the history of the history of art training, that could never be duplicated again, because all these great scholars from various parts of Germany and Austria were brought to America to this one place. We were operated out of the old Warburg House at 17 East Eightieth Street in New York. We were all thrown together. There were only fifty of us. We were all scholarship students, as it turned out. I think maybe the first year I paid to get in, and then after that it was all scholarship. We had to do something for the scholarship. We might man the switchboard or run slides or whatever—it wasn't a great thing. It was like a family kind of arrangement. The school was wonderful, because it was a private house. The professors had their offices, and we had access to them all the time. We'd stay all day, from morning till night, go to all the classes that we wanted, either to audit or to take for credit. And we got to know them personally; we'd go out to lunches together. It was very much along the lines of the old German arrangements. I was determined not to be a specialist at the beginning but to get a thoroughgoing knowledge of art history. That seems to have been part of my kind of mental exercise, that I always wanted to encompass things. So I started with classical art with [Karl] Lehmann-Hartleben, who was certainly the greatest scholar in the field at that time, an archaeologist and a wonderful teacher. Then I went into the Renaissance field, which was my real love, and I worked with people like Richard Offner, who was a great duecento, trecento scholar and was eventually my adviser, and who followed me through to my master's thesis. I worked with Martin Weinberger, who was the expert in Renaissance sculpture, and Michelangelo was his specialty. I had Walter [F.] Friedlaender, who was the expert in mannerism. Those are the ones I best remember at this point. I took all of their courses, and then we had visits. Once a year we had people like [Erwin] Panofsky coming in to teach, and then there were other visiting scholars like Otto Benesch, formerly of the Albertina [Graphics Collection (Vienna)], who was teaching at Harvard. It was through my contact with people like Benesch that I determined to follow him to Harvard to take courses there. We were given the privilege of getting credit elsewhere. My base was in New York, and I really couldn't afford to go and live in Cambridge. I had a home, and there was no reason to do it. But the arrangements were made that I could go to Harvard in the summertime (and I did that more than one year) to study with specific scholars—Jakob Rosenberg, Otto Benesch, people like that— to fill in my knowledge of Dutch art or French art or whatever it was I wanted to do. So that really in the end I had much more credit than I needed for either the M.A. or Ph.D. But that was the privilege that I had and which again I credit to my father, who made it possible for me to have as thoroughgoing an education as I felt I needed. He said, "I don't care how long it takes." He said, "You've got a home, and you do it." But I wasn't really comfortable with all of that. Well, the beauty about Harvard was of course you could use the Weidner Library. It was much easier than to use the libraries in New York, where you would die before you could really get to things. The [Pierpont] Morgan Library [New York City] was the best, of course, for my purpose at the time of my M.A.But I was able to really do all the work one summer at Harvard at the Weidner [Library]. I decided that when I'd reach a certain point, where I was finishing a thesis, that I wanted to find out really what it was that I wanted to do, whether I wanted to be a teacher or work in a museum. While I was still at NYU, I was offered a position at the Metropolitan Museum [of Art]. It was just one of those things that came my way. They sometimes took on graduate students to do some jobs, but this was rather unusual in that they offered me a full- time job. Usually these were just weekend kinds of things. It started that way, but they liked me enough and offered me a full-time job. My job was to do research for individual departments. I really had the run of the museum, and I might do a research paper on torture implements if somebody had made an inquiry. It was that kind of thing. All of these things intrigued me, and I was glad to do it. I came to know the people at the Metropolitan, and they liked me enough to ask me to stay on. But I said, I remember, to my supervisor, "But I must tell you that if I'm offered a teaching position in the next six months, I'm likely to take it." Well, nobody ever did that at the Metropolitan. Once you were given a job there, you stayed for thirty years or till you were retired. What was the salary? Thirty dollars a week? You know, it was only because I lived at home that I could manage that. And my parents liked that. I was home, you see. But there came the day when I was offered a position. It was not a permanent job. It was the wartime, and people were leaving and they needed substitutes. I was offered a job, a year job at the University of Missouri in Columbia. I remember going home to discuss this.

GALM

Where was home at this point?

BLOCH

On Fifty-seventh Street, West Fifty-seventh Street. I said, "I think I really must do this. Because I haven't been out of New York and I haven't had that experience." To get a university job [when you were] just about completing your M.A.was quite unusual. As a matter of fact, the Institute was quite astounded, because if you didn't have a Ph.D. you couldn't work in a university. You might work in a college, but not in a university. So we decided in our conference at home, that I would take this job. Came the day when I had to take the train to Missouri, I know this was very difficult for ray parents. But they realized that that was important. It was quite an experience.

GALM

Had you scouted the location at all before accepting the job?

BLOCH

No. It was offered over the phone. It had to be done quickly because they needed someone immediately, and I decided to go. I mean, early on in New York, the kinds of things you were offered were, you know, a docent at the Metropolitan or something like that, and they treated that like they were giving you a diamond. I was not impressed with that. I wanted to know whether I could teach. This was very basic, because I had to teach every art history course that was offered, every one. I was the only one. Not only did I have to teach that, but I had to buy my own slides, run my own slides. I had to do everything. I had to do the whole thing all by myself; there was no help at all. I arrived in this little town straight out of New York. It was like being out in the wilderness somewhere. I remember arriving on a terribly rainy night. The only good thing about it was I was boarding with a lady who opened the door and smiled very sweetly at me. I felt comfortable, and she gave me a hot bowl of soup, or whatever it was that evening. But from that point on, it was a rugged experience. It was the war; the university was working on a wartime basis. They had an ASTP [Army Specialized Training Program] group there. That's the specialized training program where young lawyers and doctors who were going into the special services were there to get training in language. This was instant Russian, instant German, whatever it was they had to do. As I quickly learned, a part of my job was to train them in the history of art. Because many of them were going on flying missions, and part of the thing was to train them to know where the great things were, to avoid dumping bombs on them if they can help it, you see. That was part of the thing. As a matter of fact, they really recruited the whole regular faculty to teach all kinds of things. In fact, at one point they wanted me to teach physics and chemistry. I said no way! In the first place, I was teaching every course in art history. There were enough students there to really command quite a program of me. It was everything from French painting to Italian painting to— You know, from great sweeps of courses to highly specialized courses in Flemish art and so on. So all of my training, which was in breadth on the graduate level, gave me a certain amount of confidence. At the beginning I was somewhat shaken having to face classes I'd never faced before in my life, but I quickly managed to deal with it and I loved it. I came to love Missouri, came to love that little town. My M.A.was finished before I came. And then I had already completed my requirements for a Ph.D. by that time, because, you see, all those courses that I was taking. So that I began to take my comprehensive examinations, and they began to send them out there. It was supervised out there so I could take them. Then the question was what kind of a thesis was I to do.

GALM

What had you done for your master's?

BLOCH

I did a study in iconology relating to Andrea Mantegna. My teacher was Richard Offner—as I say, one of the most prominent art historians in the field. He wanted me to continue with him, because the way those people were organized, they each had their own coterie of students around them, in their office and so forth. Very typically German. Offner was much more Austrian than he was German, very Berensonian and a very fascinating individual. We had these Christmas parties, and part of the entertainment was to do a takeoff on the teachers. I always did Offner. He was ribbed about this.

GALM

In the presence of the teacher?

BLOCH

Sometimes, but he wouldn't show up. But I did a takeoff that you wouldn't believe, because he had many interesting mannerisms. But a wonderful man, and I admired him greatly. He wanted me to continue working with him, but you couldn't travel to Europe. The way I had been trained on my own without even knowing it. Going to all those auctions and going to all those galleries had made me aware of the work of art as a focus itself, not the books. You could do a study in iconology from the books, and many young scholars actually use books and that is all they do to this day. They never go to look at a work of art. But Offner confronted you with works of art, very definitely. We went to all the collections, and eventually while I was at the Institute I was in charge of taking young students, our students, to visit the collections. I was the one that set up programs to go to see the Rockefeller collection, to see the Erickson collection, to see all of these things. As a matter of fact, out of that, Mrs. [Anna] Erickson became such a close friend of mine that she sponsored my first trips to Europe. She was the lady who owned the Aristotle [Contemplating the Bust of Homer] of Rembrandt, among other things. (That was the McCann-Erickson [Inc.] company. ) I met some wonderful people. So my eye was trained for that, and I think Offner knew that. But he said, "Well, you can deal with photographs." I said, "No, that isn't what I want to do." Although he had several wonderful topics, it was impossible for me to do it at that time. There was no travel. In fact, they [the teachers] were strapped; they couldn't move. That was the beauty of our training, that our teachers were always there. You had some of the greatest minds in the field all in one place, which in the old days you could never have done. In fact, [earlier] many of them were either independent scholars or they worked for museums. So you didn't have the kind of training you could get really seeing things through their eyes and through their abilities. They were mostly, in their turn, students of [Heinrich] Wölfflin. So how close can you get to the core of the field? It was a unique period—I have to repeat that again.

GALM

Did that then break up soon after the war?

BLOCH

Yes, they began to travel again. They're all dead now, you see; you've got a second and third generation. There are some capable scholars, but it's not the same thing. It's not the same thing at all. Their students, most of them, became prominent themselves. But then you get into the next generation. It's not quite the same.

GALM

I just was wondering whether they dispersed outside of New York shortly after the war or whether most of them remained?

BLOCH

Most of them remained. Some of them had been so brutalized by their experience that they didn't want to go back. I remember the man who preceded me in my job at Cooper Union [Museum for the Arts of Decoration] was Rudolf Berliner. His home at Berchtesgaden had been taken over by [Heinrich] Himmler. He didn't even want to go back to see that place. You can imagine this, you see. Many of them had lost everything? they just barely escaped. So they didn't have much to go back to. And they had built homes in this country and a following and support. Richard Offner had people like the Strausses as his supporters. He could go on with what he was doing. But they did go back, you see, and spent six months of the year over there and then came back to teach, until they retired. You must realize that many of them were fairly mature people when they first came to this country. It was a terrible wrench for them, and once they had settled in this country, they wanted to stay. But at that time they couldn't travel at all, so they were captives. From our standpoint, these fifty students, it was wonderful. The fact is that I was free to go anywhere I liked. Whenever another great scholar appeared or was teaching somewhere, I could work with that scholar if I wanted to continue work I might have begun at the Institute. That was true of Otto Benesch. I mean, I became interested in Rembrandt; I did a lot of work in the Dutch field. As a matter of fact, my first published article had to do with Rembrandt. He was very kind and very gentle and very helpful, and so I followed him to Harvard to do some further work with him. I think we already progressed to the University of Missouri.

GALM

Yes, I think you were determining your Ph.D. focus.

BLOCH

Yes. There I was trying to decide what to do. At that time I became aware of George Caleb Bingham, the American artist, who had begun his career in Columbia, Missouri. I remember one of my colleagues there, Frederick [E.] Shane, who now lives in this community, a painter, and I became close friends. He spoke to me about the various people in Columbia who still had paintings by him [Bingham]. They were the old, old families who were still there. It was a town that began to really gain some stability in the 1830s, and these were people who were there. These families still continued to live there. The banking families, the lawyers, physicians, and so on, their descendants were still living there, so many of the portraits he did were there. And there had only been one tiny little book [George Caleb Bingham: The Missouri Artist] done by a young woman [Fern H. Rusk] back in 1917 when she was a student at the University of Missouri. So that was brought to my attention, and what it made me realize was that, although I'd only taken one course in American art— People didn't think much of American art in those days. It was considered a native art and therefore certainly not as important as the Renaissance or French art or whatever. So you just whispered about American art. It was a novelty, and that was it. But I suddenly realized that all the work I had done could be applied to American art. That is, the kind of basic research that I had studied and had to deal with had never been applied to American art. Most of what had been done was rather general without any application of the techniques of art history which I felt should be used, either from an iconological standpoint or from a stylistic standpoint, particularly style. That was what I was interested in. My whole area was style and connoisseurship; I wanted to be away from the iconological. You see, there were only two ways you could go in art history in those days. Now they've added a few other peripheral areas. In iconology you could study the haloes of the madonna or the enframements of pictures and never even look at a picture. But that's not what I wanted to do. I wanted to really work with works of art and determine how an artist evolves. Of course, major works had been done on the great artists of the Renaissance by really great scholars for hundreds of years, or at least a hundred, a hundred and fifty years. But that was never applied to American art. So I was intrigued. Here was a ready-made artist who was really interesting, who had very obvious contacts with Renaissance pictures. The question was how this was managed by a man who was self-trained back in Missouri, a man who was brought up on the frontier. How did he evolve as an artist? How could he possibly have done this? I was intrigued by what he had accomplished, because in Missouri he was still very famous. He wasn't entirely unknown to me I must quickly add. The Museum of Modern Art [New York] had done an exhibition in 1935 on him. Very unusual that they would do a one-man show on an artist who died in 1879 and who was not a modern artist. But the people who put the show together were intrigued too, as I was, by how an artist out of Missouri could have evolved as he did.

GALM

Had you attended that?

BLOCH

No, no, that was 1934-35. No, that was too early. But I knew the catalog, so I was familiar with the name. And then of course that little book I mentioned I came across in Missouri was issued in a small edition. And then I had access to some of the pictures which were around and the State Historical Society [of Missouri]'s archives and that sort of thing. I thought this was a real possibility, an artist that had a certain amount of substance that could be used for just that purpose I had in mind. So I went back, full of enthusiasm, to the Institute. It wasn't greeted with great enthusiasm, because it was "American." Dr. Offner, I think, wanted to wipe his hands of me immediately. I think he was disappointed. I was, too, because I would have liked to continue that work which I couldn't do at that time. I was asked to make a presentation to the students and faculty. It had not been done before. So I did this with tongue in cheek, because, remember, by this time I had taught, so I had all this confidence, you see, [laughter] in being able to do this. I realize now it took a lot of nerve, but I put together a lecture, some of it with a certain amount of humor, some of it quite serious, and spoke for two and a half hours. I can remember some of the teachers sitting there, listening with great care. Offner didn't come, but most of the others did. I think Friedlaender was perhaps the man with the broadest kind of view about things. He was interested in everything. He saw in his [Bingham's] works certain aspects relating to the Düsseldorf school, and of course he knew about this. The European connection is what appealed to him. Since Bingham had spent three years in Düsseldorf, that, of course, made him one of the boys as far as he was concerned. So I was told that that was all right, that I could do this, but there was nobody in the American field to really advise me. The only people I worked with in those days were medievalists, who knew nothing about American art. One of my teachers, Dimitri [T.] Tselos, who had some interest in America art but was chiefly a medievalist, said to me, "Well, you know, Maurice, I probably can be helpful to you for the first three weeks, but after that you're on your own." That's precisely what happened. I was really on my own for all the years that I worked on it. I had to evolve my own concepts of what I was doing, and the whole framework of it was of my own doing. There was no model I had to go on except my experience in the field of Renaissance art. So it was really a challenge, this thing, because I had to fulfill the rigid requirements of the Institute. But I will say they were very patient and very cooperative, because after I came back from Missouri, I stayed in New York. I had a scholarship. And then I briefly, oh, for about a year, taught at NYU at Washington Square College, and I could have stayed.

GALM

What did you teach there?

BLOCH

There were several general courses. Whatever they wanted me to teach at that time. It probably was a Renaissance course. I think it was a Renaissance course.

GALM

Was it clear when you went to the University of Minnesota that that would be only for one year?

BLOCH

Well, those were on a yearly basis. The NYU thing could have been a continuing thing. [A.] Philip McMahon, who had been one of my teachers at the Institute, a wonderful man, liked me very much, and he would have liked me to stay on. But within that time I was offered the position at the University of Minnesota, and there again I felt it was something I should do. As it turned out, it was equally as interesting as the job I had in Missouri. Because there again I arrived in a department and there was nobody. I just had one assistant, and I had to run the department. That wasn't part of the original agreement, but once more I had to teach all the courses. This was more sophisticated—was postwar. I enjoyed it thoroughly. I had much more help in terms of I didn't have to run the machines myself, but I could have. [laughter] Nothing would faze me by that time. You could do anything you like, I would do it. I enjoyed that challenge. It was a different kind of atmosphere, different people. I lived on campus. I lived through the cold. That was the only thing I was worried about. I had friends. I made some very good friends, and I enjoyed it. But after the year, they were looking for a head of the department at that time, and I was really filling in. They would have liked me to stay on, but I had a letter from Walter Cook, you see. He was one of the most remarkable men I've ever known. I mean, he was aware of what the students were doing, and you would get these notes from him, "Well, what are you planning to do?" So he got me a scholarship. He said, "It's time for you to come back to New York and complete your work. There's no value in staying on." I wouldn't have wanted to stay on. I didn't want to be head of that department. I didn't want what was going on there. The department was split; there was a certain amount of hostility that had been created before my time. There was a question of working with American studies and with the humanities, and that all had been abraded before I came. There was no chance of my pulling all that together all by myself without staying on and putting in the time. That would have meant further delaying of completing my work. Cook was well aware of that. He said there was no practical reason to do this. "You've got the experience, now come back." And so I did. So that must have been 1947.

GALM

Yes, the end of '47. I was sort of curious about how you found the art scene in Minneapolis-Saint Paul in those days. Was there much excitement?

BLOCH

Well, there was the Minneapolis Institute [of Arts], which was kind of a traditional collection, but they were beginning to change. At that time they brought in their first assistant director, Harry [D. M.] Grier, who later on became the head of the Frick museum [Frick Collection]. He was a monuments and archives person, someone I had already known, since he'd worked at the Metropolitan prior to that. So it was like a friend, somebody that I knew. The Walker Art [Center] was the contemporary museum, and I was intrigued by what they were doing, because they did a lot of innovative exhibitions in design—again, a part of my life. Daniel [S.] Defenbacher was the director, and there was every indication that he would remain the director, since he had married the granddaughter of T. [Thomas] B. Walker. He was a very social character, and he created a kind of interesting atmosphere. They were interested in collecting American pictures, so I was invited to offer suggestions and that sort of thing. It was narrow and it was restricted, and my life, again, was quite taken up at the university. There was no great social life at all. You'd have to get out of town or go to Saint Paul and look around and squeeze something out of it. There wasn't a great deal for me. It wasn't the kind of thing I was used to from New York, of course. But then I'd been used to Columbia, which was a tiny little town. The most excitement you would get in Columbia at night was to go to the bus station for hot buns at nine o'clock or go out to dinner on a Sunday. And you had your little group of friends. That was it—you developed a group of friends. And in each place I did, and they were lovely people. The Minnesota thing was fairly similar. I made friends that lasted for many, many, many years. In fact there's one of them who worked very closely with me [Joseph J. Kwait]. He was the first Ph.D. in American Studies and came to New York and worked combining literature and art. We became fast friends and remained so to this day. So you really made friends. But it was a working atmosphere. The Minnesota thing was very demanding of me. I found myself locked in my room at seven o'clock at night in preparation for everything else I had to do all week long. So it really didn't make sense for me to think of that as a permanent position, and Cook must have realized that. I had to finish my work, which was going on for some years, and so I came back, as I said, to New York. Through the latter part of '47 and through '48 I continued completing my requirements toward the Ph.D., as well as doing research on the dissertation. Just about that time— Because after all one has to think about a little bit of money. I was still on a scholarship, but that wasn't everything. I had my home, so I didn't have to worry about that. But I wanted to contribute more. I was offered a part-time job at the Cooper Union Museum, and that was in the field of drawings and prints. They had a department of drawings and prints that was very well known, even though it was way downtown, a little bit away from the Metropolitan and other sources, but it was a major collection. That had been headed at one time by Rudolf Berliner, whose name I mentioned, and several other rather prominent curators. So it was a plum, but I thought of it only as a part-time or temporary job. When I got there, the director in very short order made it quite clear to me that what he was looking for was a permanent curator, that he liked me and would I accept the job. So I was somehow seduced by this. Remember, my interest in the decorative arts was something that went way, way back. Here was a chance to work with one of the best collections of drawings and prints in that field. My experience at the Metropolitan wasn't quite the same thing; this was a full curatorial responsibility. So here was a chance to really get to know in depth an important collection and to work with full responsibility as a curator, and this I proceeded to do. So once again I was putting off finishing my other work. The salary was agreeable enough, certainly substantial for those days, and I was able to spend some time doing some of my own research. But basically your time was really very well taken up with the curatorial responsibility. It was demanding.

GALM

Who was the director of the museum who hired you?

BLOCH

His name was Calvin [S.] Hathaway, and that's quite another story.

GALM

Did he continue as director during the period of time that you were there?

BLOCH

Oh, yes, absolutely. He had been the director for many, many years, and he continued on for thirty years before they terminated that. As I say, that's quite another story. But it was a very nice little museum with specialists in textiles, specialists in wallpapers, specialists in a variety of things. There were several departments, of which my department was one, and there was the chance to do exhibitions. They did interesting exhibitions, let's say on leather, on enamel, and all of these things. We were able to participate in some of that, although we had an exhibitions committee, some rather good people, doing these jobs. It was very fascinating to me. The first important exhibition that I really had an active role in was one relating to the Brighton [Royal] Pavilion. We had most of the drawings for the redesigning of the pavilion. They were approved by George IV when he was prince regent. If you know the history of that pavilion, it was his baby; a Moorish-Chinese-Indian combination that it was his dream of putting together. He went practically bankrupt in the course of it, which didn't please George III very much. In fact, it was because of that, because of his excesses in spending on all these luxurious notions of his, that his father forced him to abandon his common-law wife, Mrs. [Maria Anne] Fitzherbert, and marry Princess Caroline. As I say, another story. But what happened was that I was very much involved with that exhibition, as well as with the exhibition "Festival of Britain" which was held within that period. That was my first trip to Europe, in '51, where I was involved with the pavilion's exhibition and met some wonderful people and had a great, great time. It opened my eyes to a whole lot of other things.

1.3. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE ONE MARCH 13, 1987

GALM

Dr. Bloch, last time I asked you a question that I'd like to restate today, because I stated it incorrectly. When you accepted the appointment at the University of Missouri, was that for just one year?

BLOCH

All appointments were on a year's basis, especially for a newcomer, yes.

GALM

But did you have any sense that you might want to stay longer or that it might be offered to you on a longer basis?

BLOCH

Oh, there was every chance that it would be renewed, but it was not my intention to stay, since I was still a graduate student and I had considerable work to complete. I think what I said last time was that I even began to take my comprehensive examinations at Missouri. So there was a certain amount of push to get me on with that work, and what generally was awaiting me when I got back to New York would be a scholarship to enable me to go on. As I said, I had a home in New York, so there wasn't any pressure to do this. But I wanted the experience. I wanted to know whether teaching was to be my future or museum work or both. I wasn't quite certain.

GALM

And then the decision to go to [University of] Minnesota was both to get more teaching experience and also to earn some money?

BLOCH

Well, much more for the experience, because the salaries weren't all that great, and you had to live there and so on. I think I told you that in between that I was teaching at New York University's Washington Square College. I could have remained there indefinitely, but that was not a full-time position, nor did I want that. But it was a wonderful experience. My teacher, [A.] Philip McMahon, was the chairman of the department, and it was wonderful working in that environment. I was able to teach courses that I wanted to teach. I should say, along with that, that I was enabled to teach the courses I particularly wanted to build, like American art. That was the beginning of my building of a program of teaching in American art history, which really had not existed in any depth anywhere before. So that when the University of Minnesota offer came along (and it was again a bolt out of the blue), but on a state university level, which I began to feel was my pattern of movement, I was excited about it. Dr. McMahon encouraged me. He said, "I think it's a step forward in your career, and take advantage of it." As I think I said before, university-level appointments for M.A.'s were absolutely unknown, and so you grasped those opportunities when they came along. So that occurred in the fall of 1946—that I decided to take the position at Minnesota. The idea was that I would teach the art history courses. I had actually succeeded Laurence E. Schmeckebier, who for many years had been the chairman of that department. When I got there, I found the department in great disarray. There was a lot of discussion on campus about the department and where it should go. The architectural history had broken off from it and operated separately. American studies, of course, was on its own, and humanities was also evolving on its own, with some input with the department under Schmeckebier, but all a very tentative kind of thing. None of which I knew about until the day I got there, when I was suddenly set upon by the heads of both of those areas as to what my, quote, "responsibility" would be. Like many of these things, you sort of arrive in the middle of something happening, and, in those days at least, there was no preparation. I think if I had had more wisdom, which I didn't in those days, I would have tried to find out more about what was awaiting me when I got there. But what happened was there was a department with no chairman, only one teaching assistant and myself. So just like the University of Missour—but that was a wartime situation—I was faced with running the department as well as teaching all the major courses. Not the opening introductory courses. Those were taught by this young man, who was also getting his M. A., and that became my responsibility too. But it was a great experience for someone just coming into the teaching profession as a career. After all, I only had a couple of years of experience, and in those days you couldn't begin to think of a career unless you had five years or so teaching experience. So it was wonderful. Suddenly I was an administrator, and I had a sense of, quote, "power." I could deal with many, many things that came my way rather suddenly. So I was growing up, which was important. It was a wonderful year of experience again. Now, there the search throughout that year was for a new chairman of the department. I think behind the scenes I was being examined for that. I may have come on a little bit strong, because I had to in order to keep that department going and beat off the other people who were trying to get a piece of the action from the outside, namely American studies and the humanities and so on. But I didn't plan to stay, and toward the end of that year, when I was asked to stay, I again had a call from New York, from Professor [Walter] Cook telling me it was time to come home, that he had again obtained a scholarship for me and that it was time to go home and finish my work, which was all the requirements for the Ph.D. That didn't mean the dissertation; that was just the requirements. So I gave it up and I went home.

GALM

One other question that I had on the University of Minnesota is that in your discussion of it last time, you did mention a student, I believe, that you guided or worked with on an American studies— Was it a dissertation, a Ph.D.?

BLOCH

Yes, it was a dissertation. The student was really also a teacher, in that sense a colleague of mine. He was doing a dissertation which crossed departmental lines, as American studies would do. Incidentally, the head of American studies was Tremaine McDowell, who was rather a well-known figure. The Minnesota program was regarded as a pioneering program in the field of American studies. The student was Joseph J. Kwiat, who was working on the Eight group in American art. It was the interrelationship of literature and art—in other words, the interrelationship between an author like [Theodore] Dreiser and Everett Shinn, for instance. According to Kwiat, and it was certainly proved, Shinn was the inspiration for The Genius. Kwiat, who was a very agile and aggressive investigator, was able to actually get Shinn to annotate his copy of The Genius. There were many other things that were quite extraordinary in that dissertation. I'll just say this in passing, because it has not been published. Only articles were published from it. I think right now he's attempting to put the whole thing together at my behest. Most of those artists were alive: [John] Sloan, Shinn. [George] Luks, of course, was dead, but there were other people in the family he could reach. He went after all of them, including several of Shinn's wives who were around, and I went with him. He came to New York and worked with me after I left Minnesota, and I kept on working with him until we got the dissertation completed, which, as I understand, was probably the first such dissertation in American studies at the University of Minnesota.

GALM

Who eventually became head of the art department at Minnesota? Do you recall?

BLOCH

Yes, it was— I'll have to get back to that. He eventually went to the [Solomon R.] Guggenheim [Museum (New York)]. [H. Harvard Arnason]

GALM

The way you describe the department, it was a very small department.

BLOCH

The department was small, but there were a great many students and a rather large curriculum. Schmeckebier left, I think, under a certain cloud and rather unhappy. So there was nobody to turn over the department to. I mean, he left and that was it. I just found the department with almost no files to work with. Nothing tangible to grasp and no real preparation for what was ahead for me.

GALM

How did it rank among either Big Ten or midwestern art departments at that time?

BLOCH

Oh, I think Minnesota had a good reputation—along with [University of] Wisconsin and [University of] Iowa and so on—reputation as an up-and-coming department. With all of that activity taking place in American studies and humanities, it had a lot going for it. But a lot of the internal strife and the struggle that was going on there— I mean, even the question of budget was up in the air. I found that it was pretty rough going for a newcomer who only had the title of lecturer.

GALM

I would think so. Last time we did get you to Cooper Union [Museum for the Arts of Decoration], and in fact I think when we ended the tape, you were talking about your first trip to Europe. You had gone there to what? Do some background for the "Festival of Britain" show?

BLOCH

No, no. I probably should elaborate on that.

GALM

Okay. You had talked about the Brighton [Royal] Pavilion—

BLOCH

No, I really was leading into it from another vantage point. Actually, what it was was a Belgian American Educational Foundation scholarship. Again, at that time there weren't many traveling scholarships available, and that's what it was. The Belgian American [Education] Foundation had funds available to it since the [Herbert C.] Hoover commission [Commission for Relief in Belgium] of World War I. (You remember the famous Hoover commission that traveled abroad to supply food to the starving Belgians. ) That money still, to a certain extent, remained, and that was used for fellowships. It was mostly for Americans, although as I discovered, there were Europeans who were getting it too. It was meant specifically for scholars and museum people, and the group on the awards of the year I went, 1951, included professional people from various museums, including myself from Cooper Union. It was a very interesting thing, because through that you had entree to institutions and events that you would not ordinarily be able to handle. For instance, it was that year that they first opened the Plantin-Moretus Museum of Antwerp, the great printing museum that had been really blasted out during World War II. It was reopening, so I made contacts with some of those people. My interest in printing and illustration, of course, was back of that. The people who were our guides, our teachers, as it were, included someone like Paul [B.] Coremans, who was the great conservator out of the Belgian museums who at that time was restoring the Ghent altarpiece [The Adoration of the Lamb (van Eyck)]. So we had access close up to the Ghent altarpiece, which is something that almost never happens to anyone. He was also the man who was involved in the uncovering of the [Han] van Meegeren-[Jan] Vermeer story. As you know, that was the man who was forging Vermeer, creating a whole new phase in the life of Vermeer. And he [Coremans] knew Hans van Meegeren, interviewed him in prison, even had him do a painting in that style. It became a great political football in the museum world in Belgium, all of which at that time was a great mystery to me, since Paul was a very gentle man, very sincere. But as it happened, the great collector D. G. van Beunxgen, the Dutch collector, was the one who had sponsored van Meegeren. He knew van Meegeren, certainly, but he had also bought the painting of Christ at Emmaus, which was generally regarded as a long-lost Vermeer. Many great art historians immediately recognized it as a long-lost period of the Vermeer. It appeared in great catalogs, great exhibitions, and so on. I think [Abraham] Bredius was one of the great leaders in all of this, and he presented the painting to the Boymans [and van Beunigen] Museum in Rotterdam. When van Meegeren was unmasked, he was in a sense a kind of hero, because he had sold one of those paintings to [Hermann] Göring, you see. So he was part folk hero, but part a forger, and made his great reputation— I mean, it wasn't supposed to be known, you see. But after it was discovered, he became a kind of folk hero from the Goring sale standpoint. But at the same time, it created a great deal of confusion in the museum world. Coremans was regarded as the problem in back of this, the villain of the piece, and so van Beunigen sued him. So you had people lined up on both sides in this great controversy. We heard the whole story, of course, plus the great story about the missing panel of the Ghent altarpiece and who was responsible for the disappearance of that. It was almost a kidnapping within the cathedral where the Ghent altarpiece is housed, and he said that he was interviewing the people who were responsible and knew where it was hidden. In the end, of course, all of those people died, and so it was never found. Wonderful mystery story! But we did have the privilege of getting close to all of these people. In fact we visited van Beunigen at his great villa out in the country, where some very great treasures were held. I remember finding an original van Meegeren behind the couch, so there was a good deal more to the story!

GALM

How many were there traveling in your group?

BLOCH

I can't remember exactly. Of the Americans, there couldn't have been more than fifteen of us from various museums. To this were added other people from other museums in Italy and Sweden and so on. So it was a larger group. A little bit too large a group to travel together in great harmony, and some of it was not at all harmonious. We grated on one another's nerves. If you traveled on a bus for all those hours to France and elsewhere— And our particular demands to see certain original objects, and so on and so forth. Plus the strange taste of the leader of the expedition to France, as I remember, who wanted to stop off at a favorite pub. In Belgium probably the only thing he thought was of great interest were the paintings. My impatience was to get on to see the great treasures I had come to Europe to see. But it was during that time that I was able to get away to take care of my contact with the people at the Royal Pavilion in Brighton, because of our holdings at Cooper Union of the Brighton pavilion drawings and ultimately our planning to do an exhibition as well. Which was quite exciting, because I was able to meet some very important rather interesting people at that time, and so it was again a kind of growing-up process for me.

GALM

Now, you had mentioned last time that Mrs. [Anna] Erickson had also helped you, or assisted you financially, to go to Europe. Is that at a later time or an earlier time or part of this?

BLOCH

That was all after that I think, because I didn't go abroad until that time. I think even at that time she was willing to be of help to me. I became a great friend of hers. I think I told you, I ran a program of visits to famous collections in New York. She was one of them, and that's how we began to get friendly. She liked me very much and felt that I was deserving of encouragement and said that at any time I wanted to travel or needed support, she would be there. Even when I came to UCLA and we had no money at all for slides and I needed it, she found the funds to provide the supplies for slides for my use here. So that went on right through that period.

GALM

Your trip to Europe in 1951, what countries did you visit?

BLOCH

Well, Belgium, of course, we went all through Belgium. We were encouraged and in fact dragged—but not screaming—to all the so-called provincial museums, as well as the major city museums. We went to France, we went to Holland. I think that was about it. We didn't go to Italy. Italy was on my agenda, and before I went to Belgium, before I entered the program, which was a summertime program, I went to Italy for the first time. Because that was really my base and had been for many years and still continued to be at that time. So I traveled all the way from central to northern Italy at that time. It was on another trip that I went to southern Italy.

GALM

Did you spend most of the summer of 1951 in Europe?

BLOCH

That's right. It was a great eye-opener, great eye-opener. As I said earlier, I was unable to get on with a dissertation in the Italian field because it was impossible to travel. So this was my first chance to really look and see the works of art that I had been studying, to see them in their true dimension. One of the things that I think was always lacking in those early studies, and probably still continues for a great many students today who don't travel, is a sense of scale. You very rarely find the dimensions of a work of art in a caption. You're made to imagine what the size is. I remember one of the students, who was also a professional, on one of the trips into France saw a painting by a well-known seventeenth-century French master, and he said, "Oh! I never realized it was that big, nor did I know it was in color." Because he'd never seen it, you see. He always saw it in black and white. So quite innocently this kind of blurted out, you see. And that is one of the very important things: the sense of dimension. If you see a photograph of the Sistine Chapel, you have no conception about where it is from the spectator. You always see a close-up and you see details as if you can touch it, and you cannot. The thing that was so important about the trip in '51, which couldn't be compared with any other trip I made, was that through Coremans and the rest of the Belgian scholars, we were brought face-to-face, close up. I was standing closer to the Ghent altarpiece than I am to you, really staring at it and seeing then how they were restoring it, the various levels and how they were doing it. An unforgettable kind of experience. Plus access to all of the libraries. If we went to a great library that had a great treasure, it was very often right out there in front of us—not meant to be handled, although some of the scholars reached out for it. And the trip to the Louvre drawing collection, which was something I looked forward to, was incredible the way they put everything out, the print rooms and cabinets. They were very generous, very generous in bringing out material. It's quite different from American museums. They're very loath to bring forth original objects [in a situation] such as we are, sitting at a table. Only when they're on exhibition, and then from behind ropes. You're not generally supposed to get close to it for fear that your eyes may fade the object. Well, they have reason for this. There is a paucity of great original material in this country, much as we don't like to admit that. But in Europe you go to the Uffizi [Gallery], you go to the Louvre, you just can't believe the treasures that are there, and very often not carefully protected. I remember seeing at the Uffizi on my first visit that they were using ordinary cellophane to cover the Leonardo drawings. They didn't have the materials, they had the objects. But the visit to the Louvre was incredible, coming there the first day and seeing the students scrambling all over these great objects that were spread out before them. I don't think they intended that to happen. But there was a great excitement and hunger to see these things, and so seeing all of this at once on one or two tables was almost too much for some of them to bear. Today, of course, many students can travel more readily. There are more scholarships available, and it would be more leisurely than it was in those days.

GALM

What were your teaching responsibilities at Cooper Union?

BLOCH

My appointment was at the very beginning simply as keeper of drawings and prints, which was a curatorial appointment, borrowing the English connotation of the term. The appointment as professor of chalcography came as a kind of an honorarium somewhat later. I think I told you last time that it was not my intention to take this on as a full-time responsibility, because I was right in the middle of some work. But they needed somebody, and I was asked to be interviewed, which was the custom that the Institute used.

GALM

You had mentioned last time that you came on on a part-time— Or was it the idea that it was only temporary?

BLOCH

Temporary rather than part-time; it wasn't part- time. My feeling, and perhaps it was the way they deliberately described it, was that it was a temporary appointment. But I knew almost from the beginning that it was intentionally so. It was temporary from my standpoint, and it was a chance to earn a little bit of money at the same time. It was considered a rather generous salary on a full-time level, and I was stimulated by the idea of being able to work with original materials in a collection that had a considerable reputation in a very special field in which I did have some interest, which you remember went back to the time I was sixteen years old. So I was tempted. I had no experience on a purely curatorial level, so again I was thrown into this thing with no one to turn to, because the previous curator had departed rather suddenly and had been gone for some months while they hastily tried to put everything in order. I wasn't even allowed into the print room for the first month, much to my dismay. It was all kept rather mysterious from that standpoint, and I think that was simply to cover up the fact that things hadn't been just so simple in the previous experience. But I think the idea of getting someone who had teaching experience was particularly attractive to the people in the administration of Cooper Union, because it was basically an educational institution. The museum was meant to be a tool to be used for teaching purposes, primarily in design (I'll go into that in a moment). The idea, as I understood it, was that I was intended to coordinate a kind of teaching program that would involve the School of Engineering, the art school [School of Art and Architecture], the humanities [Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences], which was then evolving at the institution, and that the museum would become a useful part of the program. That attracted me. Certainly the experience I had at Minnesota and Missouri, where I really, in a sense, was organizing programs—and certainly in Minnesota administering a program—rather encouraged me to feel I could do this. And I wanted to do it. I was young and frivolous in those days. But what I really did not know and couldn't possibly know at the time was that the director of the museum was having great difficulties with his colleagues and the heads of the various departments. He was the director of the museum, but there was a dean of the art school, there was a dean of engineering, and there were all of these people. I had no understanding that there were serious internal problems that related to that. I rather innocently entered into it, and it may be that he thought this was one way to resolve that question in other people's minds while he went out and did his own thing, because he was rather rigidly devoted to the idea that he was running his own show. He wanted it that way, where they would do their internal exhibitions that had nothing to do with the rest of the institution and where he would deal with designers in the community, bring them from the commercial field to use the collection, which was part of the original conception of the Cooper Union Museum of design—Arts of Decoration, as it was called. I think he liked the rather quiet, self- contained atmosphere he had created—not he alone had created, but had been going on for a great many years. When I came there, I think he had been on at least since 1936, or thereabouts, and he was eventually to serve for some thirty years before things changed so radically that he himself had to part company with the institution. But that is another part of the story.

GALM

So this is Calvin [S-] Hathaway?

BLOCH

Calvin Hathaway, who had come from Philadelphia as a young man to be an associate assistant to the curator. I think in those days the woman who headed it was called a curator, and that was a Miss Mary [S. M.] Gibson, who was a lady of the old school who was in the entourage of the Hewitt sisters, Eleanor Garnier Hewitt and Sarah Cooper Hewitt, who were the granddaughters of Peter Cooper and who in 1895 opened their little museum. They were given one floor in the museum. I should point out, if you haven't been to the Cooper Union, it itself is a great monument. Peter Cooper was an ironmaster who did not have a great deal of education. He was a self-made millionaire in the iron business who made railroad ties and that sort of thing and rose to become, as I say, a very wealthy man, and who felt it was important to teach young people, particularly women, to earn a living. So in 1859 he opened the Cooper Union as a school for science and art, which included engineering of course. The idea was that the school of design, which was mainly for women and I think was called the School of Design for Women, was meant to train women to prepare themselves for independent support. The art school was very distinguished. They brought in some of the most famous artists of the day to teach there on a part-time level, all the way from Dr. [William] Rimmer on. I mean, really incredible programs. The building itself was one of the earliest buildings in New York to have an iron framework, not steel in those days, but iron. The earliest one was the Astor Library, which still exists just below it. It would have been the Cooper Union that would have been the first building, but Peter Cooper, being a businessman, was approached by the Astors, thinking this was a wonderful chance to build—Not a really tall building, five, six stories, whatever it was, to use an iron framework. So he sold them the iron; he didn't feel that encouraged to be the first man in the field. This building in 1859 housed one of the earliest elevators. Remember, the elevator was first demonstrated, the Otis elevator, at the World's Fair in New York in 1853, so we're talking about just six years later. It's a remarkable achievement in engineering and in the purpose of the building and so on. The idea of a museum was part of the picture, although he thought mostly of a cosmorama, a kind of scientific project. But there was supposed to be room for a museum. So this occurred maybe some thirteen years after his death that his granddaughters— His son-in-law was Abram [S.] Hewitt, who was the mayor of New York, and the granddaughters grew up in a household greatly interested in art and culture of all kinds. They decided that what they wanted to do was to develop a museum of their own. Not only did they travel in search of material, but they also had some very good friends. After all, Abram Hewitt was a prominent individual. One of the friends was J. P. Morgan. When he found out that the girls were doing this, he said how could he help them to build collections. It's reported in the documents that he met one night with the Hewitts and he said, "What are the girls doing?" They said, "Well, they're looking for this collection of textiles that's for sale in Barcelona." And he said, "Give me all the information. I'm going to Europe." He did go, and he bought that collection plus two other collections and presented it to them, making them at once one of the great collections of historic textiles—outside of the Victoria and Albert Museum [London]—in this country. So it was a fortunate set of circumstances. They also were very adept at bringing together the works of American artists. This was in the days when Americans artists were not considered terribly important. But when Winslow Homer died in 1910, they were able to clean out his studio. Frederic [E.] Church—at his death in 1900, I believe it was, they were able to eventually get some two thousand of his sketches. Meantime, they themselves were buying up large accumulations of drawings, like those of Daniel Huntington—mostly in the field of drawings, objects on paper, rather than paintings. They didn't form a painting museum; they did collect objects. The story goes that the mother used to say, "I remember seeing that somewhere." They'd clean out the mother's house, and they went all around gathering materials of all kinds. They were all collectors, both of the sisters and the brothers, at least one of whom I came to know myself, and so they began to form this rather incredible collection of materials of this kind and founded this museum. But interestingly enough, it wasn't a museum in our concept of the word. If you read the documentation, you'll see they felt that this material should be handled by the students, not to be specifically traced, that is, used physically that way, but handled—actually tacked up on a wall, if need be, and used. The idea was so what if they disappeared; so what if something happened to them? They were being used and therefore could disappear at times. It was a real student kind of usage. One of my assistants had been a student at Cooper Union in the old days, and she became a designer of Persian rugs in America. I mean, there was a Persian rug design studio in America. She learned from looking at the designs which were in those collections. All the great dressmakers of the day in Paris—who came to know the Hewitt sisters, who traveled—would give their original designs to them. It was that; it was an incredible kind of thing. But I think it was only until after their death and when Mary Gibson came along, who really kind of inherited the whole tradition of the way they operated, that a group of women who more or less acted as trustees— I think they called themselves that. Well, they were called directors. They included some rather prominent ladies of society, like Edith [Malvina] Wetmore, who was a great character of her own. She also was still alive during my time and helped probably to formulate the much more museum- oriented condition. It was into that situation that young Calvin Hathaway came, with his museum training and the idea then to start to catalog the material, to actually give them numbers, to actually give it a sense of a museum and to protect them. That came about with him. When I came that was part of my responsibility to complete some of that work. But before my time, and during Calvin's time, they hired such a prominent scholar as Rudolf Berliner, one of the great German scholars in the decorative arts, and he did some of the first exhibitions. Exhibitions weren't to be part of the original program, but once it became formulated as a true museum, they began to put on exhibitions. Some of these that date from the rather early period included such things as "Baked Clay" or "Four Thousand and One Buttons." Or the one that Berliner did that seems to have opened that whole program in a more scholarly fashion was one on Italian drawings for jewelry, and that began in 1940. So you can get a pretty general idea as to when all that began. There was a continuing program when I came, and my job was to complete or augment the cataloging which had begun. All those were done in great big books and all by hand, which was a little antiquated already by that time, when there were no such things as computers, but there was certainly a much more creditable way of working. I think the impression I got was that if the museum caught fire, you would rescue the accession catalogs and leave the objects alone. [laughter] We were all told, "You take this one, and you take that one"—these little practice sessions. The museum was really kind of a curio by that time, and it really needed to undergo change. The really important change that occurred to me was the developing of an educational program, where the collection was used and directed toward a much broader-based need than simply the narrow area of the few designers that would come down. It was just a handful of people who would come down, who kept it more or less a secret, because who would go down to the Bowery? I mean, they'd sooner go to the Metropolitan [Museum of Art], which also had a design collection, but not as impressive as this one, which had really originally been based on the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. This was the model that the Hewitt sisters had set for themselves and prided themselves on being able to evolve with the blessing of the French authorities over there. They certainly got some very famous collections of drawings from French collections, like the [Leon] Decloux collection, or Italian collections, like the [Giovanni] Piancastelli collection. Those were the basis in terms of the great drawings they were able to accumulate.

GALM

Now, were they buying and collecting without any guidance?

BLOCH

No guidance except intuition. And it was very good intuition. The material was available; today you couldn't begin to do that. I mean, they'd buy a whole collection of designs for eighteenth-century waistcoats from the firm that had created them. Incredible documentation! But what they didn't understand was how to catalog it and to conserve it. That wasn't primary with them. In fact it was all expendable, because the concern was for students within the institution, as well as for community. That was their orientation, simply to make it available. I found a great many things missing, because the descriptions that they had, these little lists that they made with ten buttons or fifteen drawings, you just never knew what you were really looking for. Part of my first job was to try to locate the long-lost objects, which I feel may have been given away for Christmas presents from time to time or had been lost or used up somewhere along the line. But that didn't mean that there were great losses. The wonderful things were still there, and it was an extraordinary experience to work with that material. I had to learn from scratch? there was no one to teach me how to catalog, how to conserve the materials. I became rather critical of their means of conservation, which were at least forty years old by the time I got there, and I pressed for improvement of that situation and for other things that were made for usage. I would approach the schools, feeling that was what I was supposed to do, with ideas for exhibitions, with "How can we be useful to you and your students?" Some of the teachers did bring their students down, and the students, many of them came on their own, students of graphic arts and that sort of thing. But I soon found out, at least through the grapevine, that the teachers weren't supposed to come down and use the museum because of the problems that they were having. So that made for the difficulty in finally developing the kind of thing I really wanted to do. As I look back on it now, that seems to be what I was always trying to do in one way or another. But what I was able to do was to quietly put up some of my own shows. We did have a good exhibitions department, and they began to do rather ambitious exhibitions during that time, professional exhibitions dealing with a rather precarious situation. Because we didn't have proper humidity. We did an exhibition of objects on vellum, and the vellum started curling up and problems of that sort, which soon became very visible. Our very ambitious loans really put many of these objects into a hazardous position.

1.4. TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE TWO MARCH 13, 1987

GALM

Dr. Bloch, you were talking about the exhibitions program that you developed at Cooper Union and some of the problems that you were encountering.

BLOCH

Well, actually what I had hoped for was that as department heads we would be participating very actively in the museum program. That was really the intention of the men who were in charge of exhibitions, but that wasn't necessarily museum policy. They had their own exhibitions set up, various kinds, most of them having to deal with materials, whether it was leather or waistcoats or whatever. But since we had some of the material, we were necessarily called upon to participate in it. I think the one big exhibition that I finally was participating in was the Brighton Pavilion exhibition, for which I traveled and ultimately produced an article for Connoisseur. That also created some problems for me, because although the director certainly was all for my traveling to Brighton and all of that, I think there was a little bit of nervousness about the curators traveling for their own interests in a sense, such as I did with the Belgian American Educational Foundation fellowship. I think that started a little ques¬tion as to the validity of that. There should have been some question already in my mind, because when I came there it was with the understanding that I still had a disser¬tation to finish. What I eventually found out as a result of that opening, and afterward, was a kind of wearing down of some of the rather open relationship that I had. Because I ran the museum in the director's absence. That didn't create a very happy experience among some of the older members of the staff, who felt seniority counted. It was a strange thing in a tiny little museum of that kind. Most of us of the same age were very, very friendly and very good friends. We used to often say how could he appoint so many people who liked one another when he himself didn't really enjoy personal relationships with any of his staff? That was a problem of his. But the older people who had been there from the time of Miss Gibson always felt they had real seniority. They were women on the staff who never had obtained professional status. They were part of the entourage that you could trace back to the Hewitt sisters' era, untrained people who were devoted to the museum. One of them, I remember, carried the keys—like an old servant, you see—and had charge of the cabinets where things were to be held. You couldn't see anything except to go to her and get permission from her, and if she wasn't in the mood, you didn't see it. It was that kind of thing. So for me to be put in charge of the museum the first time the director took time off to go anywhere was a great plus, which I simply accepted as just another part of the job, not realizing that this created some little problem there. I soon found out. It may have been part of his personality to rather enjoy creating these little problems and see how it works out. You know, "I'll go away and we'll see how it works out." Anyhow, when I made the trip, it was, oh, yes, with great applause. But I have a feeling that it didn't really meet with that kind of approval. It was looked at as my attempt to move forward in my field and to gain a reputation, a kind of aggressiveness, which I didn't see. In terms of what I was doing, it was just advancing my own professionalism. I don't think that was particularly admired. You were supposed to remain where you were, just like the other members of the old days had done, and stay on the job until you retired. That wasn't my idea. I was aggressive in the sense that I wanted to go forward in the profession. Now, one understanding that I had, I thought, was that I could go ahead with my Ph.D. and that I would be given some time to do it. But I never had the time. The one month during the summer was really spent in trying to pull together my nerves and trying to get my own work on the road. You could only make a very short step forward in doing that, usually having to go back and start over again. Even if I got away to the country to do it, there was still the question of responsibility back home and the fact that there was very limited time to do what I needed to do. So that eventually came to a head when I realized, number one, that the program that I had wanted to develop at Cooper Union, the education program, was not going to happen, that in fact the real stumbling block was at the museum itself, where there was no attempt to make any compromise with the rest of the institution. This was further augmented by a review of the total Cooper Union done by the Carnegie [Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching] people. They got an outside agency, naturally, to do this, but the trustees called for this. "Where are we going?" Because the museum and the rest of the institution still reflected Peter Cooper's will made way back before he died, I think in 1882, something like that, in which he prescribed everything down to the fact that there had to be two cats to chase the rats. And there still was a cat. It still was a very, very provincial museum in that sense, something Peter Cooper would have never, never okayed. He was a very progressive man.

GALM

Let me just ask— Now, the museum was located down in the Bowery.

BLOCH

Located at Cooper Square, which is just on the fringe of the Bowery, near Astor Place.

GALM

And where was the school located?

BLOCH

Right there. It was all one building.

GALM

So when you say "come down," did you mean it was within the building the students were coming?

BLOCH

Yes, within the building. We were on, I believe, the third floor, and I think there were two other floors. I think it was a five-story building. I'll add this to it just to complete that picture: if you look at old photographs of Cooper Union, you will find there were stores on the main floor and that the American Banknote Company had offices on the top floor. The reason for all of this, the letting out of space, was it was Peter Cooper's (who was a Dutchman) way of making the building pay for itself. The stores were meant to provide income to run the school, which was a free school, incidentally, and it is to this day. The School of Engineering grew to be in my time the second most important school of engineering in the country, next to MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology]. But it was a free school, providing free education, and this is incredible. Just as the Astor Library (which later on moved uptown) was the first free library. But the banknote company was another of those institutions that was allowed to have its offices and operate on that floor. The danger there was those heavy presses shook the whole building. Even with its iron framework, the building was shaken, so if you went into that building in my years, you would see great struts in the building that attempted to bolster the strength of the building, which was shaken by those presses. Eventually of course they moved out, and the downstairs was used as displays for the museum. I remember when Frank Lloyd Wright came to give a lecture in the great hall and to receive the Peter Cooper medal [Peter Cooper Award] that he walked through and he looked at all of this. And he said in my presence, he said, "Well, you people keep it clean." [laughter] It was a wonderful occasion, incidentally, because the great hall was the same hall in which Abraham Lincoln gave his speech of 1860, the Cooper Union Address, and they kept that hall looking exactly the way it appeared in Lincoln's time, down to the original podium. It's still a great monument of the time. But in any case, getting back to my own situation, I guess I was regarded, as I look at it today, as someone who was going to move forward and not stay there. After the review committee had come through with its review, which absolutely echoed my feelings that the institution wasn't doing all it should be doing in a cohesive way as an educational institution— There were two faults that I remember in that review, specifically noted (and it was a very strong review). One was that the library that they had, which at that time was also a free library, was attracting only the Bowery characters and was not a very pleasant place to be otherwise. [The second was] that the museum certainly wasn't fulfilling its responsibility as a teaching museum. Now, I had warned Hathaway that this might happen, as I was feeling frustration already over the fact that I wasn't able to proceed with what I had hoped I would be doing, which was not only participating in exhibitions, not only curating, but beginning to make the whole thing work, not only for the limited group of designers who would use it. By that time I had gone to Europe and had become quite infatuated with the Council of Industrial Design in Britain. If you read the old stories on the founding of the [Cooper Union] Museum, [the plans] included something like that. They had hoped that presenting these great designs of the past and present would stimulate an improvement in taste on the part of the people who would come visiting, and the designers would be encouraged to produce great designs that would have both technical as well as design values. This is precisely what the Council of Industrial Design was doing in Britain just after the war. You could go there and you could, if you were buying a hammer, find out which was the best hammer made, the best-designed hammer. You could furnish your whole home that way. Or as a designer, you could put your hands on all the major designs being put out throughout Europe, which included the thing that intrigued me most, and that was street furniture, which are your bus shelters—

GALM

Kiosks and so forth.

BLOCH

Your kiosks, your signs. You know how unpleasant the signs are in our own community. They had Eric Gill designing over there, you see. So I wanted to bring that to Cooper Union. Well, that was not met with great approval. First of all, I had to tell them what street furniture was and all that. I had all of that, which would have been another part of a very exciting program to link up with the British Council of Industrial Design. So that trip to Europe was an eye-opener to me in many more ways than one, looking back on it now. I had warned him [Hathaway] that we weren't doing the job and that we might be open to criticism. And sure enough, we were. He didn't care. He felt that he would surmount all of those obstacles and nobody would interfere. If you're on a job for thirty years almost, you feel that nothing's going to stop you, that you're really in control. He did have the approval of the then president of the Cooper Union, who sheltered him, and there were other members on the staff who liked him. He was certainly a very faithful servant. But there was a rigid makeup there that wouldn't allow any air to come in whatsoever at a time when air was absolutely necessary. So that review was a blow, but he still thought that he would surmount all that. But to me it was a signal that something was wrong, that from my standpoint I probably couldn't make much headway. You know, one small step, not a giant step at all, is possible. It would take me thirty years to make several small steps, and was I willing to do that at that point? So there was ambition on my part there. I had learned all I needed to learn. I loved the museum, and one of the highlights of that— and another thing which probably added, I guess, to my discredit, in a sense—was that I also planned an important exhibition of American drawings. We had, as you know, at Cooper Union some wonderful things, the Homers, the [Thomas] Morans, the Churches, and so on. Incredible collections which were not being seen at all, and underevaluated because he [Hathaway] didn't like American things. I was asked to do this exhibition for the Smithsonian [Institution] Traveling Exhibition Service, so one summer, in '52, I traveled to select material for that exhibition. The core of it was many of the things that were never seen at Cooper Union. The exhibition was to travel abroad. It was the first exhibition of American drawings ever to travel. If you know nothing about the history of American drawings, the point of fact is that Europeans didn't believe that Americans could draw: we were still in the Indian or Wild West stage. This was an idea of doing something that was sponsored by the German government that would travel to France and travel to England. It was my job to select the 150 drawings and watercolors for that pioneering exhibition. Very exciting. What I didn't realize was that this did not meet with the approval of my director at all. He didn't like my doing an outside job, and he did everything in his power to find out whether I was using museum time to do it and created several obstacles for me.

GALM

Did you say that the core of the exhibit would be from Cooper materials?

BLOCH

Oh, yes. Well, there were things that were never seen, and since that was my home base— But there were collections from all over. That was the point of the traveling in this country, to select the classical drawings that were never seen abroad. Some of them were extremely well known here, because they were reproduced in textbooks and so on. But American drawings were not really being collected. It stimulated my own interest in collecting them, which exists to this day and makes me, in a sense, a kind of expert in this— Not kind of. I'm known as an expert in the field. It was again a challenge I wanted to do, but nobody else had done anything like that at Cooper Union. All your exhibitions were in-house. Although they were giving the only American showing, that didn't solve the problem. I was already suspected of moving outside the parameters of my responsibility, and so everything was being watched, even my typewriter if I wrote a letter. Even though the exhibition was to be held there, there were difficulties that led right up to the opening. He [Hathaway] did not wish to have an opening of any dimension. He even turned out many of the lights that night. Many strange things happened, and I've often said that was the night I should have left, because he gave me the signal that he was unhappy about it. He made difficulties with the woman from the Smithsonian who was responsible for the organization of the exhibition. The fact that I was very friendly with her—and we're friends to this day—didn't help matters any. I always do rise to the defense of people I did like him too. I mean, we were friends, but he was becoming more and more difficult because he began to feel that I was a kind of threat. My ambitions were themself a threat. I appeared on television—we had a television program, ten-minute segments—and I enjoyed that so much, being the ham I am, that this he didn't like either, because he was very uncomfortable in the public eye. He threw me into it thinking that I too would become uncomfortable, but it didn't work out that way. [laughter] In fact, his trustees came to him and told him how wonderful I was, you see. So I was becoming a star- quote, "star"—which he wasn't too happy with. Being something of a tease, if I really liked something, I went on with it. I didn't simply stop; I went on.

GALM

Did you have any aspirations for the directorship down the road?

BLOCH

No, no. You see, he put me in charge of the museum when he went away, and at one point I was even put on a major committee to make plans for a big celebration of the Cooper Union. Evidently there were words of praise about my activity at that point, and he came back very upset and very angry and said that I was displacing him and that I wanted to take his job. He actually said that to me at one point! I said, "That is incredible!" Because I certainly didn't want that. He didn't realize that when he went away, I had to run two jobs with no additional pay and that I accepted that responsibility without complaint. Somebody else would say, "Hey, what about this?" But I think what it did for me that was important, it forced me to come to grips with my own future. I suddenly realized that I should be finishing that degree. I would be getting these calls from Walter Cook saying, "What about this?" And I would say, "Well—" It went on for six years. What was supposed to be temporary ran on for six years. The challenge was there, but at the end of, certainly, three years, I knew that nothing much was going to happen. But I still stayed on. I lost the three years on my own work in trying to fulfill obligations in connection with that museum, which included exhibitions and community relations and that sort of thing, always with the hope that the museum might turn around and eventually do something that would make it a more valuable enterprise. But it didn't work out that way, and finally I did go to him and ask for a leave of absence—which had never been done before—so that I could finish my own work. It was at that point that he told me, and eventually the president, that they were not interested in Ph.D.'s. I said, "I wish you had told me that years ago, but you encouraged me to think that you approved of that and that I would have the time." "Well, you know, if you wanted to do it, you had your summers to do it in." Well, summers— That one month, which forced me to escape from the city to try to work quietly. So that, plus the experience with the exhibition and a few other things, made me come to a decision to leave. Remember, my situation was comfortable. I had a job, I had a home, and that sort of thing. So I decided to take the bull by the horns and to leave.

GALM

Now, what year are we—?

BLOCH

We're talking about 1955. It was a parting by mutual agreement. I think he was delighted to see me leave and in fact was already interviewing people during that period. He wasn't going to grant me that leave of absence. It was an "I think you'd better go" kind of affair. So I left, and almost immediately I threw myself into it [the dissertation]. I was under stress, I might add, and that I don't want to go into, because it was a problem that returns full-blown at a later period. But that was the beginning of problems of stress, of trying to do too many things, and my constitution just wouldn't come to grips with that. But I recovered by plunging into my work, and I remember working through a terribly hot summer in front of a typewriter and an air conditioner to finish my dissertation, at which I had to start from scratch.

GALM

In the city?

BLOCH

In the city. Well, I had all the material. There was no reason to travel at all; all of it was there. Remember that it had been gathered since 1944, so it was there. Because I could do the correspondence; I could gather the materials during that period. I just couldn't put it together on paper. So I spent that year pulling that whole dissertation together in a rough form and then revising it, and in the following year— I forget exactly what time. It may have been in the spring of '56 or in the fall of '55 that I was told about an opening at UCLA in the art department. A potential opening—it wasn't exactly clear. So I eventually met with Gibson [A.] Danes, who was then the head of the art department, and I liked him immensely from the beginning. He was always a man of vision and also a rather outgoing personality, something I wasn't familiar with at that point in my life. I'd met up with somebody who had many, many problems, emotionally and otherwise, so that I was worried— I mean, I had a friend who told me, "You're dealing with a serious paranoid condition. You'd better get out of there." He was a therapist who knew something about what he was seeing. But this was completely different. Here was somebody who you could immediately come to grips with and who understood and who was also in the American field himself. What he wanted was to hire an Americanist for the department. By that time I already had a reputation as a scholar in the American field. I had done some publication by that time, incidentally. So he was very interested in me and asked me to send on my academic vitae and other materials, which I promptly did. Then there was dead silence for months and months and months. But I was busy with my own work and didn't know what was going on at Los Angeles. I always wanted to come to California. As you see, I was moving farther and farther west, not realizing it. But California was long on my list. I remember finding notes of California institutions that I was keeping in mind as a possible future for myself. Not that I knew very much about it, apart from the climate, but somehow I had the feeling that one could grow in California, where you really couldn't grow in New York. The museums in particular were terribly narrow in conception. As much as people don't want to realize that— And New York itself hates to recognize the fact of how provincial it really is. You really couldn't make progress, and there weren't very many opportunities on the teaching level either. The city colleges or NYU [New York University] were fairly limited.

GALM

How was that first contact with Gibson Danes made? Was it in New York?

BLOCH

Well, what happened, unlike what happens today— I mean everything's dumped at the College Art Association. That wasn't the major source. Jobs were by recommendation. They would go to the major institutions— Harvard [University], Princeton [University], Yale [University], and NYU—for recommendations of young people who were up-and-coming in the field. My name was frequently recommended. Not always did I go after it, but it was common for you to at least go for an interview. But in this case I was immediately attracted to the possibility of a job in California, something I'd always wanted. I knew nothing about it except that it was a teaching job with a preeminent interest in American art history. And when I met Gibson, I felt that he was somebody I certainly could work with who was creative.

GALM

Where did you meet him?

BLOCH

I met him in New York. I believe it was at the lobby of the Plaza Hotel. Most of the time you would meet a dean, or a head of department might come to New York— after all, he could get a trip out of it—you'd meet him at his hotel and chat with him. Then you might get a further invitation to come out for an interview. With UCLA there was no invitation to an interview. I don't think they had the funds for this purpose unless you were close by. So what you did was get the interview with the chairman, who had a great deal to say in those days. His recommendation was a very secure one, although he would chat with his colleagues and submit your academic qualifications to them and allow them to chew over it for a long period. Which is precisely what they did, because I eventually got back my dossier in the most battered condition I'd ever seen it, which didn't make me feel any too happy—with no explanation whatsoever. Was I in? Was I out? Was I in the running? Nothing. Just returned. So I remember going to see my advisor at the Institute [of Fine Arts, New York University] and saying, "What about this? What am I to think?" He said, "Well, you can't jump from the museum field to the teaching field." I said, "What do you mean? I've done that before." But that was unthinkable then, or very, very rare. Because museums and universities were two different professions. Now it's more combined. So he said, "I would forget about it. Because if you haven't heard from them in all these months, you're never going to hear from them."

GALM

Is this Dimitri [T. Tselos]?

BLOCH

No, it was somebody else. Tselos had left to go to [the University of] Minnesota, incidentally. He's still there. I'm trying to think of who that might have been. It could have been the director at that time, who also was advising. But I also had an adviser on my dissertation, although I think I may have already mentioned that there were no American scholars, so I was frequently turned over to the medievalists. I think that came as close as they could come to American art. I think it was probably that medievalist who suggested that I was barking up the wrong tree if I thought I could jump from a museum to a teaching position per se. So I more or less canceled it out in my mind. I wasn't actively looking about at that point because I was still working on the dissertation, but somewhere in the spring of '56, late spring, I did get a call from Gibson Danes offering me the position. The salary was so low I couldn't even accept it, because it was lower than I was getting at Cooper Union. I at least had the practical good sense to say, "It is my principle never to take a job at less than the money I'm getting." So they upped it slightly, which put me in a different assistant professorship category—I got closer to the top. I forget what step it was. But I knew nothing about these things at that time. So it was agreed that I would come in the fall of '56. There was no interview with my colleagues. Mr. [Frederick S. J Wight came to New York and called me on the phone—I didn't meet him—and he said, "Is there anything I can do for you?" I said, "I don't know, except I have to find a place to live, I suppose. I don't know anything about Los Angeles." He was very sweet about it and promised to be helpful. So came the fall of '56, and my dissertation was just about ready to be retyped and sent off to be completed that way and revised. And so I came out. I always remember my first trip. The airport was a sort of one-shack affair in those days, our airport. I had no idea where I was to go. I knew I was to go to a hotel in Westwood Village, but I had no idea what distances were at all. So I grabbed the bus that dropped me off at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, I remember. I was a little bit far from Westwood Village, so nobody met me at all. I found my way finally to the Village, and then I remember people did try to be helpful. I think my first good friend was Karl [M.] Birkmeyer, who helped me find a place to live, and that was the beginning of our friendship. It was a small department. If you look at what was here in those days—and I found that among my records— there may have been about five or six people on the faculty in art history. There was Karl [E.] With, there was Carl [D.] Sheppard [Jr.], there was Karl Birkmeyer (we all called them Karls and "Karl-schuns" in those days) and Frederick Wight and Gibson Danes. And I found that Mary [A.] Holmes was on the faculty. I didn't realize it. That was the whole faculty of art history. So to bring in an Americanist in those days was quite an extraordinary achievement for Gibson Danes. He had an ability to keep the department together. Every day he would go up on a different floor. Well, different floors— Where are we? We were in the old building, which is now the School of Architecture [and Urban Planning], which was all one floor. But he'd go from design to art history to painting and ask them what it was that they needed or where they were going. He made it his duty to go on a daily tour of the department to catch the climate. That brought all of us together, plus the fact that we were all on one floor. So even though there were little problems, we all knew one another and we could meet at the office or meet somewhere. The historians were a mixed lot who didn't really like one another. It was really kind of split in some way. But nevertheless you could talk to them, because we were all moving in one direction: we all wanted to build a good department. And the sense of building was the kind of thing that always appealed to me. Now, when I first came there, Gibson said, "What can I do for you? You'll teach the American courses, and you can teach other things." So I wasn't just limited to the American courses at all, although each professor carefully guarded his own field and the students he had working with him. It was very much in a kind of European tradition of that kind. But they were wonderful people and very good scholars, trained scholars with no real political aspirations, except "Let's set about building a department." My coming was part of that growing picture of building a department where most courses were represented or most areas of art history represented: the Renaissance, the baroque— The classical art was taught in the classical department; we did not have a classicist at that time. It was more or less regarded as archaeology, so the people in classics taught those courses. Carl Sheppard was the medievalist. I think Birkmeyer taught Northern and Southern Renaissance (he was much more attuned to the Northern Renaissance). Karl With taught the big general course that encompassed all fields. I also taught a big general course for the campus, which I loved dearly because that brought me into contact with all the departments on campus. It was a challenging kind of course, so I had a pretty heavy load at that beginning. A three-course load was considered pretty heavy in those days.

GALM

Was that, then, two different courses in American art?

BLOCH

No, no. There was the general course and there was a seminar. But I taught other courses: the big general course and I may have taught the modern course. I'd have to check that out to find out what that was at the very beginning. [tape recorder off]

GALM

Dr. Bloch, you've had a chance to review the catalog, the university catalog, for what? Nineteen fifty- seven?

BLOCH

'Fifty-seven to '58 is the catalog I have in my hands. I neglected to say that apart from the people I mentioned, John [M.] Rosenfield came at precisely the time I did as an assistant professor. He too hadn't completed his Ph.D. and was writing his dissertation. At that time he was a specialist in the field of Indian art. As you may know, he later on was invited to return to Harvard, where he was given a fellowship in the Japanese field. So he changed his field and has remained at Harvard ever since. He became head of the department and had a most successful career in the Japanese field. But he started out there, and those were the courses he was teaching in what is listed here as Art of Prehistoric and Primitive Cultures, along with Islamic and Indian and Indonesian art. This was the beginning of an interest in non-Western art, and my coming brought in native art as a specialty, which hadn't been done before. The rest were the general courses of all kinds that included Renaissance, baroque, medieval, classical, and so on, as well as theory and criticism. What you can see here was a plan to create a total offering in art history, and that really began about that time when John and I came. I don't see that before. It was a small department and we were all thrown together, but even though there were sort of personality problems, those did not extend to the students or to what we were trying to do. The idea was to build a total offering and to build a strong graduate section on an M.A. and Ph.D. level.

GALM

And what courses were you specifically responsible for that year?

BLOCH

Well, as I indicated to you, I taught, first, a big general course—which other people could teach, but that was sort of dumped on the newcomer—the History of Architecture and Sculpture. There was one part, the History of Painting, which was open to the entire campus, very, very large classes, which I taught for a while. But my specialty was Art of the Americas, as it was called here, part one, part two. One was the colonial period to 1900? the rest was the twentieth century. I taught that. Those courses eventually grow as time wears on, so that went into three sections. I did not get too involved with much beyond the second decade of the twentieth century because Mr. Wight was supposedly to teach the very modern courses, because that's what he was doing in the [UCLA Art] Galleries. I don't see him listed here as teaching at that particular time, but he may have been— Because he had, after all, to run the gallery, so he was only doing that on a part-time level. There is listed here a course called the History of Prints and Drawings, and that was open to the staff. That dealt with the techniques and formal expression. It's interesting to see that on the list here, because that's before I got really deeply involved in teaching on that level. But obviously that was done, because in the practical section of the department, apart from the design people, there were courses relating to people teaching graphics, like John Paul Jones and others, and they wanted a course that would teach the techniques on a historical level. So I imagine that was being done by various members of the painting department, but by no one in art history. But my coming in the fall of '56 actually coincided, whether by planning or not I don't know— I've still to resolve that kind of mystery, but I suspect— I have to be a little paranoid myself, after all, from time to time. In the fall of that year, if I recollect correctly, there was an exhibition of prints from Fred Grunwald's collection in the gallery ["An Exhibition of Master Prints" (1956)]. The idea was to attract Mr. Grunwald to the university, and it was at that opening that I was casually introduced to Mr. Grunwald. Because of my responsibility as a curator of prints and drawings, it was said they were sure that we might enjoy meeting one another. So we were introduced and I liked the man immediately. Very strong personality, very Germanic, but I was used to Germans from New York, and I recognized the great quality the man had and the deep commitment he had to what he was doing. I think he liked me right away too. He was the kind of man who either liked you or disliked you; there was no in-between, no waiting period. He liked you or he didn't like you. So from that point on we became friends. Well, the hope was, and I think that came to me from Gibson Danes or one of those people— "We hope you'll like one another, because we hope that Mr. Grunwald will continue to become interested in UCLA and that his collections will eventually go [to UCLA]." He originally was connected with the [Los Angeles] County Museum [of Art], and for years he was exhibiting there. There was always the promise that his collection would go there, and he was close to that curator. But at one point— The old museum was located at Exposition Park, with the prehistoric bones and other things. The head of the museum— I forget his name, but he was known as the Bird Man, because he was a specialist— And you probably could discover who that was. [Jean T. Delacour] He committed the great social error of turning his back on Mrs. [Saidee Herz] Grunwald at some party. Probably not deliberately, but whatever it was she took that as a snub and complained to her husband. And since she was his second wife and therefore had special privileges that maybe the first wife wouldn't have had, he immediately rose up in great anger. He was very conscious of that kind of thing. After all, he was forced to leave Germany through the Nazis, and he went through a very bad period and always feared that people had ulterior motives in what they were doing. So he made a formal announcement somewhere, probably along the line that he was no longer going to contribute to the County Museum's program and that he was going to move over to UCLA. By the time I came, he had already made some gifts. They were small gifts. The department had a small collection that they had bought for teaching purposes, and the whole idea was, again, a teaching kind of thing. He had given one or two gifts of prints, and this had stimulated an opening exhibition in the gallery, which I attended. But I have a great feeling from what happened afterwards that as part of the encouragement to Mr. Grunwald he was told that a print specialist was coming to teach at UCLA and that I would be his curator. Because he always assumed I was getting paid to be his curator; he always treated me like his curator. It was great affection, but at the same time I think he believed, or was made to believe, that I was being appointed specifically to work with him.

GALM

And yet the idea of a Grunwald collection was never presented to you as an interaction?

BLOCH

No, that was not to be my attraction at all. It wasn't mentioned at all until that time. I came specifically as a teacher. Maybe there was the concern that if there was a double-edged arrangement, I might not be that attracted. Because I think I made it clear that I wasn't interested in continuing a museum career, that I wanted to get back to teaching. Because you had to make that quite clear anyhow. But I knew nothing about— They had a gallery, and I knew that. Mr. Wight was there, and Mr. Wight was trying to develop a kind of museum picture. Karl Birkmeyer was the curator for a very brief period. That history is combined in this UCLA Bulletin of the Arts [No. 1], published in the spring of 1955, at least partially sponsored by the UCLA Art Council, which was only newly formed. Dr. Gustave [O.] Arlt was very prominent at that time as president of it, and Gibson Danes. The whole idea was to do really a substantial bulletin based on exhibitions, which were to be directed by a scholar. And Karl Birkmeyer and a group of students put together an exhibition on landscape ["Exhibition of the History of Landscape Painting"]. That was in '55.

1.5. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE ONE MARCH 19, 1987

GALM

Professor Bloch, you wanted to say a little bit more about— Sort of an epilogue on the Cooper Union Museum [for the Arts of Decoration]. I wonder if you could start with that today.

BLOCH

Yes. I think what I said last time brought us up through the period in which I was a member of the Cooper Union staff as one of the keepers appointed by Calvin [S.] Hathaway, who had been director of the museum for many years. I since discovered that he actually came to the museum in 1933, when he came as assistant curator to Mary [S. M.] Gibson, who was the director, who had in a sense inherited the mantle from the Hewitt sisters [Eleanor Garnier Hewitt and Sarah Cooper Hewitt]. But they were amateurs, and he was, as Russell Lynes [in More Than Meets the Eye: The History and Collections of Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Design] says quite correctly, he was, after all, a more professional person with training and experience. He was formerly with the decorative arts department at the Philadelphia Museum [of Art], had worked with monuments and archives during the war, and he had, clearly, an understanding of how museum holdings ought to be properly handled, cataloged, and so on. He was certainly the one, quite correctly, to institute a system of cataloging the museum holdings, although it was a rather peculiar system. There was never a card catalog as such. What we had was a series of large accession catalogs with handwritten entries, which he said would be rescued in case of fire and leave the originals behind. He became very much attached, literally, to those catalogs, which were cumbersome, not easy to handle. But whatever it was, it was the beginning of some kind of cataloging, which had never been done before because the Hewitt sisters regarded everything as expendable: it was meant to be used by the visitors, especially the students, but the public and so on. His was, of course, typical museum policy: let us preserve the material and begin to exhibit it. And it is true that he instituted the first publication. The Chronicles of the Museum—that was in 1935—and that there were temporary exhibitions, which began with the one called "Four Thousand and One Buttons," a tiny little catalog. They never had large funds to work with, so it was only during the time that the keepers began to appear, professional people like Rudolf Berliner and myself and others, that the more professional exhibitions were being planned, that the idea of continuing chronicle was accentuated, all of the things that go to make up a kind of a museum policy. But I must say it was always rather difficult in a museum within a public institution, an educational institution, where certainly we were not given great funds to work with, where the yearly salary was very modest for even the keepers. If I remember correctly, I think even the director got $10,000 a year; it was no large sum. So we worked on tiny budgets, and certainly for the print room there was no budget at all. If I brought material in, it was at the risk of my life, in a sense. But we managed somehow to buy things, because I went into areas that were not well represented and which were not at that time very popular. At the same time, we reached out for private collections like the [Leo] Wallerstein collection of old master prints. This sort of thing was still happening, but not on the scale of a major museum. It was a small museum, dependent a lot on donations and very small budgets. As far as Hathaway is concerned, according to my own investigation, he was made the curator in 1946 and director in 1951, when the head of the Cooper Union was made president and no longer was director. According to Lynes, the museum problems begin in 1961, but as I pointed out to you, the problems had begun much, much earlier. One of my reasons for leaving the museum is that I wasn't able to carry out the educational program I was encouraged to develop within the institution, and that was to begin communicating with the schools—the art school [School or Art and Architecture], engineering [School of Engineering], humanities [Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences], and so on—and to get them to use the museum, to make the museum more accessible to them. By that time, there was a lot of bad feeling and communications had almost ceased. Hathaway, who was resistant to change, in any case, ignored my pleas to change the museum around, to make it more practical in terms of the institution itself, and said, no, he preferred it to remain as it was and didn't care if he had a limited public. That, in a sense, became one of the important factors in the eventual decision of the trustees to dissolve the museum. They said they only had fifteen thousand visitors a year, and that didn't occur in '61 but much earlier. According to these facts, in March of '62, William [M.] Milliken, who was the former director of the Cleveland Museum [of Art], reported on the museum collections and gave an analysis report. On June 30, 1963, an article in the New York Times quoted by Lynes stated that plans to close the museum were being studied, evidently, by the trustees. Certainly in July 30 of that year, the trustees of Cooper Union, headed by Arthur [A.] Houghton [Jr.], closed the museum to the public, stating plans to transfer the museum holdings to other hands. That was dispersal—that at least was what was implied. And that was the reason they spoke about the limited number of visitors and the costs of upkeep and so on. As I remember, it was in that period, and following that notice in the paper, that I made a trip to New York on other business, but made it my business to contact my people at Cooper Union and asked to be able to speak for the collections. My love of those collections was very deeply rooted, and I was worried. So I had lunch with the then president, who I believe was Dr. [Richard F.] Humphreys, and the secretary of the board of trustees. And we discussed this. I said, "By all means the museum collections must be held together." I won't say that was the reason they did it, but I was one of the people. It seems by September of that year a committee was set up to save the museum—in fact, I think it was called that [Committee to Save the Cooper Union Museum]—keep the museum intact and so on. Even the American Association of Museums was called in to make suggestions. So all of this showed that there was a concentrated effort to do something about it. There's no word as to what Hathaway was saying or doing at that time; he was certainly still there. Certainly he was still there by October 1967, when the trustees of Cooper Union, headed by Richard Humphreys, announced the transfer to the Smithsonian Institution. I think it was the American Association of Museums that came up with that suggestion. There's no mention here of Henry Francis du Pont, who was very active at the museum and who certainly made a strong effort to save the museum, as I recall.

GALM

Who were the types of individuals who served on that Save the Museum committee?

BLOCH

They were museum people.

GALM

Mainly museum people, not community people?

BLOCH

All museum people of some prominence, some of whom I know quite well. But according to Lynes, there were 126 people. I don't believe that; I think one would have to look into that. I think there was a smaller committee. Certainly as I remember—and I repeat myself—Henry du Pont, who founded the [Henry Francis du Pont] Winterthur Museum [Winterthur, Delaware] and was interested particularly in the decorative arts and who had a particular fondness for the Cooper Union collections, may have been serving on that board by that time. The board, I remember, was an interesting group of people at an earlier period, who were all interested in the decorative arts and were collectors. But they were, for the most part, descendants of the Hewitt type of approach to collecting: collectors of lace and that sort of thing, the sort of things that the Hewitt sisters loved. The only person I remember very distinctly, because of my affection for her and strong contact with her through the Brighton [Royal] Pavilion affair, was Mrs. Brooke [Russell] Marshall, who was a very lively lady, and I think she was an editor of House and Garden. She later on became Mrs. Vincent Astor. She was too lively for them, and they saw to it that she eventually was removed from the board. But she and I had a wonderful relationship. It was through her that I really got to meet the people in back of the Brighton Pavilion project, some very interesting people like the Duff Coopers [Viscount Norwich] and so on. I had a very wonderful weekend at Hove [England] visiting with these people, who were deeply interested in the decorative arts, because they were all connected in a sense with Queen Mary, with her great interest, and they were all very close to the royal family. So that was about as close as I got to all of that, but it was fascinating for a young person to have that experience.

GALM

Just for the record— You referred to Russell Lynes. What is the work that you're specifically—?

BLOCH

I'm referring to a book that was published in 1981, evidently at the behest of the Smithsonian Institution, called More Than Meets the Eye: The History and Collection of Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the Smithsonian Institution's [National] Museum of Design. He himself admits that he knew very little about the history of design, and certainly very little about Cooper Union beyond what he was being fed at that particular point in time. He only saw one side of it and was naturally anxious to present only the surface side of it and not what went on behind the scene. I think the idea was to show where the Smithsonian stepped in, and it only briefly refers to what he calls problems. The problems were much more deeply rooted, as I think I said, and go back a long time in history. And they seemed to be inevitable after the original review that I spoke about.

GALM

Okay. Last time when we ended the tape, you were referring to an exhibit that occurred in spring 1955, a landscape show that was put together by Karl [M.] Birkmeyer ["Exhibition of the History of Landscape Painting"], and also the publication of the first issue—the first and only issue, was it?—of the UCLA Bulletin of the Arts.

BLOCH

Yes, that's true. The bulletin we discussed. As I know, it was number one, never went beyond the number one of the spring of 1955. It had an introduction by Gibson [A.] Danes, who was chairman of the art department, in which he discussed the dimensions of the visual arts. As he said, it was an opportunity for reviewing the patterns of rapid development characteristic of a vital university, an occasion for looking ahead and for taking stock. He mentions the bulletin as a joint effort of the art department, the Art Galleries, and the newly formed UCLA Art Council, of which Gustave [0.] Arlt was chairman. It was the Art Council that provided the funds for the publication. He speaks specifically of the new Art Building, which was then three years old, having been opened in 1952. Before that, I believe they were housed in Moore Hall. You might check that.

GALM

Right, the education building.

BLOCH

Yes. Warren [G.] Carter did the exhibitions. It was the kind of thing that was put on mainly through the art department, to demonstrate what they were doing. Certainly that aspect of what the students were doing was implicit in what they would be doing in the galleries. There would have to be at least one or two exhibitions a year demonstrating the students' productions and painting and design and so on. That remained very much part of the picture at the moment that I came there. It was an important moment at that time around '52, because the university had had some rather poor experiences in supporting collections that were offered to the university. One of them, the [Walter] Arensberg collection, which eventually went to the Philadelphia Museum [of Art], would have been an ideal nucleus for a museum type of approach on this campus. But the very term "museum" was abhorrent to the regents. So I think they finally had come to the decision that they really would have to do something to make tracks in the field if they were going to have anything approaching a museum. Naturally they did not call the galleries a "museum." They called them galleries in order to avoid that unfortunate term museum. We've come a long way since that time. So the galleries were set up at about that time. Now, at the time that we're speaking of, about '55, Mr. Frederick [S.] Wight was already director, had been director for three years. He was obviously very important in the building of the new gallery and the designing of it. I don't have the details of that, but I'm sure this is what happened. Karl Birkmeyer was to be a curator. That pattern of faculty members being curators is very typical of the Harvard [University] process and other universities, major universities in the East in particular, where collections are located. It was certainly very much a pattern in the East to have museum collections associated with the art department. It was not only to serve the students, but also to serve the public. Major collections were already formed by most of those universities. There's a history that goes back to probably a century, where colleges and museums had begun to establish major collections in one way or another. But it was fairly novel [in the West], except perhaps for Stanford [University]. I'm not aware of how early they began to collect. They certainly had a faculty with a very clear relationship to the galleries, involved in acquisition, involved in building the collections, and, most important of all, involving the students in some kind of a training process where they were in contact with objects of art. I remember my student days at Harvard, where objects of art were actually passed around in the classroom and were part of the collection. Or you'd have a seminar in which actual works of art were present, and you spoke about those objects. You didn't go to the books; the books were almost secondary to what the objects were intended to be. One of my teachers at Harvard, Jakob Rosenberg, had been trained in the auction field. I mean, he knew not just museums, but he knew how to handle and catalog objects from training in an auction house, which was one way you learned how to handle objects and become responsible for them. All of my training there was along those lines, so it was natural that I would look for something like that here. My connection with Fred Grunwald was such a connection here, although as I pointed out to you, that was not my appointment to the university. I have the letters here relating to my appointment. I have "ze proof," as it were. All they ever said was, "You will be teaching such and such courses," which were outlined, and then said, "We also have a collection which we hope you'll be interested in." That was not part of the appointment, although almost everybody felt that that was what I came to do. But that was not so. Somebody very cleverly inserted that later on in order to make certain that Fred Grunwald remained with the university. As it happened, it worked out very well. Now, getting back to UCLA, one of the very important figures in all of this was the appointment of Dr. Karl [E.] With. I made some effort to get exactly those dates. It seems he came to UCLA in the fall of 1948 as a lecturer, and the following year or two he was made a full professor and was appointed the first curator— I'm not sure whether it was curator or director, but at least curator of the art gallery, which at that point, in 1952, when all of this began to happen with the new gallery, was the Willitts [J.] Hole collection of old master paintings. This collection was donated by the family of Willitts Hole through the auspices of a friend of the family, Regent [Edward A.] Dickson. It was, in a sense, a way of making up for the losses that they had, since they had no collection because they had fumbled the Arensberg gift, which was the most important gift up to that time and would have made this university number one in the field of modern art. Karl With was a trained art historian and a very well known scholar who had previously been director of the Folkwang Museum in Hagen. He had traveled to the Orient and wrote some of the first books on oriental art, particularly on South Pacific art, and had published in the early twenties in this field. He taught at the University of Cologne, was a friend of Konrad Adenauer, who was then the mayor of Cologne and who appointed him director of the Kunstgewerbemuseum and then the art school, among other things that he ran at that time. Very energetic and powerful figure, whose voice still rings in my head. He remained there until 1933, when both he and Adenauer were ousted by the Nazi regime. As I'm told, he left Cologne and went to Berlin, where he actually was publishing underground. He could have been arrested at any time, because he was a very formidable kind of man of very positive convictions who would not have allowed himself to be dictated to. He finally came to the United States in 1939. He wasn't concentration camp fodder; he wasn't of that persuasion. I mean, it was a matter of his own decision, but he was in some difficulty. So it was logical that when he was here, he would have been involved in the curatorial capacity then. But he wasn't, as I see it, brought to this country with that in view; he was already here as a professor. I'm told he was brought here by Chancellor [Clarence A.] Dykstra and Kenneth Macgowan, who admired him and were friends of his.

GALM

Do you know where he was from '39 to '48?

BLOCH

He was living in the East. He had married for the second time to Gerda With, who is a painter still living in this community.

GALM

Was he teaching at some university?

BLOCH

I don't know what he was doing in the East up through that period. He may have been writing, I'm not certain. I can find out if we need to do this. But I think it's very important, since his oral history has not been recorded and he is now deceased— He wrote his own life history, which exists in manuscript in the family. But what happened with Dr. With, being this very positive and formidable gentleman that he was— A brilliant speaker and one of the most popular lecturers this university ever had. He spoke about art history in the larger context of its relationship to social and political events, a mesmerizing speaker. Very positive and very often could say things that made people sit up and take notice, which I won't go into here. Very colorful gentleman. As soon as he saw the whole collection, he realized that there were holes in it, in the sense that the attributions were very questionable. The Willitts Hole collection was made up by a gentleman who wanted to build a kind of—what shall I say?—a collection that would have scope, and so was very anxious to have the great names represented. That's always dangerous in collecting, even in those days, because unless you know what you're doing, you're faced with recommendations by some rather unscrupulous people, who frequently will sell you the names, but that has nothing to do with the quality of the merchandise. Now, we know that went on with [Joseph] Duveen and with other more famous dealers than those with whom Willitts Hole associated. He never associated, as far as I know, with Duveen. He bought them on a lesser level and may have even had agents working abroad to pick up things for him. It was very obvious that the collection included old pictures, but old pictures of no great quality in many cases. Not that there aren't some exceptions, but for the most part, a second-rate collection. But the thing that troubled Karl With was of course the labels. He at that time put a label on the opening exhibition of the new gallery which said that those paintings would be reevaluated. This label was seen by Regent Dickson, who, it would seem in a matter of hours, determined that Dr. With would no longer be directing or curating that gallery. And so he was dismissed, literally. I don't think it was a meeting of minds; I think really he was dropped out of it. This placed the gallery in the kind of embarrassing position of finding a substitute immediately. Gibson Danes, who knew Frederick Wight—who was working in Boston at the contemporary museum [Boston Institute of Contemporary Art] and who was about to leave—felt he would be the logical candidate. So he was contacted and invited to come to UCLA. As far as I know, Frederick Wight had no teaching experience. If he was to be appointed a professor, which was part of the job—that no longer exists, incidentally, as part of the makeup of the director of the gallery—he needed some professional training. If I am not mistaken, he taught a course in museum training or something of that sort, something relating to museums, at the University of Michigan that summer before he came. So he had the necessary papers to make the appointment possible. Fred Wight was a very pleasant, amusing man who was a painter by profession. He had received at least an M.A.at Harvard and was very friendly with people like Rosenberg and Agnes Mongan and so on, who supported him and liked him very much. Very charming man, quite different from Karl With, whose charms were of quite another kind: a dynamic, forceful, aggressive man. Fred could be aggressive, but in a rather charming way. He took control of the gallery, and he was exactly what was needed, because he was not involved in having to evaluate the whole collection. He knew he would have to exhibit at least once a year, along with the [James] Kennedy collection of British art, which was evidently given to the university about the same time. All had strings tied to them in the sense that they had to be shown on a more or less permanent basis. They could only be taken down at certain intervals and had to be shown and be on permanent display through the year. This Fred proceeded to do and to use the other galleries for temporary exhibition. This he did rather brilliantly with monographic-type exhibitions on people like [Charles] Sheeler and [Morris] Graves and Hans Hofmann and [John] Marin. There was a whole series of these things built in areas that he knew most about because he'd written about them. So that began a professional program at that time. Karl With was completely out of the picture. He returned to teaching and was no longer brought into the gallery picture at all, unfortunately. That was a great loss, because he should have always been made part of the meetings and the structure of programs. From what I understand, he wanted very much to support Mr. Wight in that program, but because of what had happened he was simply omitted from that and never had any part in the exhibition programs. He followed my work very, very closely. Because he approved of it and admired me as a friend and what I was doing, [he] visited all the shows and wrote me many, many notes offering me his opinion of what we were doing. But then, remember, he was a great friend of Fred Grunwald, so had a closer feeling for the Grunwald collection and what I was doing with it and what we were doing as a group in bringing that together. He was the one who was largely responsible for bringing Fred Grunwald to this campus. I think I already pointed that out, but I think it's important.

GALM

No, no, you pointed it out in introductions to catalogs, but not on tape. We haven't talked about that.

BLOCH

Well, that I should emphasize it, because I did at one time have to clarify it. In more recent times other people have tried to assume credit for bringing Mr. Grunwald to this campus. I think I did mention that Mr. Grunwald was unhappy with his other connections, such as the [Los Angeles] County Museum [of Art], and pulled out finally. But it was at that time when he was ready to pull out that Karl With and people like Jake Zeitlin, and others who knew him very well, stepped in and encouraged him to come to UCLA. That was in about 1952, '53. That was within that period. So that when I came here in '56, the fall of '56, the first exhibition of Fred Grunwald's collection ["An Exhibition of Master Prints"] was on view, and it was there that I met him. Now, Jack B. Carter was by that time the curator of exhibitions. He had been a student here in the early 1950s. When he returned from the service in 1955, he was given a split appointment—in other words, he would teach as well as do the gallery exhibitions. He remained with that, working with Mr. Wight and, certainly almost from the beginning working with me too. We remarked about this to each other the other day, that this is more than thirty years that he and I have worked together. So the fact that we've worked out a marvelous relationship, to this day, is an interesting thing to see. Because all the exhibitions we did at the Grunwald [originally Grunwald Graphic Arts Foundation, late Grundwald Center for the Graphic Arts], the major exhibitions, were those which were designed by Jack in collaboration with me. This is, in a sense, a model of how collaboration can take place on a very creative level. I will always speak about that with great warmth, because that doesn't often happen, even in a major institution.

GALM

I want to ask a few questions about Karl With and Fred Grunwald. Do you know whether they knew each other in Germany?

BLOCH

No, I don't think so. I think they met here. Fred Grunwald was, after all, a businessman.

GALM

Right. So maybe through his collecting?

BLOCH

No. Fred was in Berlin. It's true that Karl With was there, but I do not think that their paths crossed during that time. Besides, Fred Grunwald was in America in 1936. Remember, he would have had to leave and was in great danger, since he too— The two were very similar in personality: very aggressive, very positive people. It was either yes or no; there was no in-between in their likes and dislikes, and you knew that immediately. They liked one another, and they spoke the same language, in the true sense of the word. I mean, really they understood one another. Besides, Karl With was friendly with people like Emil Nolde, who was one of the great heroes of Fred Grunwald, one of the great German expressionists. So there were many points of contact. Besides, one of the things Karl With did while he was here was form this— I think they called it the Modern Institute of Art. It was one of Vincent Price's projects in which he put money. This was in Beverly Hills in 1948. So Grunwald was already established in this community and certainly was aware of Karl With. They must have known each other from those early days as friends. They became very close friends indeed. When Karl With retired from the university, it was Fred Grunwald who made a large reception in his honor at his home. There was a great admiration for each other on both sides, although Fred came from a completely different area. He was not a writer, but he was an intellectual; he loved intellectuals, admired [them], and read a great deal. He brought his own children to UCLA and admired people who were scholars, the thing he always wanted to be. He was a scholar in the sense that he had a very creative approach to collecting—another reason why I was so anxious to keep the collection intact as far as I possibly could. Because it had a beginning and it had a middle and it had an end. It was not collecting at will; it was all done with very clear intent and with very secure knowledge of what he was doing.

GALM

Did With advise him on acquisitions?

BLOCH

I don't think so. They certainly had contact. Fred Grunwald did what he did in Berlin. He had a kind of little print circle in Berlin where people would come to his home and they would look at objects of art. Now, that goes back to private collecting in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, where people had little cabinets of collecting. That's exactly what Fred had in his own home. He had a little print room all set up, to which his friends could come and he would proudly point out his newest acquisitions and discuss at great length what it meant to him. I remember hearing him do it not only at his home, but even in public. "I do not care what the writers say," he would say. "This is what this means to me." Very often it was very, very perceptive how he would interpret the content and meaning of a single print. Very perceptive gentleman. This would have appealed to Karl With, who was exactly that kind of person, so they may have had many, many conversations along that line. I was not privy to this kind of thing. I think Fred always regarded me as his curator, and I always kept my position quite clear. I was available to him whenever he wanted me. He eventually sought my advice, but he said from the beginning that he enjoyed the collecting on his own: he liked to make the decisions. He was one of the original subscribers to Tamarind [Lithography Workshop], which we'll go into in detail later on, but one of the reasons he discontinued this subscription—and he made that very clear—was because he had no say in the selection. He just didn't want to buy for the sake of— He wanted the involvement. This again would have appealed to Karl. So I imagine that there were many conversations between the two men on this level. I can't believe that Fred would not have done that. But I can find out more about that through Gerda [With], with whom I spoke only this morning. Fred had this little print circle, and people would come. There are several people in his community who still remember with great warmth those meetings at Fred's house, where there would be the generous dinner and the cocktails and then finally a retiring to the cabinet, where the rest of the evening was spent in talking about works of art, looking at the prints and discussing.

GALM

Where was his home?

BLOCH

He had two homes. One wasn't too far from where the present County Museum is. It may have been Curson [Avenue], I'm not certain. It was a small house to which he and his wife retired, his first wife. She was killed in an automobile accident, which left him really quite alone, so much so that he sought companionship immediately. His children were off on their own, and it was certainly not too far after— I did not know the first Mrs. Grunwald, but when I first met Fred he was still living in that little house. Then he married Mrs. [Saidee Herz] Grunwald, who liked bigger things—larger cars, larger houses, and so on. Especially for entertainment, because she was an exceptional hostess, an American, not of German extraction. His first wife was very careful with the money. Mrs. Grunwald liked to make the display, and that was wonderful for Fred. He needed that, since he was already a successful businessman and could afford all of that. So he took great pride in all of that, to be the gracious host along with Mrs. Grunwald. They lived, I think it was on Cresta Drive, in a large house, and there they did a certain amount of remodeling to make room for his print room. I think it was built around entertainment: the big swimming pool and the gatherings for the barbecue around the swimming pool, all of that which comes with living in Los Angeles, you see, which he enjoyed. He would not speak German; he was very angry if anybody greeted him in German. He said, "I am an American." He was very proud of being an American, even through the heavy accent. He said, "I can't hear my accent." It was interesting to hear him speak, but he resented anybody greeting him in German. Very proud of all of that and proud of his new wife, and they had a very good life together.

GALM

So his new wife was Saidee—?

BLOCH

Saidee Herz Grunwald.

GALM

And then what was the first wife's name? Do you recall?

BLOCH

I don't know.

GALM

Had he married in Germany?

BLOCH

Oh, yes, she came with him. They had two children, Lottie [Grunwald Talpis] and Ernest [M. Grunwald]. Ernest is a professor of chemistry at Brandeis [University] now, but he was trained here under Saul Winstein—one of his best students.

GALM

You mentioned also that one of his early Los Angeles connections, as far as bringing him to the university, was Jake Zeitlin. Was he buying things through Jake Zeitlin at that point?

BLOCH

No. Fred was using reparations that he was receiving from Germany, for the most part, in building his collection. I don't know how much of it he was able to get out of Germany. I am told that certain amounts of it were taken away, since the German expressionists, the core of his collection, were not regarded as artists, not as painters in the public collections that were being sold by the Nazis. I forget the title of that famous catalog—we have it at this university, and we should probably get it out—of art that was regarded as, I forget the exact term—

GALM

Degenerate?

BLOCH

Something like that; that's not exactly the word. It was degenerate from their standpoint. But that was really the core of Fred's thinking. In those days, those were the modern artists and the most expressive artists of his time. Indeed, that's why they were called expressionists. He collected German expressionists and French impressionists in this country. His first wife was evidently very much involved with this, because when he really began to collect seriously again and he had some money to deal with—both moneys from reparations and money from his business, which he drew on for this purpose—she bought as a gift for him a group of prints by Otto Müller, which are in our collection.

GALM

The Gypsy series?

BLOCH

The Gypsy series, exactly. Which I was surprised he gave us, because it had such very special, poignant meaning for him. So obviously his first wife had some knowledge and input in that field. Saidee Grunwald did not have this kind of background. She learned quickly, but she really never bought for him. After one or two attempts at this, he said, "Saidee, I would rather you not." [laughter] But she did learn how valuable they were, with good practical reason. The children were not interested. He gave them things for their own homes for decoration. Ernest expressed disinterest in those days to his father, wondered about the founding of the Grunwald Graphic Arts Foundation and all of that, none of which he particularly sympathized with. But now he has become more interested in the prints, the collection that he received as part of his inheritance. He is committed to UCLA, and he does give from time to time from his personal holdings. So does Lottie, the daughter. She has kept only a few things for herself and her family, but the rest of it goes to UCLA. It's Mrs. Grunwald's children who feel no sympathy with this, or very little, and have been selling off their holdings.

1.6. TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE TWO MARCH 19, 1987

GALM

Dr. Bloch, I was asking you about Fred Grunwald's relationship with Jake Zeitlin. I guess what I was also trying to determine was whether there were any dealers in prints at that point in Los Angeles of note. Was 0. [Orrel] P. Reed a significant dealer at that point?

BLOCH

We have never had in Los Angeles, not in more recent times— I think many, many years ago there were some rather substantial private dealers who dealt with people like the Huntingtons [Collis P. and Henry E.]. But they had long since passed out of the picture. Jake Zeitlin was a bookseller who had a print department. That was rather typical of European booksellers, to have a department relating to the graphic arts, and Jake is rather typical of the old-time bookseller who has many, many interests and commitments in the field. Jake is a scholar in his own field, interested in medical books and so on, and it's mainly in books, of course, that he has made his great reputation as an antiquarian bookseller. He is in a sense, in a true sense, the dean of California booksellers, especially in Los Angeles. I've heard tell that Los Angeles was regarded at one time as the second largest antiquarian bookseller area in the country, but I failed to have seen this in any great quantity. We certainly have had interesting people. Now, in terms of specific print sellers, O.P. Reed stands out in my memory as one. We've had people more in the modern field, like Felix Landau, with whom Fred did some small bit of business. I think that Fred certainly visited Jake's bookshop [Jake Zeitlin Books], but whether Jake really was able to sell to Fred remains to be discovered from Jake himself—he may have on occasion. But the reparations and the fact that those moneys were deposited in Europe encouraged Fred to buy in Paris. His dealer in Paris was [Paul] Prouté. This I knew very well because I would visit Prouté, and they would tell me what he was buying. At one point I made some recommendation, at the risk of life and limb. Fred did buy them, but because he hadn't selected them, he gave them over to UCLA, which was okay. But most of what he got came from such dealers as Prouté. I'm sure his bills will show purchases made in Germany and elsewhere on the continent. But mainly Paris, as I remember, was where much of his activity took place. There may have been some purchases in Switzerland too. There were some dealers, as I say, on the continent he would have to go to for the Germans or Swiss or whatever, for continental artists. He wouldn't really go to Prouté except for the French.

GALM

That early collection that he created in Germany and a large part of which was confiscated by the Nazis, would that have been sold or would that have been destroyed? Does he have any sense of what happened to it?

BLOCH

I don't think that the Nazis really destroyed [it]; I think they used it as a means of raising money. I think they were practical enough not to simply make a bonfire. They made demonstrations, burning of the books and that sort of thing, but I don't think that they really would have destroyed works of art wholesale that way. I think they confiscated them, stored them, and sold them. Certainly that big sale of the "degenerate" art—you're right, that's the title of the show, "Degenerate Art"— which included the great Franz Marcs and so on, some of these works found their way to America and were sold. Now, the prints could have been easily disposed of in other ways. The paintings were quite another thing. There they could make the big public demonstration.

GALM

When he later on had come to Los Angeles and had established himself as a businessman and then began to collect again, did he rebuild the collection along the same lines and was he able to buy back, so to speak, pieces that he had lost?

BLOCH

Well, it never was quite clear just how much he was able to salvage from the original collection. What he did was certainly to continue the pattern of collecting he had begun in Berlin, with the great core in the German expressionist area, with the side interest in French impressionism. He would buy in the modern field. I'm not so certain of how many artists he would have supported in Germany at that time, except those artists who were still alive when he was there. After all, people like [Karl] Schmidt-Rottluff and Nolde and others lived to great old ages. Whether he had personal contact with them, I have no way of knowing. He never spoke of them that way. I corresponded with Karl Schmidt-Rottluff when I was at Cooper Union, because we started to buy German expressionism when I was there. But then, remember, you could buy them for thirty-five dollars apiece. That was the top price I ever paid for one of those. The refugees were carrying these things under their arm, the one thing they could get out. So those were for sale at Via's Bookshop and places like that in New York for nominal amounts of money. I was familiar with that, and certainly these were the things he was buying too. He was able to buy a great deal through the market. His interest in contemporary artists and his support of contemporary artists I do not feel necessarily began only here. I have a feeling that was always part of his pattern, the younger artists. In this country he supported artists like Mario Avati, who was a Monaco-born artist who lived in Paris. Whether he came to know them through Prouté is something I'm not quite sure about, but he regarded Avati as one of his discoveries. A great technician, and that appealed to his sensibilities. Fred loved printmaking in black and white. Although he collected color, his real heart was in the graphic art. He loved the modern artists, beginning, let's say, with someone like Daumier—that would have been about the earliest—but reaching into people like Manet and artists of that era. He would not buy old masters. As he said, it takes too much careful study. He loved Rembrandt, but he said it was too complicated for him. He stayed away from drawings for the most part. It was only later, after he and I became close friends, that he began to show some interest in drawing. Because, after all, that also required a special kind of expertise. He knew his limitations, and he didn't want to get involved in any of that. The things he could grasp that were cataloged clearly and simply were the things he wanted to deal with. He got a tremendous amount of—what shall I say?— inspiration from these things; it meant something. The graphic art was something that was implicit on copper, on steel, on wood—he could cope with that. In America, well, Avati was one. He started to collect John Paul Jones, who was on our faculty. He was very fond of John Paul Jones. There was the woodcut artist. I think he's Argentine. [Antonio Frasconi] And there were a few artists like that. Now, when he began to work with us, we began to do exhibitions once a month. John Paul Jones and I at the very beginning were doing small shows. We did not take advantage of Jack Carter's services at that time. We had a tiny little spot in the gallery and a closet, literally a closet, for the few boxes we had. All of our exhibitions were based on loans, chiefly from Fred Grunwald. John Paul and I would visit Fred once a month. We'd spend, let's say, a Sunday. We would be fed a lunch, and then we'd spend a leisurely time with Fred, who by that time, I must say, was not terribly well. I mean, he had a heart condition, so Sunday was his day to rest. Mrs. Grunwald saw to it that he rested in bed. He got into the habit of calling me up if I wasn't coming there and discussing with me at great length certain aspects of art history that concerned him. He was very intrigued by my outside interests in, let's say, mannerism. It was completely foreign to him, and he would say to me, "What is this all about? I do not understand this, so will you tell me what the baroque is and explain the difference between mannerism and the baroque?" He enjoyed the conversation. He would read. He had a very good library. But he much enjoyed the disputa, the business of being able to discuss it: with somebody he respected and could have the exchange with. Mrs. Grunwald used to say, "You two are like two old ladies." She said, "I go out shopping, and you're still on the phone when I get back." But that was something we both enjoyed greatly. He was a good student, a very receptive student. He liked to argue the point, but that was healthy. In the end, he respected what I had to say and I respected his opinion and we got along beautifully. When I became interested in teaching old master drawings, he said, "This I cannot understand. I do not understand these brown paper things, these browning drawings." He said he could not be interested in that, but he was interested in seeing them and understanding what it was that concerned me and where the values were. He was ever curious, and that is an aspect he carried into his art. So getting back to what we did, John Paul and I would select from his collection. It might be still lifes or it might be landscapes or self-portraits (he was interested in self-portraits of artists). They mostly reflected the patterns of his collecting, and we were able to put together many interesting shows. After selecting the material, we'd then spend a whole weekend installing it and putting it together, and Fred would enjoy this immensely. There was one critic of the Los Angeles Times at that time who was very interested in what we were doing and would come down actually to see these little exhibitions and report about them. I think we did the first little exhibition of Käthe Kollwitz, not exactly a minor artist. In those days, though, very few people had seen her in Los Angeles.

GALM

Did he know her?

BLOCH

No, no. I really don't believe that Fred knew these artists personally. He did know some of the younger artists eventually. Certainly he was a great friend of John Paul Jones. What he did eventually, in terms of his business, he even commissioned works of art, which he gave away as Christmas gifts to his employees or friends or clients. So John Paul was one. Avati was another who prepared actual prints for him, and the plates then came to him. He was very interested in controlling the plates, and I think most of those are in the Grunwald collection at UCLA. So there was that kind of thing. Now, in terms of knowing them, I don't think he really believed that it was necessary to know the artist personally. I think he preferred the distance so that he would be free to make his decisions. I say this because I was present when Avati came to America for the first time with his wife. There was an evening at Fred Grunwald's house. That was the first time they'd met, although he'd supported his work and bought everything he did for years. I remember Avati, who did not speak English— His wife was American, so she translated for him. June Wayne, who knew Avati quite well, I remember was present that evening, and we were preparing to do a show. In fact, I think that may have been part of the occasion, that we were doing a show of Avati's work, a full-scale show with a very nice catalog, which was designed by Avati himself. I remember in the course of the evening, he [Grunwald] said to Avati, [imitating a German accent] "I suppose you wonder why I am not collecting your works at the present time. I have ceased buying your prints." When it was translated, Avati wanted to know why, so he said, "I tell you what—you are not showing improvement." When that was translated, Avati fell to the floor, you see. He said, "Well, I do think I show improvement." You know, he was a very modest fellow. But that was very typical of Fred Grunwald. When he was your patron, he, in a sense, was the father telling the son, "You are not showing improvement," that kind of thing. So I think he preferred the distance rather than the immediate contact. That could have been disastrous if that went on in many cases. I don't think he ever said that to June Wayne, whom he felt was a most remarkable lady. I don't think she would have taken that as easily as Avati did. While he was still connected with the County Museum, when Ebria Feinblatt and he were working together, she wanted to do a contemporary Italian show, Italian printmakers. In those early days, in the early 1950s, in traveling abroad you would find—as it was in America, through IGAS [International Graphics Arts Society] and places like that—an emerging interest in printmaking, which had been dormant for a good long time. You know, the German expressionists were doing this on their own, not because they had a clientele. The medium was important to them because woodcuts, for instance, were very much part of a German heritage in fifteenth century art. So it was natural for them to turn to black and white, in particular. And Fred knew that. Hence his own feeling for these techniques, the graphic techniques in general. At that time there was in Italy, there was in Sweden, there was in Holland a growing up of a generation of printmakers. Some of these were being shown in New York while I was there, and a great deal of interest was being expressed in other parts of the country in exhibiting these works and importing them and that sort of thing. So he told Ebria Feinblatt to select the material for her exhibition and he would buy the material, which would become part of his collection. I think he gave them some things, but for the most part that became part of his collection, and he gave a lot of that to UCLA. That was the experiment he would go through. That wasn't naturally part of his central collecting; it was the sort of thing he would give away, but he would sponsor. So the Italian was one. When we were working with him, it was contemporary German artists, two or three artists who were then coming into prominence, and he would buy them with the idea of donating to UCLA. He liked that sort of thing.

GALM

Did he ever speak to you about his relationship with Ebria Feinblatt?

BLOCH

Well, the problem there had to do with his great disappointment in the County Museum. He and Ebria, I think, worked very closely together for a period. He respected Ebria as a scholar. Ebria was in a difficult position at the County, and she sort of counted on Grunwald being a demonstration of what she could do in bringing a great collector to that then very small collection of prints. She had almost no budget to work with and could only occasionally buy a great master print, because the museum was chiefly interested in raising money to buy much more impressive works of art which they could show to the public. She was really always the low man, as far as getting access to money, and there was at that time no support group to which she could turn for assistance. So finding someone like Fred Grunwald was an important plus for her as a museum curator. When Fred decided to leave— And this was very sudden and had nothing really to do with Ebria, but was based on some social problem, I gathered. He made a very clear decision to do this, which I think was a very unpleasant pill for Ebria to swallow. But I think the mistake she made was in immediately reacting in a negative way. She's a very shy person, and so she withdrew, rather than seeking him out and saying, "Look, you can't do this. Let's sit down and talk about this. What is it I can do?" Which was the only way you really could behave with Fred. You had to stand up to it and sit and talk to him and hear it out and try to make it good. But she didn't. She withdrew, as far as I can see. By the time I got here, they weren't even on speaking terms. She more or less avoided Fred Grunwald. Not that she ever spoke against him—I never heard a word of that— but she withdrew from him, and she felt that he was dedicated to UCLA. Even though she had gotten her degree at UCLA, she was committed to another institution. That happens very often with museum personnel, that they become so associated with their institution that they react in the same way that the institution is: "They're out of it, so I'm out of it." So she really had very little to do with the Grunwald Foundation. Never visited us. Eventually borrowed from us. When I came, I certainly made contact with her, but I never had the feeling that we were close colleagues. We were friends, but in a distant sort of way.

GALM

So Grunwald's disillusionment with the County had to do with the directors?

BLOCH

It was on that level, not with Ebria. I think he had great respect for her ability and I think enjoyed working with her from those many times that they did. After all, if you realize that there were exhibitions that they put on, Ebria had every right to expect that this would have been a continuing performance. And suddenly it was out, and he had transferred his alliance to another institution.

GALM

Last time we spoke about your initial meeting with Fred Grunwald, and it was at the exhibit of master prints—

BLOCH

Prints from his collection. There is a catalog for that.

GALM

But it seems also that that was the inaugural exhibit for the Grunwald Graphic Arts Foundation.

BLOCH

That's right.

GALM

You've had a chance to look into the background of the establishment of the foundation. Can you give some of the historical data on that? I guess it seems, just in my reading, that there seems to be some confusion as to just exactly when it became a reality. Because there is some mention in catalogs that say 1954, but that wouldn't have been an actual official date for the foundation, would it?

BLOCH

No, I think you're quite right. I think there were discussions that were going on probably in that period. The rather fragmentary bits and pieces of manuscript that are available, some undated, seem to refer to that early period. There was a discussion by the university on the, quote, "requirements" for acceptance by the university. Remember, the university was being very cautious in these years as to what it was going to do. They were not very experienced in such matters. Nowhere anywhere in the whole university system at that time had they really established requirements for acceptance of collections. The Willitts [J.] Hole thing was the first one, and already they had been burned slightly through what went on there. But that already was part of the picture. They were making some effort to develop a kind of museum picture without using the term "museum." I have one bit of manuscript—this must have come out of the chancellor's or the president's office, probably more the president's office by that time—in which they said that very little would be required from the university to, quote, "house and manage" such a collection, thinking of getting the whole collection eventually. And it says, and this is again a quote, [reading] "Mr. Grunwald and we ourselves envisage a print room, and here we should consider both an immediate and a possible future solution. There are now three galleries and a student lounge organized as a unit for exhibition purposes." This is in the new building. It was there in 1952, so you realize that this is post-1952. There had been no provision for a print room. What they used was what was called a student lounge, which was just off the patio in what is now the School of Architecture and Urban Planning building, and that is indeed where this thing sat. That was used as a unit for exhibition purposes. It was just what they said, a lounge with chairs around and not very much space. Just off that was a place where kitchen facilities were used for entertainment at openings, and right next to that ideal location was a closet. It was there that was to be the print room at that time. That was hastily put together when Mr. Grunwald made his first gifts, which must have been in '53, '54, or '55. When I came on the scene, I think there were two or three boxes. Included in that little group were things that were collected by the department for teaching purposes. They now and again would buy something; it might be a drawing that Karl Birkmeyer thought was useful. Now, this has to be post-1952, so we're speaking '52 to '56, within that period. So when I arrived, there were these things that the department had bought. People like Clinton Adams, who was in the printmaking department for some time and eventually became the assistant director of Tamarind [Lithography Workshop] and eventually the director of the Tamarind Institute in New Mexico— He was one of those instrumental in buying an occasional print. There were a few very nice things, but nothing major. Fred's was the first impressive kind of donation that seemed to have the possibility of continuity in the sense of a collection. So they're envisaging a print room simply because Mr. Grunwald was insistent that eventually there be, quote, "a print room" to house his collection. So it says, [reading] "The lounge has always contained works of art, as was envisaged in the first place." Well, we won't go into that. It said, "This space is precisely such space as we would require for a satisfactory print room." (This sounds like this came out of the department much more than from the president's office. ) That wasn't satisfactory, as we certainly knew. "Has its own closet-size storeroom"— that's exactly what I've been discussing. This goes on at some length and says, "It is estimated that $5,000 will be adequate to take care of the cases and equipment and so on." Now, the original thought Mr. Grunwald had with the university itself was that it [his collection] would be something that would be integrated with the library. He thought of it as a library adjunct, just like the way he collected. He had books and reference books and he had the prints—he thought of it as a kind of integral thing. Of course, that did not take place. The library was certainly not equipped to deal with this or to supervise it or any¬thing of that sort. This little thing [the document] that I have here already dates from the period around 1956, when everything came really to a head. Much of the preliminary [activity] was in little gifts. Sort of one heir courting one another until Mr. Grunwald finally came up to it. The second document I have is dated June 7, 1956, when everything sort of came to a head in the formal agreement with the president of the University [of California], then President [Robert G.] Sproul. Raymond [B.] Allen, who was then chancellor of this university [UCLA], forwarded it to President Sproul for, quote, [reading] "approval and acceptance by the regents of Fred Grunwald's proposal to give the university, over a period of years, his valuable print collection." They described it as "part of the educational program for the arts on this campus, as well as for students in various other areas," trying to stress its importance. At that time it was described as "a significant proposal for implementing and enriching the teaching program for the arts and humanities at this university," and it says that the collection was valued at $250,000. "Mr. Grunwald has made other gifts to the art department at Los Angeles from time to time. "Now, that points to the fact that there were these previous gifts and that this gift which he was going to make at that time represents the culmination of his interest in the development of that aspect of our program. Then there was a formal agreement, which is attached to this document I have, an amended version of the terms offered by Mr. Grunwald. This is dated March 5, 1956, but evidently the original terms were dated earlier. This was the final one, in which Mr. Grunwald said: I have brought together a substantial collection of prints in the graphic arts. I am told this collection would add most significantly to the art resources available for teaching and cultural purposes on the Los Angeles campus. For this reason, and because I believe that the Los Angeles campus is an appropriate place for the effective use of art material, it is my intention ultimately, and subject to the conditions below set forth, to give my collection or a substantial part thereof to the Regents of the University of California for the use and benefit of the Los Angeles campus. This I propose to do by partial gifts annually of such numbers or of such valuation as I in my sole discretion shall determine after consulting with the Department of Art on the Los Angeles campus and by a provision in my will to assure completion of the plan. The following conditions shall apply to all gifts of graphic arts, prints, and related literature which I have heretofore made and hereafter make to the Los Angeles campus: 1. The collection shall always be known as the Grunwald Graphic Arts Foundation. 2. It is the intent of the donor to create a center where graphic art prints on the Los Angeles campus may be cataloged, properly housed when not in use elsewhere, and displayed as needed for instruction or cultural purposes. I might add to that, Mr. Grunwald was adamant in stressing, not here but elsewhere, that none of this material could be lent to offices or for display in chancellors' houses and the like. Remind me to amplify that later on. It was meant strictly for instructional purposes and for the use of students whenever they needed it, not to be lent else¬where, which was not always the case in other institutions. It is my hope that others may be encouraged thereby to contribute graphic art prints for this purpose. However, in that he intended that whoever gave any¬thing would give to the Grunwald Graphic Arts Foundation, and therefore it would not be identified with them, but would become part of that. The Regents shall house the collection on the Los Angeles campus in a room assigned to the art department to be identified in an appropriate manner as the Grunwald Graphic Arts Foundation. At that time, it was this student lounge and appropriate closet space, but that's not what he intended it should ultimately have. Certainly before he died the plans for the present Dickson Art Center and the identification of a print room, in which I played the most active role, were made and carried out. He saw it on paper, he never saw it completed. 3. All graphic arts prints which I shall give to the Los Angeles campus shall be appropriately marked or identified with the words the Grunwald Graphic Arts Foundation, and other graphic art prints acquired by the Regents and given by others for that purpose may be added to the collection when so appropriately identified. This, I might add, was a very sticky point with me. I didn't have anything to do with this agreement, since I arrived a few months later and never saw this until much later on. But I did know that it was impossible to get gifts from other people unless they could be identified with themselves. They weren't handing it over that way. And the term "foundation" was itself unfortunate. I can amplify that later on. 4. The Regents shall manage the collection in a suitable manner and, so far as practicable in the circumstances and in the discretion of the Regents, shall provide conditions reasonably appropriate to my purpose, that this collection shall be a significant contribution to the cultural life of the university community as well as an important aid in teaching. I should add that that was always what concerned him most, and that was the great quality in the character of Fred Grunwald and his purpose in giving to the university: the identification with education. Without going into detail about that at this point, it was that kind of idea that agreed with me completely and led to my creation of courses that tied directly to the Grunwald. So that became the tool of my teaching program to which students could go, and they always referred to the original objects. That was carrying out what I wasn't able to do at Cooper Union. 5. The Regents shall, under proper conditions to be determined by them, make loans of all or any part of said graphic arts print collection and related literature to other educational institutions or museums, provided, however, that such loans shall be made under the name of the Grunwald Graphic Arts Foundation. This actually may have been very close to the final agreement, if it wasn't it. Because it is signed by Fred Grunwald, and it says "as discussed with Professor Gibson Danes, chairman, Department of Art, UCLA." I think that was the critical document that marked the end of that discussion, of which there are many other bits and pieces of paper in our files.

GALM

Do you know who put together this exhibit of master prints? Did Fred Wight do it?

BLOCH

No.

GALM

Did Grunwald himself select? It doesn't seem to indicate who was responsible for the exhibit.

BLOCH

I would assume that— You see, this describes and is signed by Fred Grunwald, discussing himself as a collector. If you want me to discuss that further, I can do that later on. But I have a feeling that Fred played a significant role in the actual selection. Whether Jack Carter can answer some of those questions, I can't say at this point. I really think that he was instrumental in forming it, may have worked with one or two other members of the faculty in it. Mr. Wight wrote a little introduction, since, after all, he was director of the gallery at that time—there was nobody else. And in this Fred mentions Jake Zeitlin and gives full credit to Karl With as the man who played a great role in this. Now, it could be that Karl With was also instrumental in helping, but he never got credit beyond this credit, because he was persona non grata in the gallery and remained that way. I would say, looking at the shape of this, that Fred Grunwald probably made the final selection himself.

GALM

How much contact did Fred Wight have with Grunwald over the years?

BLOCH

I'm afraid that was very limited. For some reason I cannot really estimate, the two men really did not enjoy each other's company. Fred was a different type of person I think, ambitious, had his own gallery. He was a painter, he was a writer—

GALM

You're talking about Fred Wight now.

BLOCH

Fred Wight. And he really knew very little about prints. I mean, he couldn't sit down as Karl With might or Jake Zeitlin and really intimately discuss it. So really, on an intellectual level, they had no real contact. Fred [Grunwald] was doing things that were a little foreign to Fred [Wight]'s interest. He was interested in painting, after all, and although Fred Grunwald was interested in painting, it was the graphic arts that were closest to his heart. So I think from that level they didn't have it. Then personally, they seemed not to get along too well. Fred Grunwald, as I told you many, many times, was a man who either had an instant like or an instant dislike. There was nothing in the middle of the road. For some reason he really didn't enjoy, and I'm putting that very mildly, Fred Wight's company. I never remember being at any gathering at Fred Grunwald's house at which Fred Wight was company. This bothered Fred Wight a great deal. At first he dealt with it. There were really instances in which Fred Grunwald more or less turned his back on Fred Wight, and that bothered me a great deal. I thought it would have been so much better if we could all be one happy family. But had it remained for Fred Wight to deal with this, the whole thing might have collapsed. I think part of it—now, I think so—had to do with the departure of Karl With from the gallery picture and the fact that he was certainly not silent on the fact that he was being eliminated from all of this. He was very hurt and didn't hesitate to speak out on the subject. I have a feeling that that played a role. Besides, Jake Zeitlin and Fred Wight were also not very close. So I think it was based on personality grounds a great deal, plus the fact that Fred Wight really made no great effort to stimulate his own interest in the graphic arts so that he really might call Fred Grunwald on the phone and say, "Tell me about this," you see. It was that kind of thing. So it wasn't really until I came on the scene that he had somebody he could talk to on a professional level. And I think that was the reason why when I came they said to him— "They" meaning probably the chairman of the department, who asked me to show some interest. He "hoped that I would show an interest." That was in the letter to me in the early months of 1956 when we were talking about my possible coming. Certainly that worked out very well. He did have somebody to talk to—it was built into the faculty. That, together with his affection for John Paul Jones and other people like that, helped make it happen. But I think it had to be with Fred Wight more or less on the periphery of all of this. We worked together in the gallery, but the Grunwald was to be an autonomous unit, and that had to be very clear. As a matter of fact, it became so for me. I'll go into that later on, that that was the only way I could operate if I was indeed to establish a program, which was what I wanted to do and which seemed to tie in very much with what Fred Grunwald hoped. That was done deliberately. It was something that happened because I always wanted to do it. As I said, I could not do it in New York. I could not make anything but a tiny step at Cooper Union, if at all, and finally it reached the point where I knew I could go no further with an educational program. But here I could bring together my interest in teaching young people and also in collecting on a museum level. The Grunwald offered that opportunity.

GALM

How much support did the department and the art galleries get from Chancellor Raymond Allen?

BLOCH

Raymond Allen knew nothing about this area. I think he certainly was supportive, but not in going out, as Franklin [D.] Murphy did, and finding real practical support. I think it was, quote, "support" of a moral nature. I know that while Allen was there, there were attempts to attract other collectors. This was important to Fred Wight too. He was collecting from local collectors, bringing together a kind of scattered collection of objects. When you start to collect that way, it doesn't become comprehensive. There was no money, or what small moneys he had went for exhibitions and that sort of thing. And besides, Fred Wight wasn't really that interested. His attraction to museums was on an exhibitions level and as a writer and as a painter himself. It wasn't his professional personality nor even in his training to build a collection. That was clearly visible in what he was collecting, and eventually it was all sold, as you remember. But the idea the university had, once it had the bug, as it were, was to build a collection, hopefully something sizable. The department was fairly cooperative. They hadn't reached the point of changing their political philosophy at all with view to museums. I think they realized that this was part of the training, for students to be in contact with works of art, and they certainly used the galleries for that purpose. But they only had the Hole collection or the Kennedy collection, which was very limited and strange.

1.7. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE ONE MARCH 27, 1987

GALM

Professor Bloch, today I would like to ask you about your assuming the supervision for the Grunwald [Graphic Arts] Foundation and how that came about. I have a date, spring 1957, but just exactly what were the circumstances of taking on that responsibility?

BLOCH

Well, there may have been some kind of an official appointment. It may have begun in the spring of '57, but actually we were active already in the fall of '56 in putting together exhibitions, and that was the way we really went into it. The collection itself at that time was very limited. The collection included the small gifts of an annual nature made by Mr. [Fred] Grunwald, which included a few major things from his own collection, plus other things that he acquired to build out a kind of a unit. This is how it began. I think I mentioned last time that of course the initial exhibition program was to show examples from his collection. John Paul Jones and I would go once a month to his house. It became a kind of social event for Mr. Grunwald and was also very healthy for him and for the university for us to do it this way. He was very friendly with John Paul Jones and with me by that time—this occurred rather quickly. So we'd pay the weekend visit to his house, gather material, and then put it together and have little shows. Most of those shows had no catalog. In fact, all of them didn't. And the show of master prints that I've listed as fall of '60 was one that I pulled together from galleries for the most part. Those did not come from Mr. Grunwald. I think from the beginning it was my idea that in order to build a study collection— Which is what Mr. Grunwald really had in mind. It was meant for study, but it didn't have the scope that was needed. I felt the collection needed to be made comprehensive. Mr. Grunwald's interests were only in the latter nineteenth and early twentieth century. French impressionism, German expressionism, very little else. He did not collect old masters; he was fairly suspicious of old masters and the problems that went with them. He dealt with those things that he enjoyed most. From the beginning, and that was before [Franklin D.] Murphy came on the scene, I felt that if I was to develop any kind of a study atmosphere— And it was my idea from the beginning that that's why I would do it, if I could use it as a teaching tool. My background was in teaching, and I was a professor by appointment at the Cooper Union [Museum for the Arts of Decoration] already. Although I never had the chance to actually do much of this in practice, we did have a comprehensive collection. I was building almost in the reverse way at Cooper Union. Because we had old masters but we had very little modern material, and so I would buy German expressionism. So it was a turning around of the whole idea. And so it stimulated me to do it. We had no funds, I must add, so the initial exhibition, for which there was a kind of— It wasn't Xerox in those days.

GALM

Mimeograph?

BLOCH

Mimeograph, you're right. We just had a kind of mimeograph thing. I remember, because of my connections with my colleagues in the East, I was able to borrow from the Metropolitan [Museum of Art (New York City)], from the [Pierpont] Morgan Library [New York City], which you could never do today. I remember we had two impressions of The Three Crosses, the most famous of Rembrandt's prints. We actually had two impressions to show the differences one with the other. This kind of thing you could never have done. It was meant as a kind of demonstration of what we could have. And that was where the early exhibitions began. I remember the curator of the Metropolitan writing— He thought [assuming an affected tone] it was rather "amusing" that we published in such a simple fashion. He thought that was rather refreshing. So we got a lot of things in that little alcove display that we had, the lounge area, and put on a little exhibition. This was intended to acquaint the community with what we intended to do and to let the students know that there was a print room. You must realize that there was no print room, just a kind of alcove, but we wanted the students to become acquainted with the name Grunwald and what we were doing. Of course the true demonstration of that only came when the courses began to be given. That's where that began, with an exhibition program which was intended to key two exhibitions then going on with the gallery. We always worked together, because after all we were right there, and there was never any problem with that. We just had to watch the schedule and match schedules.

GALM

Was it the idea of always having something up on exhibit, more or less?

BLOCH

Yes. Well, that was my idea. When Dr. Murphy came on the scene, he more or less laid it out. There would be two major shows a year and two minor shows. In other words, we were told that we could expect some support to do shows, providing we did it. And that was all right. We were actually doing even more than that if you count what John Paul Jones and I were doing before he arrived. I met Dr. Murphy quite by chance, because even in those days you just didn't knock on the chancellor's door. I met him at a party. He heard me talking about bookshops in L. A., and he immediately nabbed me and said, "Oh, you're a bookman." From that point on we became fast friends, because he loves books above everything else. From that he certainly was led into prints. After all, much of that he was urging in the collecting program they had at the University of Kansas. It wasn't long after his arrival that he asked me to introduce him to Fred Grunwald. He'd heard about him, and the idea was of course to encourage him from the very top level, [assure him] of the basic interest in collecting and building at UCLA. They became very, very good friends, and that was an enormous help to me, because Fred was occasionally rather volatile and difficult to handle. Although I never had a problem, there was always the danger that someone in the department or somebody on the [UCLA] Art Council would create a problem. Sometimes I wasn't aware of it. This way he had a direct line, in a sense, to Franklin Murphy, and what better direct line could one have? We mentioned Chancellor [Raymond B.] Allen—he didn't have that. I think Allen certainly, like any other chancellor, was welcoming gifts and helping to make the university better known as an art center. Those things were going on, but their hearts weren't in it. They really didn't know enough. Murphy was the first person with a keen interest and knowledge to go with it, to make these things happen. So once that happened as far as Grunwald and Murphy were concerned, it wasn't long before Murphy came to me and said, "I have an idea." Which in a sense was a pattern that he generally followed, that he would tell Grunwald, "Now, look, you give us your gifts in your area, and I will back it up with whatever funds I can get," through funds available for the chancellor's use, apart from official use, that he had access to. There was a certain fund that he had access to; it wasn't large. He said we would buy in that area. He and I would work together closely in building a collection [before] the nineteenth century. That is, go back to the beginnings of printmaking in the fifteenth century and move on to that point that Grunwald was interested in. In other words, creating a pattern of collecting on a general level. I must say that I had already convinced Grunwald of the need to do this sort of thing. There were the occasions when he would, if I was going abroad, make a small fund available, and I could buy a few things. I think I began to interest him in this aspect of collecting. Things that he didn't know he was anxious to learn about, but he wasn't collecting. He would make a small amount available. In those days you could do very well with a small amount of money. I would buy a few things here and there. So we already had some basis for this. With Murphy on board it made life much easier. Now, in terms of funding, as I said, there were no funds at the beginning, only what I could possibly scrape together through interesting Grunwald. That was limited because he wanted to save his funds for his own purchases. The gallery's funds were chiefly for exhibition, and certainly at that time everything we did had to be keyed to the funds available to the gallery. Mr. [Frederick S.] Wight promised to give us the space, and I imagine he found the funds that fixed the closet that we had and the shelving, and the initial moneys for mounting and that sort of thing. But he had his own exhibition program, and since what we were doing cost nothing and we had no publication, it didn't require very much. I think the problems began when we became more ambitious and wanted to do more. We needed certainly to publish catalogs. A publication is very important if you're developing a program. People have to know. Otherwise, it doesn't exist anymore. A great many of the things that you see on that list I can't even recall, because they were shows that we did in great numbers at the beginning. The only way you can check on them is in terms of critics' reviews. I've checked back on that and found out that in the early days the Los Angeles Times was particularly kind to us, and people like Arthur Millier, Jules Langsner, and Henry [J.] Seldis usually came through for us. Particularly do I remember the first two—these little exhibitions in an alcove bringing the major critic. Later on you weren't getting that kind of attention. Especially when the Art Council shows began to assume some importance, our shows generally faded into the shadow. What we did was we did a [Käthe] Kollwitz show, which was the first Kollwitz show ever shown, based mostly on Grunwald's collection. We were getting attention from the press, and that was very healthy in again making us known. But getting back to the funding and the pattern of collecting, the pattern was already set, even before Murphy came, that we were going to develop a comprehensive collection that was intended eventually to be a study collection. I always underline the fact that we weren't trying to compete with the [Los Angeles] County Museum [of Art] or any other. This was a university study collection intended eventually to collaborate with the art department. I had been assured that not only would we have autonomy in our own work, but that we could count on the collaboration of the art department. I would say for many, many years this was very true, that there was interest [from many in] the art department and certainly encouragement for me to develop the courses that I eventually evolved. Because, remember, I was a faculty member. That situation has changed. I wasn't attached to the gallery in any way; even Mr. Wight was appointed a professor, after all. Later on that changed, after Mr. Wight left. So I began almost immediately to evolve these courses in the studies in prints, studies in drawings, and eventually they were tied to seminars in this area. They were connoisseurship courses, purely and simply—a word that later on was not acceptable to the department. It was meant to make students aware of the technical achievements in the world of prints, as well as its relationship to the general history of art. Because without the prints you lose sight of the whole evolution of the art of communication, not just in art but in science, history, you name it. This is what develops in the fifteenth century, and I was very anxious to make that very much part of my course. A good part of the first part of the History of Prints course actually dealt with the history of the book. Ultimately the idea was that the library would participate, and they had their own courses. All of this was with a view to the total campus commitment to the subject matter.

GALM

What was the student response to these early courses?

BLOCH

Very enthusiastic. Those courses were always heavily populated.

GALM

Many of those first courses were initially keyed to undergraduates, weren't they?

BLOCH

Yes, of course. They were undergraduate courses, but graduate students attended them and graduate students, of course, attended the seminars. But even on the undergraduate level, students had reports to give based on original materials in the collection. As I said, we had a very small budget, so the first exhibitions were borrowed kinds of things to make the community, as well as the students, aware of this [print collection]. There were some extraordinary things in those early shows, which we were very fortunate to get through the cooperation of one's colleagues in the field. But then we began to collect on our own, and with Murphy on hand it made it possible. Now, remember, the funding was not open-ended. When I first discussed the matter with the director of the art gallery, he said, "There are no funds," and that was it. He said the Art Council wouldn't be interested in it, that they were supporting exhibitions. And that is true. So I more or less had to steer clear of the Art Council. I couldn't go to them over the director's head, because that was, after all, his responsibility. You remember in those days and for years afterward, Mr. Wight was the only director. Nobody else was to be called director—that was specifically his wish. Which made things a bit difficult when the ethnic laboratories [UCLA Museum and Laboratory of Ethnic Art and Technology— now the Museum of Cultural History] evolved and Ralph [C.] Altman became connected with that. The confusion was to where we really belonged. Particularly since we were called a foundation and all of that, the question of title became a little bit complicated. But it was understood from the beginning that there would be only one director, although they kept changing my title one way or the other. None of it really made the community aware of exactly where any of us stood. But as far as budget was concerned, he [Wight] was tightly keyed to the UCLA Art Council, and they worked very well together. From the very early days they planned exhibitions on a yearly basis. When Dr. Murphy came this became very much a policy, that the Art Council would do its show once a year. In the very early years I was either invited or invited myself to participate in those shows; if they wanted to do drawings and prints they were bound to come to me. If you find UCLA Art Council acquisitions, let's say in 1959 of [Jose] Ribera, that was only because we needed prints by Ribera to go in the Spanish show that they did. I think one of the patterns that they had evolved was to do a series of master shows: "Spanish Masters" [1960], followed by a French show of rococo to romanticism ["French Masters: Rococo to Romanticism"], a show that was 1959. [looks it up] No, 1961. Jerrold Ziff, who was then a young professor in the art department, was invited to be guest curator by the Art Council to put together the French show, because he was teaching in that area. I was then asked to participate in doing the drawings and the prints. These were sometimes rather touchy areas. I more or less invited myself into that part of the show. Since they asked me to participate in selecting the drawings, I asked then to participate in preparing an essay and all of this sort of thing. But then the question came up as to how I would select these things. There was no money for me to travel. I think they let Ziff travel to New York to select the paintings, but there was no money for me to select, let's say, the prints, because we had nothing like that here. Remember, just going back, let's say, to the Spanish show, in order to have Ribera prints we could either borrow them or buy them. In those days they were very inexpensive, so the Art Council made some funds available so we could have those prints. Hence, that's how they got into the collection. That, in a sense, became one of the little patterns or one of the ploys I used to use to get the Art Council to support us. If we were doing a show, I would say I knew where we could get some prints, and they might make available some funds so that these could be put into their show. When it was the Picasso show, their major Picasso show, "Bonne Fete, M. Picasso" [1961], I wrote to Picasso himself asking for some material. Which Picasso didn't understand. He thought that we were asking for a gift, but that wasn't so. There were some missing pieces, and I thought we could possibly borrow them. That show was made up of Mr. Grunwald's holdings of Picasso. He invited himself to participate in that show, saying he would buy all the necessary materials that might be lacking, providing they gave him the room to himself: it was to be the Grunwald Picasso show. That's how that happened. There are all different approaches to this. Now, with the French show, I used some of my research funds. I was going east on some research, so I used my funds while I was there. I used the same travel fund to stop off and visit my friends in the galleries and get some of the prints.

GALM

Did you buy any prints for that show or did you—?

BLOCH

I think we were able to get a couple of things. I would have to check back, but I think a couple of the crayon manner prints, eighteenth-century things, we acquired because they were here and we were able to get them. But the drawings, of course, we did not collect drawings, much as we should have. It was Dr. Murphy's feeling that since Grunwald was a print collector, we should concentrate on prints and not try to spread our wings too far. We did not go heavily into prints. We started to buy here and there later on. Certainly when I developed a course, we needed more material of that kind. Very often I had to invest some of my own funds so that the material would be on hand. Ultimately I developed a collection, and it surprised me when I left that there was so much material, although I gave some of it as gifts to the university. Much of the expense I went through personally was to augment our holdings so that things wouldn't escape us and they would be available. A lot of those were lent to the university and sometimes appeared under the Grunwald aegis as "anonymous loans" or whatever. But as I remember, the rococo show was a particularly interesting circumstance. It was to be a distinguished show, and there were some very handsome things in the show. It didn't work out exactly as we had hoped, because the museums were a little loath to lend to a gallery which really didn't have proper lighting, didn't have proper humidity control. This problem, the question of temperature, is always very much in the minds of lenders, as well as security. So we weren't always able to get major works. But in terms of the drawings, there were just so many places you could go for great French drawings. We got some major things from individual institutions, but not all of them were totally cooperative. Finally it got to the point where the show might not have been able to go on as I would have liked it to go if I didn't work rather strenuously. At that time I already had a good relationship with the University of London—I had a friend who was curator there. I went to them to fill out the gaps in our collection, and that's when we really had the first kind of international loan of that kind. They were most cooperative, and I think we should have made more of it than we did at that time.

GALM

What was the name of the curator that you dealt with?

BLOCH

I could easily remember his name. I just forget it at the moment. I think he's still there. [Philip Troutman] But what you're seeing is a pattern of exhibitions working with the art gallery under the aegis of the Art Council. Because I felt that was important to us. But I must insist and underline the fact that they were cooperating with the art gallery—and I cooperated with them when the time was appropriate—but that they weren't necessarily supporting the Grunwald Foundation. You must remember that the term "foundation" was not a very happy one, because everyone insisted, even if you couldn't even prove it to them to their satisfaction, that "foundation" meant money. They were quite sure that Mr. Grunwald was supporting us rather generously. They had no notion that there was no money in that foundation; it was collection and material we were getting that way. So they tended to be wary of us and went on supporting the exhibitions and supporting the art gallery. The art gallery in time received some very generous gifts from the Art Council. Certainly the [Franklin D. Murphy] Sculpture Garden became very much part of their contribution to a collection. Mrs. [Frances Lasker] Brody, in particular, was most influential in helping develop that garden, which became Dr. Murphy's particular love and development, now named after him.

GALM

Do you know when you might have first worked with her on an exhibit? Whether it would have been before the Picasso show?

BLOCH

Oh, yes. She was very much a presence on the French show, as I remember, because she had her own ideas as to how the exhibition should be put up, which I didn't totally agree with. We still laugh about that today, because we had many— They weren't quarrels, they were differences of opinion. I had my own ideas about how, let's say, drawings and prints and paintings should be shown; she had her own idea. We were just chatting about that the other day, Jack [B.] Carter and I, because he was very much involved almost from the beginning of my tenure with the gallery. She wanted to show these materials together, and I said, oh, no, I wanted a special gallery with the drawings shown as they were shown in the eighteenth century, as much of what we were showing was eighteenth century. To make it effective, Jack Carter actually developed a kind of paneled room in the French style, and we borrowed furniture from the County Museum and costumes, in order to bring the design people into the picture. There are photographs of this still available. It was an extremely attractive show, although that wasn't what Mrs. Brody had in mind from the beginning, because she liked to be involved in all aspects of shows, down to the publications and the exhibitioning and so on. This became very much an Art Council practice, and for the many years that she was there, she was very much involved with that, with many other ladies of the Art Council. But in the end, I remember, when she came and saw the show—because she fortunately had to leave town, I think, about that time— that she blew kisses to me across the room. We speak about it today, because she's a dear friend, and certainly there hasn't been anybody with quite that kind of will to produce and to do something of quality. She had great taste and the energy to go with it and the desire to really put the Art Council on the map. Certainly it was thanks to her the Art Council gained the kind of reputation it had as an important support group for this institution or any institution.

GALM

I know she was an early member of the Art Council, but how did she emerge as such a strong force?

BLOCH

Well, I can't say how. She certainly was there. It was a presence. And the kind of energy she gave to it—

GALM

And her contacts.

BLOCH

Right. A woman with many ideas. I mean, it was through her that the Thieves Market was formed as a means of raising money. She was influential, she was a woman of taste, she was a well-known collector in the community. Anything she lent her hand to was bound to be successful. Because anyone who was associated with her had to put in the time and energy she did—she made the demonstration. I always said that no matter what— And there weren't conflicts of any great significance. As we have said many times when we meet, we were all working in the same direction; we were never working in conflict that way. We all wanted to do something important for the university. We might have differences of opinion, but that's the kind of thing you'll find in any organization. But any time we did have that kind of difference, I always said to myself, "But look what these people do!" It's not that I gave ground, but I had great respect for them and great love for them. It's a great affection that still continues with these people, even though many of them have now retired from action. Whenever we meet it's like a meeting of great old friends. We'll probably end up in the same home eventually. [laughter] But we do have great respect and affection for one another, much of it developed in those days, and we're talking about more than thirty years. So as I say, I participated in a number of the shows. There were some that created problems for me, specifically because of the fact that I always considered the Grunwald as an autonomous unit—it had to be. I think that perhaps Mr. Wight continued to think of himself as the director and hence would have something important to say in our operation. But that wasn't so. I mean, he realized soon that this was a ongoing affair and he, I think, realized the value of it and tried to be cooperative, but not to the point of, let's say, going out and helping me find money to support the building of collections. That remained again for me to take over. I think the very first time he discovered that I could no longer come to him to beg for that support, that I had Dr. Murphy, he was very surprised that that happened. Because he wasn't seeking that kind of support. He wasn't building a collection. But that I was able to reach Dr. Murphy and get his support I think was a great surprise. Eventually he applauded it, once he understood that what we were trying to do was exactly what Dr. Murphy wanted us to do.

GALM

Was he ever threatened by that do you feel?

BLOCH

It's hard to say. I think perhaps he may have felt threatened at the beginning. I think the idea of another professional person being on board may have seemed threatening. I don't know. I must say I've always been kind of innocent about this kind of thing. But it's conceivable, because I think he wanted to be able to select certain shows for his program. After all, our program was small-scale, but it was ambitious. Perhaps that was troublesome—I can't say for certain. We did work together on the first Tamarind [Lithography Workshop] show ["Lithographs from the Tamarind Workshop"]. It must have been around 1961. I'm not certain. I don't have the catalog in front of me. [1962-63] It was intended to be, according to June Wayne, a show for the Grunwald Foundation, but it ended up, on the catalog at least, as an art gallery show, much to my great surprise. Mr. Wight did all the writing for that show. I was invited to make the selection, and I thought that this was to be a show that we would be sponsoring—at least it would appear under our flag. June Wayne has long told me that she thought all along that it was intended to be a Grunwald Foundation show. But it turned out not to be. So I think he was probably anxious to have an overall program, and occasionally it just didn't work out that way. That caused a little bit of a problem for me.

GALM

Did you have to clear your exhibits at all with him, or did you just advise him of what you would be doing?

BLOCH

It was rather loosely structured. When I knew he was doing a particular show, then we tried to do a show that would play well within that. After all, remember we're talking about a very small area in the old [Art] Building. We're still talking about the old building, where we just had an alcove. I mean, we couldn't make any great splash. We didn't have access to other space; we were working within a small space. But the whole idea was not to have shows that would in any way conflict with the nature of the show that was developing in the gallery. As I said, when it came to the French show or the Spanish show of the Art Council, I joined hands with them to do a show that would reflect what they were doing. True, there was another motive. We were able to get some prints out of it for our collection.

GALM

So in the old building there was never any time in which you took over the entire gallery?

BLOCH

Never. Oh, no, never. No, we had our spot, and that's where we operated in. And after all, these early days it was mostly John Paul and myself, so it was a large effort for us to do this. But we wanted to do it. It was the way to keep Grunwald aboard. It was the way to make him happy and at the same time to help us begin to evolve a program. Those are the very earliest days. But when there was an Art Council show, I was certainly ready and available to lend a hand in doing my part if they wanted to include the graphics.

GALM

You had mentioned, in speaking of the Picasso show, that Grunwald made funds available.

BLOCH

No, he acquired Picasso prints specifically.

GALM

But he already had quite a sizable collection of Picasso?

BLOCH

He had a good collection of Picasso, yes. As always, it would be early, middle, late. He built in structure, which was ideal for our purpose and for certain demonstrations. You could see the evolution of an artist. But he told the Art Council that if they gave him a gallery—and it was one of the small galleries—for the Picasso prints, that he would fill the gallery from his own collection and would buy what was needed to augment that.

GALM

Was that also a collection that continued to be added to over the years, or was that more or less the bulk of the collection?

BLOCH

Well, by that time he had a sizable collection. He simply added more recent things. One was the Tauromaquia [La Tauromaquia, o Arte de Torear]. I remember he was buying that whole set, which is now at the Grunwald [Center for the Graphic Arts]. He went out and actually spent—in those days, if you spent $25,000 that was a lot of money— to fill out certain gaps. But he still didn't have [La] Minotauromaquia. He didn't have the major pieces. That was why at one point I wrote to Picasso himself to see whether he—because it was in his honor and he did the poster for the show—would approve of what we had selected to represent him in prints. I thought that was something I wanted to know. But he didn't understand. He thought that perhaps we wanted him to give us something.

GALM

Did Frank Perls ever deal in prints?

BLOCH

Oh, yes. As a matter of fact, Frank Perls worked very closely with the Art Council. He was a friend of Mrs. Brody, and he was the one who really persuaded, as far as I know, Picasso to be cooperative. He also was very close to the Matisse family (as a matter of fact, the grandson, Peter Matisse, was in his employ), and he would intercede with them to get support for the Art Council. Certainly the Matisse is the best example, the one that was actually the show that opened the new gallery ["Henri Matisse Retrospective Exhibition" (1966)]. What was shown had really not been shown before. They were right from the studio. Speaking of how we joined hands, the Matisse show was of course the ideal opportunity for me to get support for things we wanted to put in the show, because we were called on immediately to cooperate on the prints side. It was at that time that we started buying in the field of artists' books. That's another one of the patterns, but I will get back to all the patterns that evolved. But it was then that we bought Jazz. We began to buy the great books, and that formed the basis of the collection that is now a rather substantial collection. There was one book there that belonged to Peter Matisse, with a little presentation from his grandfather and that sort of thing. So we bought a number of the books. Murphy was particularly fascinated by Matisse—he owned a drawing himself. So he certainly was most helpful in making certain that we enlarged our collection. Grunwald himself had a fairly good collection of Matisse, but nothing like what eventually happened. What happened there was that I believe it was Mrs. Brody who found out that the Matisse family (she knew them also quite well, probably through Frank Perls) needed funds, at least one member of the family. What happened when Henri Matisse died was that he left each member of the family a group of prints. That was the legacy each one would get. He really didn't produce prints for the market per se. He may have sold off some, but he really retained a great many of the prints with the idea, as I understand it, of making that the legacy to each member of the family—children, grandchildren, and so on—and they then could use that for whatever they needed. At one point, one of the grandsons, I think, wanted to buy a house or something of the sort, and he wanted to dispose of some of the prints he had. Mrs. Brody heard about that, probably through Frank Perls, and I guess came to Murphy and hence to me. It was at that time that Murphy got Norton Simon interested in buying this collection, but I was asked to be the businessman of the transaction, not using Norton Simon's name. So for, as I remember, something like $30,000, we got seventy prints. The value of that today is difficult to [estimate], but they included some major, major things. That was the basis of the collection that was in the great Matisse show, and, combined with what we got from Grunwald, it created a master collection of Matisse at the Grunwald. That was one specific pattern of a single artist that we were able to evolve.

GALM

Now, is the implication there that if Norton Simon had been known as the purchaser that the price might have been higher?

BLOCH

Oh, that was always the problem, that they might have taken advantage.

GALM

Just like the [J. Paul] Getty Museum has now?

BLOCH

Oh, absolutely. Well, of course, the Getty finds it difficult. When they buy at auction, if the curator goes, everybody knows. It's difficult to hide that unless you have an agent working for you. In a sense I was acting as the agent for Norton Simon, working with Peter, who then went to his family. Of course once that deal was made, the family kept coming back again and again and would have liked to sell more and more of them. But that was a onetime affair. We never again had that kind of money available from any other source, although Norton Simon continued to make additions to that collection. They would call me from his office and say certain things were available, so we got a few major editions beyond the original seventy from that collection.

1.8. TAPE NUMBER: IV, SIDE TWO MARCH 27, 1987

GALM

Dr. Bloch, we've been talking about collecting for the Grunwald and some of the patterns that were being established in the area of collecting. Perhaps we can continue in discussing the collecting that you pursued.

BLOCH

Well, much of what I have to say was already said in a general way, and in some detail in some aspects of it, in the "Twenty Years of Acquisition: [The Grunwald Center for Graphic Arts]" show held at the [Frederick S.] Wight [Art] Gallery in the spring of 1974. That was intended to clarify how the foundation was formed and who were the people who were responsible, because there had been a certain amount of confusion as to how that all began. Since all those people were alive, it was possible to get at the truth of it and then to lay out how I proceeded to evolve the print collection and what the purpose was. I can only emphasize the fact that this wasn't just to create a collection. It was a collection that would be put to use. And since much of what we're talking about really began in the fall of 1957 or thereabouts— Meantime, we were, as I say, doing exhibitions. I've said here we did an "Exhibition of [Prints by] Jacques Villon" (1957), that that was the first show. You won't find a catalog, but that was taken completely from Fred Grunwald's collection. That was one of those typical shows that we did using Fred Grunwald's holdings, which were extensive. We're talking about some five thousand prints. It was possible to do many things, theme shows or individual artists, and so on. There was one show we did of Chagall ["Marc Chagall" (I960)] that I remember. There we borrowed not only from Fred Grunwald, but from a local collector, the Reverend [James L.] McLane, who was a friend of Chagall and had extensive holdings, including beautifully inscribed books, who was most generous to lend to that show. Chagall knew about it, and his friends who were in this community told him about it. That was the kind of thing we liked to do. It stimulated a lot of excitement in our midst. But remember that the whole idea of developing the collection was with a view to developing courses and to bring the students into the picture. It wasn't even so much the community, it was really an emphasis on an undergraduate program. It was something I always wanted to do, and I was given that privilege here. That was the reason why I was willing to be so much involved with the collection. In this catalog I do say it was offered for the first time in 1957, the course the History of Prints, followed by a graduate seminar called Studies in Prints, which occasionally culminated in special exhibitions in which students could join. But it wasn't only that, of course. Through my American courses—and it was for the American art that I was specifically brought here, that was my specialization— we had little exhibitions that weren't always held in the gallery. Remember, the small gallery, or the alcove, was taken up with material related specifically to the Grunwald Foundation and reflected that collection. If we did other exhibitions with students participating, they were frequently in the hall cases. We had a series of hall cases all the way down the long hall—which probably no longer exist that way—and there the students would be involved. It might be the illustrators of the American wars or something of the sort—it was history plus art. We would borrow from the Library of Congress and so on. Those were beautifully organized little shows. The history of those is rather interesting, because many of the students involved in those seminars, which were graduate seminars, eventually went into the museum field, and many of them credit their early experience to what they did in helping to put together a catalog, helping to hang the exhibition. I remember the sincerity in what went on when they had disagreements about the design and so on. The whole idea was to get them into the whole swing of the total responsibility for exhibition selection and so on.

GALM

Did the class itself have any say as to the theme of the show, or was that something that you set for the class?

BLOCH

No, I would suggest possibilities. After all, it had to be possibilities we could do, where we would be able to borrow. I was the only one who knew the possibilities of borrowing. I mean, if one said, "Let's do a Leonardo show," we knew we couldn't borrow the Last Supper. But students of course have great ambitions. So we would discuss it; it wasn't something I laid on. These were things they had to be interested in and stimulated by. The illustrators of the American wars ["The Special Artist of the American Wars" (1959)3 was a good example, because that enabled them—and they were a fairly large group of students—to deal with everything from the American Revolution on to World War II and Korea (that was the last war at that time). So the students that were interested in more historical periods could borrow prints of the American Revolution, War of 1812, etc. —on to World War I, World War II. They could become familiar with the history of the period as well as the illustrations. We would borrow from the New York print dealers. Those things were not available here. I was personally interested in all of this. I was always interested in the art of illustration. That was an easy way to go for them. It was the way I became enthusiastic about art and history, particularly American history. Then when you got to World War I, World War II, they actually could be in touch with the artists, who were still alive, particularly the World War II, and the kinds of letters that they got from the artists were documents unto themselves. There were even one or two local artist correspondents who assisted them and made material available to them. It was very exciting. In other words, they had direct contact. We would borrow from a variety of sources. I had a certain amount of material myself, and that always helped, because that was readily available and they could get a grip and a grasp of what they were dealing with.

GALM

During those early years, were you receiving other gifts? We've mentioned major gifts later, but say in those first pre-Murphy days.

BLOCH

Well, if we're speaking about the patterns—and forgive my using that term constantly—first of all, there was an overall pattern of the general history of prints. The only stipulation on my part was that no matter what we bought, it had to be of top quality. What I mean by that is that I wanted the students not to see poor impressions of prints. I wanted them to realize that this was an art unto itself that had intrinsic quality. We didn't buy in the popular areas. We left that to Grunwald. Because he was buying in an area that was very popular and where the impression wasn't always that important. They were sometimes uneven, but that was fine, that was the way they were produced. But when you're dealing with old masters, you're in a problem area, particularly Rembrandt or Dürer or what have you. This demanded a keen eye. I want students to reach this not by seeing poor things that are unimpressive but by seeing great artists at their best. If we were to buy a print, let's say by [Giovanni Battista] Tiepolo, we might have to feel we could only buy one, and that one better be a knockout so the students would really come to understand what this artist was about and what he was able to do. That is how we proceeded. There were many areas that were not popular at the time for collectors. This was before the great renaissance of collecting in all these areas when the prices went out of range. We could really do quite well. So we bought when material was available and when the funds were available. Now, we're talking specifically about university funding for the most part. We really weren't getting help from the collectors in the community, who had their own way of going and really weren't going to buy for us. There was the occasional gift or the occasional gift from the Art Council. Like the Andrea Mantegna when Fred died—that was a memorial gift. Or if Franklin Murphy said, "Well, this is Fred Grunwald's birthday. Let's buy a print in his honor." He knew exactly how to reach Mr. Grunwald's heart, and that was the way you did it. So we'd always find the occasion. The first clear-cut involvement of Dr. Murphy and myself in collecting came very soon after his arrival. He had met Fred Grunwald, and what Murphy liked to do was to become directly involved. We used to get catalogs from a gallery in New York, the [William H.] Schab Gallery. Dr. Murphy knew the Schabs [William H. and Frederick G.] from his Kansas days, as he knew Jake Zeitlin very well from those days, too, so the art of the book, particularly science, was something he worked out with Jake Zeitlin. I remember specifically when a catalog came my way and Murphy said, "I'm going to New York. What is it you want from this catalog?" You know, "Check off some things." And that was the first time we really worked on a kind of generous level. We may have been talking about $10,000 at most. I remember selecting a set of ornament prints by the Master of the Sforza [Book of] Hours. I mention this specifically because this was a set of prints I dearly wanted for Cooper Union. My love of ornament, the decorative arts in printmaking, came from my years at Cooper Union, which had one of the great collections of decorative arts in prints and drawings. But I couldn't get it from them. It was all of $2,000 (you'd have to add a couple of zeros today to buy that set). Lo and behold that same set was still available, or one like it, when Dr. Murphy and I were looking at this catalog. He said, I remember, "I don't know why you like it, but that's okay." So we got that masterpiece of the ornamental panels. But at the same time, Dr. Murphy selected a Martin Schongauer which appealed to him. So basically we were putting together things we liked. Until this day, I think that's the only Martin Schongauer we've got, and certainly the Sforza Hours is one of the great highlights of the collection. In those days Schab was a good gallery to go to, and they were friends. Ultimately they gave us some very important gifts. Jacopo de'Barabari's "Bird's-Eye View of [the City of] Venice," which is a great masterpiece, hangs in the print room to this very day. Other gifts came to us through that source, as well as a generous collection of ornament, which helped me formulate the basis of an ornament collection, with the idea that the design department would develop a history course. I eventually developed a course in the history of ornament [History of Style and Ornament] with the design people specifically in view. As it so happened, because of my growing program I only taught it once. It was a very demanding course, and as many art historians as designers were interested in that course. But that collection was meant to be the basis of that.

GALM

Did any one else take up that course?

BLOCH

Nobody. I think they tried to get someone to teach the course. My life became very complicated at that time with the series on drawings, the series on prints, the series on American [art, Art of the Americas]. I really couldn't embark on any large project. As I remember, I'd hoped that the design people would be a little more energetic in promoting that course or encourage me to do more or do something more on their own, but they just didn't, although they were interested. So what you will find to this day at the Grunwald is a good substantial basic collection in general ornament as well as specific areas relating to that. That is a small echo of what goes on at Cooper Union, and I know of no other place that has— I think the Getty now has formed some area in ornament prints. But many people are not to this day aware of what we have. Plus a costume collection— I don't mean actual costume, but designs for costume. That was when Mrs. [Alice E.] M'Closkey was teaching the course. Since she retired, the course has also been retired along with that. But all of that basis, that was a pattern, again relating to what was going on in the department. Apart from that, of course, there were the specialized collections. One idea Murphy echoed was to form a collection of individual artists, hopefully artists who were in the department. That has been very spotty in terms of the members of the department who were printmakers. Grunwald collected John Paul Jones, so we were pretty well represented by John Paul Jones. When Dorothy [W.] Brown died, she left all of her paintings and drawings and her personal collection, which wasn't her own stuff, but things that she had collected by women artists. She left all that to the university, but she was again a great friend and wanted that to happen. But in terms of what we actually went out to get, the Simon gift of Matisse, which was a major acquisition, was tied up to what was going on in the exhibition. That was the incentive to collecting, one way to go. Then the time came when a portion of Frank Lloyd Wright's collection of Japanese prints became available. Mrs. [Oligvanna] Wright—this was after Frank Wright had died—needed some funds to support the foundation in Arizona. So she released that collection, which was being sold through her representative in this community, and we had first choice. As I remember, we bought some six hundred prints. Murphy was very much involved with that. He was very enthusiastic about it, because we only had a very small collection of Japanese prints. Here was an opportunity to not only get a substantial collection, which included study materials showing them in different states and so on, but also the collection of a very distinguished collector and a famous man. So we went after that. I think that was a $50,000 gift. Murphy actually raised the funds through the university—that was not private, it was university support—and we both agonized over that. There's much more to that story. But that was a great acquisition.

GALM

From the idea that it might be questioned using university funds for it?

BLOCH

Well, there's always a question of nervousness. I think he went to the president of the university for part of the support, maybe $25,000, and he raised the other. There was a member of the faculty who considered himself an expert in the field and wanted to be involved, but he wasn't even on hand at the time. He would have been [involved], but he was in India. So when he came back, he was very disturbed that we were doing this without his consultation, and he made it quite clear to Dr. Murphy that he didn't think it was an important gift. He changed his mind afterward, of course, but at that time he was just, I think, personally annoyed that he wasn't being consulted. There are just so many people you can't consult. The man we were buying it from, the dealer, knew a great deal about the field, and we had implicit faith in his judgment. Decisions had to be made, and it was the one opportunity. Another group of the prints were purchased for the Pasadena [Art] Museum, the old Pasadena Museum, but that was a collection not as important as the collection we got. Ours was very comprehensive. So at one moment we were able to develop an important collection, which we could never do singly. What we were doing apart from that was, for the most part, buying piece by piece. That was my choice, to buy when material was available, scouring the market for those things we could afford which were of high quality. So there was a limitation to what we could do, but we were buying it, piece by piece. The chance to get a collection like that I could never have done. We then after that bought here and there a major piece, because what Frank Lloyd Wright collected was strictly Ukiyo-e school. The earlier things he was not interested in, so in order to build the history of Japanese prints we had to do it that way. So that was another thing. In terms of bequests, the only bequest I remember that had some real bearing on what we were doing was an accident. There was a man who was the comptroller at the Beverly Hills Country Club, whom nobody ever met. He simply lived very quietly there. He was a refugee named Walter Otto Schneider, and he collected old master prints that he could afford. And he collected recordings, albums, not in the modern concept of it, but in the concept of those days (we're talking about 1960s, and probably earlier). Once he'd filled his little room at the country club, he would then put them in Bekins [Moving and] Storage. I think Zeitlin was the only one who said he ever met the man. Nobody ever met him. He was a bachelor and he lived alone, and this was his place. He never played the recordings? he simply collected them. He was a friend of Frans Masereel, the German expressionist, so that, in a sense, was kind of interesting. But I don't think he thought of the Grunwald at all. When he died, he left in his will that everything would come to UCLA, so where it landed was over in the library. They, of course, thought of us and turned to me with the prints, so we got most of that material. They kept the Masereel books and that sort of thing, but we got the old master prints, which included some very fine things.

GALM

Do you know why he selected UCLA?

GALM

Nobody knows. I think really he didn't want to leave anything to his family, and after all, we were the closest neighbor he had. He probably was aware of the university and probably a man of some intellectual appreciation, at least, of what universities were about. But whether he knew anybody here— Nobody at the library knew about him at all. But everything went to them. I knew nothing about him until the thing was announced and we got the material. So there again we benefited greatly. I think on the cover of this catalog is reproduced one of the prints that we got from him. There were by chance some really very, very good things that filled out certain areas in our collection. There was very little chance of duplication when we were buying piece by piece. It was very rare that there would be a duplicate; we were really on fairly fertile ground. It's not like collections in the East that have great bases of material. We did get here and there small groups of material which we put into what we call "dead storage." Only in more recent times have we pulled some of that out because it begins to form some contact with other material in the collection.

GALM

What was the quality of the gifts that you got from Claude E. ["Mac"] Jones?

BLOCH

I should mention Claude Jones more than once. He was a very enthusiastic collector, but beyond that he was a splendid man, a great friend of the graphic arts, a great friend of the department. You will find his name turning up again and again as an active supporter in whatever we did. He was a teacher of English, a poet. His collecting interests were rather eclectic. He was interested in a whole variety of things, in books as well as in prints, not so much in drawings. Had a particular interest in English—Hogarth on to the early twentieth century. He bought in those areas because they were relatively easy to buy and inexpensive. I traveled with Claude and Mary Jones over the years. They were my closest and dearest friends. That had nothing to do with the graphic arts—we were just great friends. You once in a while find somebody like that, whom you immediately care about. That kind of friendship you only find but rarely. So just the fact that I was also involved in the graphic arts only made the friendship warmer and in greater depth. He resigned from the university to undertake a Fulbright program, and he traveled thereafter strictly on a Fulbright, to Israel, Romania, Turkey. Eventually he was even to be in Africa, but ended up in Paris, where Mary Jones died. Then he came back to America. But before he left and they sort of packed up their belongings, he decided that much of his collection should come to UCLA and to the Grunwald, and that's how there are large holdings there. Not all of it is out now, but they're gradually pulling the material out as is needed. It was a very large collection.

GALM

Would he buy these things on trips to England or was he buying them here?

BLOCH

He bought in a variety of ways. He bought on his travels, but most of the time he liked to buy from catalogs or write to favorite dealers and buy whenever they were available. The availability was based on what he could afford. It was, after all, a professor's salary.

1.9. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE ONE APRIL 3, 1987

GALM

Last time, in talking about various exhibits that the [Grunwald Graphic Arts] Foundation put on, one that you'd mentioned that you thought you were going to be doing but actually Fred [Frederick S.] Wight did was the Tamarind Lithography Workshop exhibition in 1962 ["Lithographs from the Tamarind Workshop" (1962-63)]. I thought today we might talk about June Wayne and about the establishment of the Tamarind Workshop and the part that you and perhaps the foundation played in that. Do you recall when you first may have met June Wayne? Was it prior to that time?

BLOCH

It was prior to that, oh, yes. I can't fix a date completely. I may have met her through Fred Grunwald. Fred Grunwald was one of the original subscribers to the Tamarind output, so he was in at the very beginning, which I would say was about 1960.

GALM

The summer of 1960 it was established.

BLOCH

Yes. I did not know June Wayne while she was working abroad or when she came to this country and all of the business that occasioned the beginning of the Tamarind Workshop. I only heard about this later from her, have heard it many times. Of course [I] knew W. McNeil Lowry, who supported her, and I've heard his story many times. The interesting part of that was that there was also a workshop in the East run by Tatyana Grosman, Universal Limited Art Editions [ULAE]. She was the director of the workshop par excellence at that time, producing really high quality materials in the East. Because the condition of lithography was the same wherever you went in this country. Artists who worked with lithography, let's say in the thirties, where you had a large amount of this happening, were doing it on a more or less commercial level; most people who did the printing were commercial people. There was once such a person here, whose name escapes me.

GALM

[Lynton] Kistler.

BLOCH

Kistler, whom I met later on. I didn't know him, but June Wayne had actually begun our first lithographs with him, because he ran a kind of practice workshop. He'd bring in [Eugene] Berman and Wayne and a whole lot of other people who worked with him and under him. There was no other place in Los Angeles, and Kistler takes great pride in having set this afoot. But it was on a commercial level, so that much of the lithography you see put out by even well-known artists in the thirties, the regionalist group and others, basically in quality were rather bland, not very strong, not certainly experimental, not innovative in any way. For any artist to do this, one had to go abroad to work in the French workshops, where wonderful things were happening and had been happening for almost a century. If you think about Daumier and all those people, the great renaissance in lithography has its basis in France, I would say, more than anywhere else abroad. So artists felt they had to go. June Wayne's notion was that it was about time that we did something here. I must say there were exceptions where certain artists, artists I knew in the East, would do the printing for other artists in the hope of getting something more. Because the stone is a very sensitive surface, and within the hands of a good master printer, amazing things can happen, particularly if he works in close collaboration with the artist. June knew this and other artists knew this well, but many just had no conception of what could happen. The stone is a wonderful medium, and it has tremendous flexibility beyond most others. Although I must say that in terms of printing, you have it in etching and other [mediums] where artists supervise the printing of their own works and the inking of the plate. All of that has a certain equality of meaning there. But June felt, and I agree with her, as many other artists and curators certainly do, that the collaboration is much clearer in lithography than in any other graphic medium. And she felt too that the collaborator, the master printer, should be recognized in his own right for what he does, should have his name on the plate. It happened in France, but it certainly wasn't happening in this country at all. He was the unknown quantity. That was part of what she had on her mind when she proposed that we establish a workshop in Los Angeles. Of course the eastern-based people just went out of their minds, because if there was to be any support for anything like that, it should happen with Tatyana Grosman or somewhere in the East. The West Coast? This is unthinkable. That was when the Ford Foundation was certainly active in subsidizing new ideas. When McNeil Lowry heard about her idea, he was captivated by it, particularly since June is a wonderful spokesman. She's one of the most literate people you will meet, who can put into words whatever she has to say and make it stick. Certainly that must have impressed Lowry, to the point that I remember him telling me that he wouldn't care if June Wayne was established in Istanbul—this is where the workshop would have taken place. He was completely dedicated, and is to this day. We heard him only a couple of years ago speaking about this. As you know, June's original grant was renewed, and she devoted many, many years to the creation of this workshop. There were at least ten years, I remember, when the big show was held in New York, but of course the whole thing has lingered longer because of controversy that evolved around a film that was being made [Four Stones for Kanemitsu] and that sort of thing. But June had already by that time—at that time she was doing films and so on—had already committed herself to quitting the workshop in Los Angeles and transferring it to the University of New Mexico, where Clinton Adams, who had been her original associate, was the dean. So it made sense for that to happen there, and they've continued that program there.

GALM

Yes, that went over in 1970.

BLOCH

Was it '70? Because 1970 was the year of the big exhibition ["Tamarind Homage to Lithography" (1969)] at the Museum of Modern Art [New York], and we were all there for that big occasion.

GALM

There was quite a controversy around that exhibit, in the catalog and so forth. Did you get involved?

BLOCH

I wasn't involved. I knew that there was trouble, if I can call it that. I think the curator, [William S.] Lieberman I believe it was, sort of took control of it and made the selection. I do not believe June had much of a say in it or in the installation, and she was very displeased with all of that. It also was a kind of grim period for the Museum of Modern Art. They were about to fire their director, and that banquet we went to was a very unhappy affair. At every table there was a discussion about the possibility that this man— He either was fired or about to be fired. The director and other people, the trustees and so on, were each speaking, and you could hear all this murmuring going on at the table. It was "a bad scene," as it were, and I could feel the discomfort. Of course, June wasn't happy either. But I think part of it could have been due to the problems that were going on around there. There wasn't any real control.

GALM

You were asked to serve on the board of the workshop. Who else do you recall that might have been?

BLOCH

Well, first of all let me tell you the circumstances. Fred Grunwald was one of the original subscribers, and he was a member of the board, of that original board. And I imagine, if I'm not mistaken, that already included Calvin [J.] Goodman and Allan [J.] Greenberg, a lawyer. Most of these people were associates.

GALM

There were professional people involved too. [Ebria] Feinblatt was—

BLOCH

Feinblatt, that's true. She was on at the beginning but left not long after I was there. There was some kind of a little problem had evolved. I'm trying now to think: Clinton Adams, of course.

GALM

John [D.] Entenza, I have listed.

BLOCH

Could have been. He wasn't there when I came aboard. It would be difficult for me to specifically say who was on the board because it changed. There was a time when William [J.] Brice was on it. I was on it fifteen years, so there were slight changes. Mrs. [Frances Lasker] Brody was on it at another point. That was the local board. There was also a national board for the Tamarind, which included [Alfred V.] Frankenstein and a number of other people who were not living in this community. This was the local board; it was never more than five or six people. There were two other women. One was the granddaughter of William Jennings Bryan—and her name escapes me at this moment [Rudd Brown]—who is still involved, a great friend of June's. And another lady, Elizabeth something [Elizabeth Hanson] from Pasadena. You didn't prepare me, so I couldn't dig these names out for you. But these are people who were close friends and supporters of June Wayne, and she really needed that kind of a professional plus. Fred Grunwald was on from the beginning, so this could have started even before I got on. It certainly started before I got on, maybe a year or two. Maybe Tamarind was in the works even before 1960.

GALM

No, the proposal was 1959 to the Ford Foundation, and then it began the summer of 1960.

BLOCH

Well, he may have been on, because he was a member of the board when I came to know June and we became friendly. He quit the board very suddenly. That was chiefly because Fred was a collector. He didn't like these meetings, and he was a little unhappy with the material he was getting as a subscriber. I mean, you get a certain batch of material, which would include some interesting things, but some other things that didn't interest him. He felt that he had no part in the selection, and this would always bother a collector like Fred Grunwald. At that time there wasn't the immediate thought about giving it to the university. He took it home with him; he gave some away. This June did not know about till some time later. There were Sam Francises that he gave to his family and to friends. We never had the complete set. I think to this day we don't. So the idea of the subscription for the foundation was not written into Mr. Grunwald's agreement, and that was part of the problem. I mean, if you were buying it for the foundation, that's a different thing, but, no, he took it home with him. And then he decided he wasn't really that happy, because there were not only prints by well-known artists who were invited to participate, but because of the experimental nature of the Tamarind, artists who were not necessarily well known for lithography were invited to come and the master printers made prints. There's a complete difference in quality when you get a master artist and a master printer. Printers can print, but they're almost never great artists. June wasn't doing what Tatyana Grosman did. Tatyana Grosman was after inviting and bringing in well-known artists and making them work in a graphic medium, not necessarily always lithography. I think that was the primary medium she was interested in, but they worked in other media as well, the artists who came in. There wasn't that kind of a specific restriction.

GALM

When June Wayne put Grunwald on the board, was it with the idea that—? Did the UCLA connection help at all or not? Or was it just as a print collector?

BLOCH

Well, she was looking for subscribers, but I think if June was to be asked, I think, no, she intended that these subscribed editions would go to a public institution. That was part of the whole structure of the Tamarind: it wasn't to be a private collector's little enterprise. You would have to see one of the contracts— those contracts did specify that the collections would go to a public institution. I'm quite sure that June felt that these were automatically being turned over to UCLA. But Fred Grunwald wasn't the kind of person who would follow such directions. It was his investment, see? So he felt he could give them away. These were done on special papers. There were other editions: there were editions that each artist got some to take home with him or he dispersed some, and the master printer got a copy. But all of these things had specific markings. So the subscribed editions were very clearly set aside with the idea that they'd be in a permanent collection. I think it was a long time before June finally realized—because I certainly didn't bruit it about—that we weren't getting it all. Fred gave up the subscription after a couple of years. It was after that that [Franklin D.] Murphy got the [UCLA] Art Council to participate and June found supporters to help us. So ultimately we did get everything. When those subscriptions were made with other people, we got the whole thing. But not with Fred. He would dole it out, you see. So there are spaces, there are gaps among some fairly important areas. Well, when he quit— And June was rather perturbed by that, because he made it quite clear that he was quitting because he didn't like all the material, he didn't have the choice and all of that. He was very quick to mark out if he didn't feel the quality was up to, quote, "his standards." Did I tell you the [Mario] Avati story or not?

GALM

Yes, yes, you did.

BLOCH

So you know that that's the way he operated. He loved to be in charge. There was something personal in the matter too, [although] not with June, whom he always called "a most remarkable woman." If I was ever the slightest bit critical over something that happened, he would say, "Just remember, she's remarkable." Well, it's true. Nobody could argue. She's a woman of great warmth, and certainly no one else could have done—could ever do—what she did. What she did was to raise the art of lithography to an art, a real art, in this country. Tatyana Grosman was doing her thing, but June Wayne selecting Los Angeles as her base really made great impact. And because she was so forceful in it, she did offend people. She was a very determined person to get this kind of thing on the road. She gave herself totally to it, to the point that her own work was neglected and I think has suffered ever since. Because it just went on and went on and went on: once she got on the bus she couldn't get off. It was very difficult. There was the first five years and then renewed another five years? that was it, the ten years. When I came aboard, I think my role was to be available for any kind of expertise that she might need. I always felt that I had a role. I would not have wanted to be a member of the board if I was just to sit in a chair and listen to the minutes being rolled off. I mean, I did have a role to play. She would call on me for those specific talents that she thought I had and could be used, and I gave of it with all my heart. That was true because I found it the most fascinating enterprise I was ever involved in. Not only that, I felt it was a privilege to be part of something like that emerging in our midst. I felt that history was being made, although in the East there was a lot of criticism. I was constantly laying that out to my fellow curators, who wondered about all this and who kind of steered clear of it. I said, "You will find in twenty-five years how important this workshop will loom in the history of lithography in the United States." And I think it's proved that.

GALM

As a member of the board, did you participate in any of the selection of the artists or the printers?

BLOCH

No. We were asked periodically, perhaps once a year at least, to send in a list of names of artists who we would like to see invited. That didn't mean they would get appointed. Ebria Feinblatt would do it, I would do it, and so on. That's part of the expertise we had. And I remember suggesting someone like Karl Schrag, whose work I knew in the East, and other names as well. Then we were given lists of artists whose names had come up and asked to check them off in some order of preference. So there was that? we did have that involvement. But we weren't invited to be present when the printing was done and the work was being done. That was all done with a kind of clocklike accuracy. I mean, there was really a labor-management system going on there. Everybody had to perform, and, in a sense, that is very difficult for artists, who wait for the inspiration. But you know, it wasn't done that way. The idea was time was of the essence and they were to get on with it. The master printers who were brought in—they were people that June had appointed—were not trainees. There were trainees, but master printers were brought in who knew the art of lithography, and those people were also given this kind of time schedule to work at. I knew of one man who was very disturbed by that and didn't like it at all. Many of them didn't like to be managed in any way, but it had to be done. It had to be done. You can't run a workshop casually. Mrs. Grosman, whose workshop I came to know sometime later when I did a show, operated quite differently. They called her "the Siberian lady" because she had been brought up in Siberia. Her father was an editor. She ran her workshop, I think, also with great accuracy and care, because time costs money. But she never tried to make the people who worked with her feel that time was important. She had a caterer to prepare lunches for them, and everybody ate together—visitors, well-known artists, the printers, everybody. And it would seem a kind of siesta; it's a very European kind of thing. Very casual, everybody was relaxing. But when they went back to work, they could work through the night if necessary. There was no stopping at five o'clock. If a job had to be done, it had to be done. But it gave the impression of a certain kind of casual atmosphere, which I think a great many artists liked. But that wouldn't be the American way.

GALM

I think she also perhaps allowed drinking on the job, too, didn't she?

BLOCH

Oh, yes. I'm sure there was lots of wine being spilled. I don't know about vodka. But I remember my first visit to that little workshop, which was in a farmhouse out at [West] Islip [New York]. They sent a limousine to pick me up at my hotel, all this with great flourish, [and drove] to this little farmhouse. Mrs. Grosman, who was a tiny little woman, very simple lady, would sometimes greet you, or you might be brought in by one of her assistants. There would be white linen spread out over the table in front of you as you walked in. They'd whip it away, and a thousand deviled eggs would look up at you. You had to sit down and have a refreshment—very carefully prepared. And that was part of it. I used to say, "Gee, what time is it?" But we went on and went on—there was no end. If I was there, it was still going strong. After it all, they had the limousine to take me back to New York. That was a big trip. She set out to introduce well-known artists to the art of lithography or whatever graphic means she had in mind. It might be the making of a book, for which she would bring together a poet and an artist and have them correspond with one another. She would select the two and have them work together. The books, which were the basis of the exhibition we did ["Words and Images: Universal Limited Art Editions" (1978)], proved that. People like [Robert] Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns and artists of that reputation were introduced really to the graphic arts chiefly through that workshop, and they adored working there. It was a completely different purpose here: the idea was to train master printers to revive the art of lithography. It was a major undertaking that June had brought herself. So it had to be managed in a different way completely. It wasn't the idea of creating, in every case, great works of art. There were great works that came out of it, because many very important artists were brought to it. And many were artists who really were not necessarily graphic artists to start with, so there was the similarity there. They would bring them in and invite them (and we recommended them, as I've already said), but the real heart of the program was in training printers, so that there would be in the long run an inheritance. They'd bring in a master printer who would train others, and many of those people indeed did go and open their own workshops and there has been a continuity.

GALM

I know that one of the other goals was to stimulate a new market for lithographs.

BLOCH

Yes, that was always part of it. There was a marketing program. Calvin Goodman took that on as something he wanted to do in particular. Sure, June investigated every area of possibility, and marketing and business was very much part of her thinking. There are many publications that deal with this. They actually did publications on every possible aspect of prints, the marketing of prints. Because there was no real market in this country. What would happen is you'd go into a gallery, and if there were prints, you had to ask for them, and they'd be in some back drawer. Now, when I was at Cooper [Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration (New York)], there was a Print Council of America, which is still in existence, that was sponsored by Lessing [J.] Rosenwald, one of the great collectors of old master prints. He encouraged an associate of his— Again, since I'm not prepared today, his name escapes me. They founded under the aegis of the Print Council of America—it was part of it—a print program where they commissioned prints. We called it IGAS. It was the International Graphic Arts Society, I think they called it. But there was a link with the Print Council. I'm not sure of how it all worked out, but certainly Lessing Rosenwald was behind both. This was to bring back into view the patronage of prints, the importance of prints. I remember Stanley Hayter was one of the first ones to contribute. Of course they couldn't pay them very much, but many artists were intrigued by the whole idea and joined it, because for something like anywhere from twelve dollars to twenty-five dollars you could own an original print. The whole market had so deteriorated that many people had no idea what an original print even meant. They were trying to define it, and the Print Council eventually set up standards, what an original print was. Especially when the more commercialized prints were being produced in France, that were sometimes signed by well-known artists who had more or less approved. These were done by print processes by the print publishers, but they were not original designs done on the stone by those artists. They were frequently after their designs—done by somebody else, but signed and approved by people like Braque and others. People were absolutely taken in by these things. This still continued into June Wayne's time. She knew all about it. But I remember the Print Council set up what they felt were standards. Dealers would get the certificate, and you went in there and it would say that anything you got was guaranteed. June, in documenting her prints, actually created whole documentations that you would get with a print, so you knew exactly when it was done, how it was done, what the edition was, what the medium was, and so on. It was even difficult to define the media because of the mixed media that were being experimented on very early in those years before I even came here. I knew a considerable amount about what was happening or not happening in the market of printmaking. This was necessarily part of June's thinking, to try to establish a market. It went in so many directions that maybe it stretched the point too far. What started out as a program of training finally went into the marketing, went into many, many areas that involved prints in any shape. There was even a course in marketing that Calvin Goodman ran, and I did the historical portion of that. That was sponsored by UCLA Extension, and that was kind of an offshoot of Tamarind.

GALM

You also participated in the award process for the Tamarind Prize that she established. Could you describe just what the prize was?

BLOCH

First, I will say this, that Ebria Feinblatt left the local board, just quietly removed herself. There was some kind of a disagreement, I think, that happened because of a lecture June Wayne gave to a group of collectors down at the [Los Angeles] County [Museum of Art], in which she told them what she thought. June was so concerned about this art that she had given her life to that she really could be very vocal in her criticism if people didn't understand what this was all about and were, in a sense, muddying up the area that she was so carefully trying to form. I think she had very little patience, and with good reason. Because you meet with an awful lot of ignorance, and she more or less told this group that that's what they were. Ebria, supporting her own people, naturally had to take a stand, and she just quietly removed herself from the scene. When it came to the idea of awarding a prize in lithography to a great artist, I was selected to do this, and the foundation was to be the recipient of whatever benefits came of this. It certainly was a great honor, not only for me, but for the university, to be selected to do this. Not that it was a huge prize, but the interesting part of it was [that] it wasn't just the artist, but it was the printer who was to be brought into it. When you're speaking about a great artist of lithography, you naturally first think about Picasso. Matisse was already dead, and none of these were given that way: it had to be a living artist. But of course the idea of giving a prize to Picasso just made all of us wince, because he needed a prize— [He would] find it difficult to accept. But of course there were other important artists, and it finally was [Jean] Dubuffet who was selected to receive the prize. Of course, he was a great entrepreneur. He wasn't just an artist. He was, I think, involved in grape manufacturing or something. He was an extremely wealthy man.

GALM

Certainly a wine maker.

BLOCH

That's right. I really didn't meet Dubuffet. We corresponded, and I announced that I was coming to Paris—I was there on other business—to present the award to him and to his printer, who was Serge Lozingot. Dubuffet did not welcome this prize to his master printer. Although they might have been recognized and everybody knew who was the master printer, he was still in the shadow of the master, almost his slave. Lozingot was an extraordinary craftsman. He certainly knew how to get the most from Dubuffet's work on stone; there's no question about it. And he [Dubuffet] felt that this might spoil him [Lozingot]. In fact, it was made quite clear to me that they weren't going to really help me find Lozingot to give him the prize. If I remember correctly, our early correspondence addressed to Lozingot, care of Dubuffet, was very carefully misplaced and he never got it. But I, being as persistent as June, was determined that we were going to get that. Working with another artist who was then in Paris, Misch Kohn, we finally squeezed the information out of Dubuffet's curator, who said finally, "Don't ever let him know that you have been told where you can find Lozingot." [Lozingot] was operating out of one of the workshops at that time; it was the summertime. So we found Serge and told him that he was to receive this $500 prize, as I remember. I recall him saying, "Ah, c'est une grande vacance!" He had never received a prize, and for him this was an extraordinary happening. Whether I put it in writing or not I don't recall now, but there was at least an unwritten guarantee that we wouldn't try to encourage Lozingot to leave France. He [Dubuffet] felt receiving the money would only make him [Lozingot] feel there was more at hand. But of course what really happened was exactly that. It had nothing to do with me. I was barely back in this country when Lozingot contacted June Wayne, I guess thanking her, but also saying he would like to come to this country and would like to work at Tamarind. First thing you know, I was being asked to write a letter which would help him to migrate to this country with his family, which is precisely what he did. As you know he's lived happily ever after. He's now an extremely successful master printer, no longer with Tamarind, but working here. And has more than one vacance. He's into ski resorts and everything else; he's really lived it up. He's had the good life. But it was only an indication of the fact that even in Paris, in the great centers in Europe, these artist were recognized but they weren't really credited in the way that June expected that they should be.

GALM

In her oral history, she mentions that you may have had an international committee to aid in the selection.

BLOCH

That's right.

GALM

Do you remember some of the members?

BLOCH

We selected a committee. There was a curator from the Swedish museum who was a friend of mine. I remember recommending him. I was asked to recommend and to recruit people abroad who would play a hand in this committee. There were at least two people from abroad. I can probably rediscover this in my files, but the fellow, I think, from Sweden was one of them, and there may have been one fellow from Germany—I think so—who was also a friend.

GALM

The point that she makes about the selection was that Dubuffet actually wanted to reject the prize, because he saw himself, in a sense, as a working member of the working class, and that it was in a sense an elitist prize.

BLOCH

Well, probably so. Although you didn't use that term in those days. But I don't remember. I think he was a little reluctant—he didn't feel he needed it, first of all. I always had the feeling that he was a little bit nervous about the whole business because of the prize to be given to the printer. I always felt that he had second thoughts, and perhaps third thoughts too, as to whether indeed this would be something to get involved in. You never know what those Americans are up to, you see.

GALM

But she states that he would not accept the thousand dollars, but that he would sell you a thousand dollars' worth of his prints.

BLOCH

That's right. No, he did not want the money. He didn't need it. He said that instead, whether it was specifically that he would sell or whether I would get prints by him from another source, that we could select those prints and they would go to the Grunwald Center [for the Graphic Arts]. And that's precisely what happened. But as I recall, we didn't buy them directly from him. We did that through Frank Perls, who had a direct connection with Dubuffet, who was in a sense his representative. We bought a suite, prints in the different states, which I wanted as a demonstration piece. An extremely handsome and very valuable series. If it was a thousand dollars, it was a great buy.

GALM

Then we had mentioned that 1962 show. Did you actually curate that show, then, the Tamarind show that appeared in the gallery? Or did she [June Wayne] make the selection?

BLOCH

You mean that first show, which I referred to I think once before?

GALM

Yes.

BLOCH

That show, as June later on told me, was intended for the Grunwald Foundation. She found the money through the Ford Foundation money she had available to support the catalog and the costs of the show. Now, you realize that of course we didn't have the space at that time in the old gallery. To do such a show, we had to move into space occupied by the art gallery. We still had just that little entry, the so-called student lounge to use, and that wasn't suitable. June was very much involved in making certain that this was a proper installation. There were special frames ordered for it, and so on. And she was with it, supervising the installation with Jack [B.] Carter. That show was also intended to travel, and she more or less followed it from place to place. It was a very important occasion for the Tamarind, the first real display of what they had been doing within those two years. What happened was that Fred Wight invited me to go down to Tamarind with him to make the initial selection, which we did one evening, as I remember. There was no commitment to me personally to act as curator. I simply assumed that because it was a graphic show that I would be somehow involved, that if I was involved in the selection, I would also be involved in writing an essay or participating, and that since prints weren't part of the gallery's program—that this would be sponsored by the Grunwald Center—that their name would appear in the catalog. But I wasn't brought into that picture. Once I'd made the selection, that was the end of it. Until suddenly I realized that the show was going up and that the catalog was either out or about to come out and that I had had nothing to do with it. I was not invited to participate at all. Fred did it all, and, as a matter of fact, took the exhibition for the gallery. But June claimed years later that she had never realized that. It did cause a little problem for me. I felt that I had been slighted and that, not just me, that the center, the foundation in those days, was not really being given a fair shake. Because we were also a fledgling little organization. Fred Grunwald withdrew from the whole picture. I think I complained to him about it. I didn't know June that well enough to confront her with the whole thing, and I didn't want to cause any trouble, so I just simply licked my wounds and went away. But I went far enough away so that I did not participate in the actual installation, and I did not show up at the opening. I made it quite clear that I felt that something wasn't right. There is an epilogue to that, but I don't know whether that's important to speak about.

GALM

Oh, why don't you give the epilogue? Epilogues can be entertaining.

BLOCH

Well, a day or two after the opening, I had a call from Fred Wight, who, after all, was a full professor at the university, and I was just assistant professor, no tenure. I could always tell when Fred was in a serious mood. He could be very amusing and very charming, but he wasn't being charming this day. He got on and he said "Sir," and I knew something was up. But I wasn't working under him at all, and he knew that. We did have our interrelationships, budgets and whatnot. The exhibition budget was, after all, all in one place. He said, "Had you thought about moving on from where you are? Had you thought about another position?" He was, in other words, inviting me to leave the university. He said, "I happen to know that there is an opening for a director at the J. B. Speed [Art] Museum in Louisville, Kentucky." You see, he wanted to make sure I was far enough away. I said, "Well, no thank you, Fred." I said, "I'm quite happy where I am." I said, "But I have an idea for you. I've just heard of an opening in Detroit." [laughter] That, I might add, was the very last time he ever started that thing. But I could tell that he wanted me to know that he was aware of the fact that I had not shown up. That wasn't written into my agreement that I had to show up at every opening, but I did make it quite clear by my actions that I was distressed. June seemed not to notice it at all.

1.10. TAPE NUMBER: V, SIDE TWO APRIL 3, 1987

GALM

Professor Bloch, you were talking about the epilogue to the 1962 UCLA exhibit of Tamarind prints. Maybe you'd like to conclude.

BLOCH

All I want to say is that I think Fred and I kind of squared away on that occasion. He knew that I had noticed, and I rather fancy that he was a little nervous that perhaps I would make it known and issue a complaint. I had no intention of doing that. Certainly Dr. Murphy would have been very unhappy if he had known about it, and certainly particularly unhappy if he had thought that Fred was trying to offer me a job, which he had no business doing in the first place. He wasn't chairman, and he wasn't anything of the sort. I mean, he was just issuing a little warning, and I sort of flipped it over and turned it back. But that, I might add, had nothing to do with my regard for Fred and our ability to do things together. It was always a problem, always. I can't say he felt necessarily threatened, because I certainly wasn't after that job, but the fact that I had made brownie points with Dr. Murphy I'm sure didn't go unnoticed. Because certainly by that time, Murphy and I had come to know one another and to exchange notes on what we would do in developing the collection. And that was very important: that was the heart of Murphy's interest in building that collection. He was always a builder of collections, and we were very closely related in that. He [Wight] may have felt that I would have issued a complaint, but I had no intention. The gallery thing was something else. I had agreed to do a certain number of exhibitions a year I think, even by that time. I don't think Murphy wasted much time in getting that across. And it was my job then to work with Fred in setting up programs that would complement one another. The difficulty was in getting Fred to sit down with me and work these things out. There were never meetings to discuss this. I was always sending out a kind of network of spies to find out what was going on. I shouldn't say "spies," particularly, but we always had to be alert to the fact of what was going on and keep track of schedules and that sort of thing and try to put together a program that looked like we were working very, very closely together. It just wasn't always working out that way, and certainly the budget being in his hands made our ability to do a first-rate show extremely difficult, because we'd often be told we had no budget on July 2 when July 1 we were supposed to have a budget. He was in control of the budget—which wasn't very large, so he had to do his own program. I realize that. But he was supposed to share it with us and give us a chance to do something attractive and important, and he certainly wasn't going out of his way to do that. I really don't believe he was excited about the foundation because of his not very happy relationship with Fred Grunwald. I think that continued to be a sore spot with him.

GALM

I know that you had mentioned in an earlier tape that he sort of protected the title of director for himself, but I noted in one of the catalogs, the memorial exhibit for Grunwald in 1966 ["The Fred Grunwald Collection: A Memorial Exhibition"], that you are listed as director of the Grunwald. Was that the first use—?

BLOCH

If that says that, that wasn't correct. Something must have gone wrong. Because the title of director didn't come to me—I have all of that—until the seventies, until Fred retired. So I don't know, I'd have to look into that. That could have been a misprint. [leafs through papers] Yes, that's a mistake, that's a mistake. That early I wasn't the director, so I don't know how that got in there. If Fred saw that, he would have been up in arms. I probably will do this another time. Let this be a preliminary discussion of it, because I have the whole chronology of this thing very clearly stated. You must realize the ethnic laboratories [UCLA Museum and Laboratories of Ethnic Arts and Technology, now the Museum of Cultural History] was also formed.

GALM

You had mentioned Altman as—

BLOCH

Ralph [C.] Altman was really recruited to do this. He was a lecturer in the department, but he didn't have any real status as a faculty member, and that bothered him. He didn't have the academic clout that was needed, the background for this. As a refugee who, I think, started out in the medical profession or training, or whatever, he just wavered around and then finally never completed anything. But he had a wonderful eye, and he ran a business on La Cienega. It was from that that Murphy came to know him, and finally when the chance to develop these laboratories with the [Henry] Wellcome collection as its base— (Although this may have even begun slightly earlier; I think they did buy a collection. ) Ralph Altman was in this from the beginning, and he certainly wanted recognition. (That wasn't at all connected with the art gallery. That was a separate entity. ) He felt he should be called director. Plus the faculty kind of thing. I knew this was going to be a very sticky thing. No, Fred made it quite clear that he was the only director, no matter what was going to happen anywhere. Although there were various attempts—and I can show you the mock-ups showing the breakdown of the various departments—that the university struggled long and hard to do, and still avoid this issue— It never really happened. They'd wait till Fred might be away one day, and then they'd have a meeting. Fred would somehow get wind of it and come back, and that would be the end of it. It was very mystifying to me, because I had various titles.

GALM

For instance?

BLOCH

All right, I have to go back to this. At one time I was sort of "assistant director" or something of the sort, and I said, "Assistant to whom?" They threw around the curatorship, and they threw around this— I remember one vice-chancellor saying, "We don't care what you call yourself, as long as it doesn't cost anything." They really didn't know how to deal with this problem, which was a problem simply because it was a question of identity. It had nothing to do with money, absolutely nothing, because it was always called a service. After a while, that began to bother me too. Because I regarded a service as the sort of thing you did on committees on campus—that was university service. But to call this thing a service, which was beginning to occupy so much of my time and energy, seemed to be kind of foolish. People were beginning to talk about the salaries I was getting, and I wasn't getting anything. I felt that at least there should be some identity for all of us in terms of title, and I saw no reason why "director" wouldn't have been the usual and the best way out of it. But Fred made that quite clear, and the university simply could not get out of it, for one reason or another. The mystery of that still can only be estimated and guessed at, but I'm not going to go into that. It's just that it wasn't until he retired that everybody heaved a sigh of relief and the directors came into being. But Ralph Altman was already dead. It remained for Chris [Christopher B.] Donnan to benefit by that. I think even Ralph Altman's successor [Jay D. Frierman] didn't benefit by that. It was only when the Museum of Cultural History was formed that they began to set up the solid structure.

GALM

Did that then mean a substantial increase in salary for people?

BLOCH

No. It really meant that they arranged their time, so much teaching time, so much—

GALM

So much administration.

BLOCH

Right. It wasn't possible for me, because what I had been trying to do was to develop a collection, an exhibition program, that would involve students, and there were courses tied to that. So that I couldn't even take a sabbatical. That was the difficulty I found myself in. And I could not teach half-time and run the foundation. In other words, the teaching program related to the center would suffer. So I was doing both, rushing from one place to the other. They gave me more staff. It was usually a half a person here and then a full job and then another half, and so on. But we gradually had something like two and a half people. Whatever it was, at least I had some help. But they were always, I might add, student help. I insisted that these were young people who would be in training under my direction, that it was a professional experience, but that whatever the job was, it was not a permanent job. They had to realize they could be there during the time they finished a degree or for whatever time was needed to get them what I felt was the kind of training they would need if they wanted to go in the museum world, although it wasn't a dictum that they had to go in the museum world. I wanted them to have that experience if they wanted it. There were always people who wanted to be involved, and that particular scheme of things maintained itself throughout the time I was there. That has now changed completely. They may have a student come in to do a little something or other, but the main positions there are not done by students anymore. I think that's a loss. It was very important. The students became extraordinary professionals.

GALM

We'll talk about that maybe at a later time, with names and so forth.

BLOCH

That's right. So where were we?

GALM

Well, I think we sort of finished that. Why don't we go back and finish, perhaps, June Wayne's connections to UCLA. In 1971 you did have a June Wayne show ["June Wayne: ] Exhibition of Multicolor Lithographs Realizing the Genetic Code."

BLOCH

That's right. There was a very special little catalog. It was printed by—what was the name?—Saul Marks. It's a very rare item; it wasn't something that was just given away. June Wayne paid for that, and that was her little exhibition in which I wrote the introduction. That was something we did in the upstairs gallery. That was a special tribute to June. But that wasn't a total Tamarind show. It was strictly a June Wayne show. Later on I did a show that was circulated by the Smithsonian [Institution] or— No, it wasn't. It may have been the International Exhibitions Foundation. I think it was one of Mrs. [Annemarie H.] Pope's shows. It was the renaissance of lithography ["Tamarind: A Renaissance of Lithography"], and it was a special show. Now, if you haven't seen that catalog, I can bring that along next time. But that was my big contribution later on.

GALM

What is the June Wayne connection there?

BLOCH

Well, it was a Tamarind show. It was a history of the Tamarind, and of course I was associated with it for so many years. We drew up a chronology, and we listed the— As a matter of fact, it was at that time that June Wayne, in listing the exhibitions, listed that first exhibition as being a Grunwald show. That was the first time she realized that it actually had not been.

GALM

But then you didn't have anything to do with the 1984 Tamarind: From Los Angeles to Albuquerque that was put out as a volume, part of the [Grunwald] Center Studies group?

BLOCH

I don't believe I've even seen it. The Center Studies was inaugurated by me, but by that time— I think I saw it through at least three editions before I retired. Such is life, you know. Once you're out, you're dead.

GALM

In 1971 there was a show, "Made in California," that dealt with Tamarind, but also with four other workshops.

BLOCH

Tamarind was only—

GALM

Part of it.

BLOCH

It was part of it. That was a student seminar [Studies in Prints] in which the students were involved with not just dealing with the various workshops and interviewing the heads of the workshops. It was a unique moment, because many of these workshops were spin-offs of Tamarind, certainly had close relationships and wouldn't have come into being had Tamarind not started the whole ball rolling. So that show was very significant. On top of it all, that was the beginning of the Friends [of the Graphic Arts at UCLA]. We already had some discussion about the Friends, because I remember that Harold [P.] Ullman— We called them "two members of the advisory board," so I will backtrack on that. Ullman was ultimately a prime mover in the formation of the Friends. This is 1971. We always had an advisory board made up of faculty and of outside people. This board included Saidee [Herz] Grunwald and Harold Ullman, who joined with two members of the seminar—Tom [Thomas W.] Travis, who was also an assistant of mine, and Francis [J.] Martin, Frank Martin—to work together to get a special print made, which was on the cover of that catalog. It was Ed [Edward] Ruscha; it was important to recruit an artist of this kind. I was simply directing the seminar and this whole production from the sidelines. It involved the staff, it involved the advisory council, and [it involved] working with these young people, because it was, again, a professional enterprise. How do you work with a great artist in getting him to produce a print, and what is the commercial responsibility? The whole affair was put into their hands. I had them working with Jack Carter and his staff in the exhibition arrangement, and I worked with them in the interviewing of members of these workshops. They went to the workshops. It was a very fascinating experience. It was one of the few times we were able to do something on a completely contemporary level. It was very exciting, and the students themselves felt that they got a great deal out of it. Nothing like this was done in the gallery until sometime later. I think as a result of this and the success of this, there was a show in the gallery that Fred organized with the help of the Art Council. I remember I never got the Art Council benefit on levels of that sort. We simply had to do it ourselves, usually sponsored by the dean or some other way. But Fred was able to take a number of students east to work with artists in their studios, and that was a very handsome show done with students. My feeling always about that was that they could have done a similar kind of project in the gallery more often.

GALM

Do you recall what the name of that show was or who was—?

BLOCH

I don't at this point. It was a painting show.

GALM

Was that called "Color"?

BLOCH

It may have been. I think it was. That's it, that's the one. Selected by graduate students, yes. But that's 1970, so it's within the same period that we were doing "California." I wasn't aware that it took place in 1970, but I think our show was probably in formation at that time.

GALM

Maybe just for the record you might tell what were the printmaking workshops that were part of that "Made in California" show, and perhaps anything that you might remember about them.

BLOCH

Well, I would have to check back. June Wayne, of course, Tamarind Lithography; Kenneth Tyler for Gemini G. E. L. [Graphic Editions Limited] (and Kenneth Tyler, as you know, had originally been with Tamarind); Ernest de Soto, Collector's Press; Jean Milant, Cirrus Editions; Alice Woodrow, Tamstone Group. Several of these workshops were short-lived. It was sort of a moment in history when the Tamarind influence was taking shape, with some major workshops like Cirrus and Gemini, which are still going strong, although Ken Tyler has left. Smaller workshops no longer really exist anymore; there were others that took their place. But it was an exciting moment, and here the students are listed who worked on them. Some kept on in the museum field, and others went on to be Ph.D.'s in other fields of art history.

GALM

Did you have continuing contact with these workshops?

BLOCH

In what sense?

GALM

Through the foundation, were you purchasing things from them?

BLOCH

It was unfortunate that we didn't have the kind of support I would have liked to see, so that we would have had all of the Cirrus Editions—and Gemini, particularly. We didn't have space for many of the things that Gemini was going into, and we would have had to build a whole new area, but that would have been the moment for us to be involved with all of that. But the only area we could really guarantee was Tamarind. That had been begun in Grunwald's time, and we continued to energetically get support, because, after all, we were working closely with June—she was a personal friend. There were all sorts of discussions about what we might do, but there wasn't that kind of support in the community.

GALM

In 1974, that twenty years of collecting ["Twenty Years of Acquisitions: The Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts"], you refer to the fact that [Lawrence E.] Deutsch and [Lloyd E.] Rigler had promised the Tamarind Institute production.

BLOCH

June Wayne arranged that.

GALM

And did that come about?

BLOCH

Yes. That still continues, as far as I know. Larry Deutsch has since died, but Rigler has continued to do this.

GALM

You stated in there that the center has perhaps the greatest collection of June Wayne prints of any place in the country.

BLOCH

Yes. A part of the program was of course to have a few artists, major artists, whose works would be represented at the center and perhaps nowhere else. That probably began, in a sense, with June Wayne, although one of the projects we had in mind was to collect the works of our former faculty. Murphy liked that idea, but that really didn't get on the road very easily. We do have certain representations in some depth, but not all faculty went along with the idea, and not all were graphic artists. We have Jan Stussy, I know. John Paul Jones, that goes back much earlier. He was already gone from the faculty at that point. But Fred Grunwald had sponsored John Paul, and so we had a fairly good representation. But we had nothing like the comprehensiveness that we were able to get for June Wayne. Her present husband [Arthur Henry Plone] was influential in giving us the nucleus of some of the rare material from her early career, and she certainly made it possible for us to get gifts through friends and so on. She couldn't easily donate herself, but other people added to that. So I would say we have a major representation of June Wayne. We also have [a major representation] of Joyce Treiman. We have all of the plates that she produced, and it's a rather substantial archive.

GALM

Corita Kent was also mentioned.

BLOCH

Yes. Since she has died in fairly recent times, and I've not been informed of what happened. But I sought out Corita Kent and persuaded her to think of UCLA as the ultimate repository of her work, and she said she liked the idea very much and would do this. She kept corresponding with me after she went east, so I always assumed that this would happen. I've heard nothing about it since she died.

GALM

Can you assess her role in the art of printmaking?

BLOCH

It isn't the same role as some of the people we're talking about. She was a unique personality, and I think her work had a certain unique quality all its own. It was rich and joyous and had an important message to say. I felt that she, at a certain period, was an important member of this community and that even though she had moved that she should be represented here, rather than some strange place that wasn't familiar with that part of her career. As I say, I have no idea whether we were included in the will, if there was a will, and that that material was offered.

GALM

Okay. I think that sort of winds up Tamarind and June Wayne. Unless there's anything—?

BLOCH

Oh, I may have something to add, because I really didn't come prepared today on the basis of all of that. There's a great deal more.

GALM

Okay. We can always add a postscript. Another thing that we might talk about today is that plans must have been already under way in the early sixties for the new building, the Dickson Art Center as it now stands. Included in that, of course, was a print room. Was there a building committee within the art department? Were you a member of that building committee?

BLOCH

There was a building committee. Archine [V.] Fetty was much more the leader of all of that. She was involved in interior, then environmental, design—or whatever they were calling that area at the time. She was a very knowledgeable and very agile person who was responsible for a great deal of the designing that went on campus, various places like the Faculty Center and so on. I guess that was slightly later. When the idea came to move to the north campus, away from our old building, which was inadequate for our needs in all directions, there was a discussion as to what kind of a building we would have. Would it go up or would it spread out? If it had spread out, it would have included the area occupied by the chancellor's house. But at that time the chancellor was adamant about keeping the house on campus, and so the ultimate resolution was that we would have to go up. I've always felt that the old building, even though it was becoming tight for all of us, allowed us a kind of communication. There were only two floors and a basement. It allowed us the kind of communication within the areas that was an indispensable part of our operation. Once we started going up, it became a Tower of Babel, and people really were not communicating. The painters would have one floor and then there would be another floor for the designers and the art historians. And we never really met, except maybe in the elevators. So the old kind of communication was lost in the process. That was certainly true. But nobody thought that would happen. I don't know whether it was even discussed as part of the building philosophy at that time. Certain things had to be built in, if we think about the gallery, as part of the Dickson Center thing. The building I'm talking about is the one occupied by the faculty, but part of the plan was a gallery, which was to be separate but within communicating— There would be the library and then there would be the part of the whole Dickson Center complex, and we certainly needed double the space that we had in the old building. Certainly Fred Grunwald had been guaranteed in the original plan that there would be a print room, not the kind of thing we had, but something more appropriate to the size of the collection he had promised to the university. These discussions were taking place for several years. He was still alive when this was being discussed, so he knew about the plans for the new gallery, that part of it. But he died before those plans were put into action, and I can remember then it was up to me to battle for the little things that I wanted. You were on a committee and you weren't on a committee: you were there if you were summoned. You had to really fight for your own thing. The problem that I faced was that I was really a member of the faculty and concerned about that situation, as well as making certain that the Grunwald Foundation at that time got its proper planning. Of course we had a much larger concept in view, giving a sense of future direction and expansion, but it gradually got tighter, and we were told we'd be lucky if we got what we got. It became very dictatorial in that sense: take it or leave it. And sometimes decisions had to be made in ten minutes, that sort of thing. Incredible. In the meantime, the art historians and the painters and so on, while they desperately wanted the space for themselves in their building, were not being very constructive or very helpful. I think what they did was sort of delegate one member to serve on a committee who would represent them. Usually it was somebody who thought he knew something about architecture, but knew nothing about communication and all of these problems, or even air. So what happened to art history is quite in evidence. They never had proper space. They never had a proper use of the space so that everybody had an equal share of light. The lesser members of the faculty were put in the dark, and the others had window offices. It was a strange thing. It's never been very accurate or very well planned. But they showed disinterest, and that was the problem. I fought for every inch of space that we got for the Grunwald, and all of the installation was something I investigated and fought hard for. We fought down to the very locks on the doors, to the carpeting on the floor. We certainly didn't get everything we wanted, but we were lucky to get what we had, and I will say it lasted for a great many years as adequate space. It's not adequate now. But we had our little gallery and we had the print room, and then we had a conservation space, a preparatoral arrangement. No real setup for offices, because I didn't feel that that was absolutely necessary.

GALM

Did you have an office in the new building to begin with? Or did you retain your office?

BLOCH

I had my office in the old building, and I had no office set up for myself at the Grunwald. My assistants wanted at least desk space. At the beginning they were more or less outside in the hall. Yes, I think they were sort of outside in an area that was where storage was held. I remember that. So it wasn't adequate, but it was the best we could get at the time. Because I didn't want to take up space in the print room proper. They had to go in and out and supervise the students, and I thought they were better off on their feet than sitting behind a desk. Desks have a very strange impact on young people. They tend to make them feel fairly important, you see. I was determined that when they were in the print room, they were to be on their feet and being active, and that was it. If they needed to rest and sit at their desk, that should be somewhere where they were out of sight and they could communicate and have their coffee or whatever was needed. So that was contained in not terribly good space, but that was the best space we could gather at the time. Later on we had to change that space around, and I finally agreed to put the desks in the print room proper because we needed supervision in there. We needed somebody always on hand while people were busy looking at prints. We had to remove that area that they originally had, because we set up a corridor that led down to the street. We were having problems with students trying to get to the print room through the main entrance to the gallery. The gallery people didn't like that at all. They more or less were unhappy about seminar students finding their way through the gallery upstairs to the print room. So we had to set up a more direct approach which would not interfere with the gallery. That was an afterthought, that outside staircase that leads upstairs was an afterthought. That was put in simply to provide less conflict. It was another point.

GALM

Now, I'm not totally clear. What came with the original 1966 building, and was anything then changed when the gallery was enlarged?

BLOCH

Part of the enlargement was what I told you. The gallery itself enlarged; we weren't given any more space than we had. I think what we were told we would have would be the privilege of occasionally spreading out beyond the small print gallery. See, the idea of the print gallery was to make certain that we always could put on an exhibition, because there was never a guarantee that this could happen. And there were times when that gallery was even blocked off to do certain shows, which caused conflict. That was under Wight, under [Gerald J.] Nordland, and so on. There were always these problems in making certain that the Grunwald's exhibition program could maintain itself. But with the expansion of the gallery, we were told that, yes, there were times when we could show in the gallery space itself and spread out, which we occasionally did for "The American Personality: [The Artist-Illustrator of Life in the United States, 1860-1930" (1976)] and the big ["Prints: The] Image and the Means" show [1964], and so on. These went into the gallery, and then the little gallery became simply part of that total plan. We were allowed our space on the second floor; we were never invited down to the first floor. When the Museum of Cultural History established its exhibition program, they were told that they'd have one exhibition a year in the galleries, because they didn't have galleries of their own. That too became a conflict. Because they were frequently told they could only be upstairs, and Chris Donnan regarded that as— You know, upstairs-downstairs, and second-class citizens upstairs. I remembered telling him, "Don't look at it that way," because I knew it was causing a great deal of problems. He wanted it always on the first floor, and I understood why: he was trying to create attention. But there was some antagonism to the Museum of Cultural History as a separate entity. While Fred Wight's gallery, which wasn't called [that] in his life— Well, it was in his lifetime. After he retired it became the Frederick S. Wight [Art Gallery]. I think that was a result of the expansion, as a matter of fact. That was part of the agreement. When the Art Council paid over $500,000, one of the stipulations was that the new gallery be named the Frederick Wight Gallery. No, he was still in charge at that time. That was a gesture made by the Art Council in his honor, and appropriately enough. But the idea that we'd have a separate museum for cultural history was not looked upon happily by the gallery as such, simply because it was not in their control, and still isn't, as you know. I always remember my speaking to the present director and saying, "Well, don't think the second story is a bad place to be. I mean, we're there." You know, that sort of thing. But he said, no, he felt keenly about it, and I could understand the reason.

GALM

Everything that you accomplished for the physical facilities of the Grunwald, did those have to be approved by Wight or by the committee as a whole? How did that work?

BLOCH

Well, I think that behind the scenes they knew that Chancellor Murphy was keeping an eye on it, that I was to get what I wanted because he wanted it, as a promise he had made to Grunwald too. I can remember if there was a problem, he wanted to know about it. I can remember only one problem, and that was getting locks on the cabinets so that when we were away we could lock them and secure them. Because although we had a security system, there was always the moment when something could happen, and we wanted to make certain that those cabinets were locked. I was told by the person who was in charge of these details that I couldn't have them. I remember Murphy saying, "What about locks on these doors?" I said, "Well, we were told we couldn't have them." And he carried on about it! By that time it was much more costly to put in than it would have been if we had done this in the first place. There were little details of that sort, the quality of the carpeting and all of that. No, we had to battle every detail. This wasn't something that came easily. As I say, the space wasn't adequate, but it was certainly far better than anything we ever had before, so I had to be grateful for that. It was a beautiful print room and still is. It worked, certainly, for a great many years.

GALM

Have you ever had any problems with theft?

BLOCH

No, none whatsoever. They had problems in the old gallery, where they had no security whatsoever. Some of that was extremely— Well, it wasn't considered funny at the time. I can only tell you one story, if you want me to.

GALM

I do.

BLOCH

Fred Wight was then chairman of the department, as well as running the gallery. They had a couple of problems in security, and those were the moments he did consult with me, when he became agitated by something that might happen. The gallery had an exhibition of Henry Moore. It was a traveling exhibition of small-scale sculpture, some lent by Henry Moore's wife [Irina Radetzky]. I then had one assistant; we were still in the closet. One day one of those sculptures was missing. I can remember my assistant— he wasn't a guard—saying, "I did hear footsteps outside," and this sort of thing. Fred Wight was very disturbed, naturally. There were no guards. Everyone was to be trusted, you know. Well, you can't nail things down. He was very upset, and rightly enough. I remember my assistant saying, "Well," he said, "after all, it belonged to Mrs. Moore, and Mr. Moore can make her another one. And whoever got it is certainly enjoying it, plus the fact it was insured." Which I felt wasn't exactly a professional way of looking at the problem. Then there was a second time, when we had a loan of an important selection of materials from a collection that was owned by a lady who I think was in an institution [Ruth Maitland]. There were wonderful prints, as well as watercolors and paintings, and the family decided to lend it to UCLA. Some glorious old masters, and it made for a very handsome show of a particular collector's interests and tastes. Among the things was a very handsome Paul Klee watercolor, and one day that disappeared. Now, these things happened one on top of the other in quick succession. I remember Fred being particularly disturbed and that he actually came to talk to me about it. I said, "Well, you know, Fred, without any proper security, without any guards, as the quality of your exhibitions improves and the kinds of material you have, there's going to be this temptation." The thing was turned over to the insurance companies to resolve. It took quite a time, and they finally caught up with the guy who had done this. The watercolor was found to have been sold to a gallery, I believe, in Germany. Ultimately that gallery had sold it to a German museum, and there it was. Now, the point that's kind of strange about the whole thing is that the fellow who sold it actually used his real name, and he happened to have been a student at UCLA. I don't think I'll mention his name, although I remember it quite well. I knew him because he came to me at one time and said he was going into the print business. He had some very good German expressionist prints, and he wanted very much to show them to Fred Grunwald. I said, "I'll mention it to Fred Grunwald." He said he had support from a relative of his to buy material and to become a salesman, and he was a very nice young man. I think he was at a studio. But Fred Grunwald, being someone who only purchased abroad and from his own dealers, wasn't interested in seeing this material. I thought afterward how fortunate for me! I never questioned where these things came from. Anyhow, as it turned out, it was this fellow who had done it. They caught him and it got into Time magazine. Fred was very disturbed because the gallery was mentioned. It was a curious thing that the fellow used his own name, and they were able to track down this object. It must have been two or three years later when all this had died away and was almost forgotten that I found myself in Fred Wight's office with Ralph Altman, who was a man of considerable delicate humor, in the German sense of the word. He said, "Oh, Fred, guess who I saw today." "Who's that?" And he mentioned his name—"This young man came to see me." That was the first time I had heard his name in a while, because I thought he'd been put away, but obviously they didn't. He may have been to some therapy. He said, "Well, Fred, you'll be interested to learn that he wants to come back into the program. He wants to come back to the university." Fred, who had his own particular brand of good humor and had gotten over the whole thing, said, "Oh," he said, "I think he would make an excellent member of a museum training program. He has such an acquisitive sense." [laughter]

GALM

I hope he didn't come back, though. Did he?

BLOCH

I don't think so. Because, first of all, we never had a museum program. He might have been the star member of such a program. After all, acquisition is important, no matter how you look at it.

1.11. TAPE NUMBER: VI, SIDE ONE APRIL 16, 1987

GALM

Professor Bloch, last time we spoke about the Tamarind [Lithography] Workshop and [Tamarind] Institute and also about June Wayne. Since then you've had a chance to review some of your own materials on Tamarind and you've had an opportunity also to speak with June Wayne. There were a few things that were still in question from last time, and maybe we could make those part of the record.

BLOCH

Yes. I spoke to June Wayne, and as far as she could recollect without checking her own records in some detail, in 1960, which was really the beginning of the whole Tamarind Workshop operation, there were five people who were the incorporators of the Tamarind at that time. That included John [D.] Entenza, Ebria Feinblatt, Allan [J.] Greenberg, Calvin [J.] Goodman, and June Wayne herself. Within the same general period, there was a Tamarind board, a local board that met several times a year to discuss with June and to help her with any ideas that she wanted to deal with. I always felt that my particular position was as an adviser on a variety of things such as archival matters. (June always points to the fact that it was my suggestion about preservation of archives that encouraged her to think in terms of the Tamarind archive, which is a very significant part of what they do.) So we all had our specific chores. Allan Greenberg was the lawyer; Calvin Goodman was an adviser from the very beginning. Some of those people were paid members of the board who received salaries, but some of us were absolutely not. I mean, we were just simply appointed. And this included people like Sims Carter, whose name I did not remember last time, who was the dean of the Art Center [College of Design (Pasadena, California)] and who was on the [California] State Board of Education. So he advised her in matters of this kind. He died some years ago. Fred Grunwald, myself, Elizabeth Hanson—

GALM

Is that the woman from Pasadena?

BLOCH

Pasadena. Rudd Brown, who was the granddaughter of William Jennings Bryan, whom I mentioned last time. John Entenza and Ebria Feinblatt. Now, some of these people, like Entenza and Feinblatt, I did not see at many of these meetings or not at all. The people I saw in those days included Carter, Wayne, Greenberg, Goodman, Hanson, and Brown. Those are the people I saw. I went consistently for fifteen years; I never missed a meeting in all that time. Later on, other people were added, like William [J.] Brice and Frances [Lasker] Brody—these weren't long-term people. The people I'm speaking about were generally there for a long period. Ebria Feinblatt finally pulled out. She didn't resign, she just simply faded out. There was some disagreement or other. So that the people that I saw all the time were the ones I've mentioned.

GALM

How did Mrs. Brody and June Wayne get along?

BLOCH

Well, as you know they're both very positive characters.

GALM

Right. That's the reason I asked.

BLOCH

I think anything that Frances Brody joins she wants to have something to say and to play a structural role. At some point, there was a disagreement between June and a matter at the [Los Angeles] County Museum [of Art]. At this point I don't remember what this was. It didn't seem terribly important, but evidently it was important enough to June. Frances interceded in some way—I think in an attempt to clear the air—and this wasn't the thing June Wayne wanted her to do. June usually clears the air on her own. So there was a kind of confrontation at one meeting, which has been taped somewhere, and it was really the end of their collaboration. But then this was bound to happen. If it wouldn't have been one thing, it would have been something else. Very strong and very positive people, and it's too bad that it didn't work out. Not that we were passive, but I always felt that my job was as an adviser. I was deeply interested in what went on, but there were various aspects of the operation which did not affect me in any way. June would privately confer with her lawyer, who usually acted as chairman of the meetings, and with Calvin Goodman, who was there all the time and organized the management programs and so on. He was involved in various other things, some of which probably didn't work out too well either in the long run. But when legal matters came up, things got very, very complicated. We each played a role. None of this was a casual affair; we took it all very seriously.

GALM

Is there anything else from last time or any recollections that you might have had since our last taping?

BLOCH

About Tamarind?

GALM

Or anything in general

BLOCH

Oh, don't get me started. I mean, there are always—

GALM

Otherwise, we'll go on to the topics for today that we agreed upon.

BLOCH

Yes. The kinds of things relating to the [Grunwald] Center [for the Graphic Arts] we have yet to get involved in, I think. There were also some problems relating to exhibitions that we, quote, "shared" with the gallery that I think need to be talked about. Not for the sake of gossip, but because it affected the operation very often and rather dangerously. I'm not saying that I have the ideal personality, but I had to stand strongly for what I believed in if we were going to do what we set out to do. Although we tried to work always with the gallery—and for the most part did—there were moments that we didn't, and a lot of that had to do with structure, which had to do with budget. Those things the university itself wasn't able to really understand, despite my constant warning that there would be problems.

GALM

Perhaps after our discussion of the death of Fred Grunwald and then the official opening of the new facilities of the Grunwald in the Dickson Art Center, maybe we can talk after that about—

BLOCH

Yes. I think really it is important only in the sense that we see what's happening today, with the kind of disarray that exists now and with the fact that the structure's beginning to pull apart and people are not quite aware where they belong. I understand the term ORU [organized research unit] is beginning to be used even on an administrative level. These were the things I talked about. These were the things that you would think would have been understood and would have been acted on earlier. Hopefully they will now, but it's a little late in the game. It would have saved a lot of grief. That's why I think it's necessary to talk about it.

GALM

Fred Grunwald died in March of 1964. Did this come suddenly, or was he ill for a long period of time?

BLOCH

Fred Grunwald had a heart condition for some years, a fairly serious heart condition. He may have already had some of this at the time he even married for the second time, but I think it became more pronounced later on. [laughter] Not because of it [the marriage], but I think— He had lost a leg in World War I; he had to leave the country; he had to start a new business all over. Even though he wasn't an old man—he was only in his sixties—he was not a well man, but proceeded to still keep up a schedule and to work. I knew about this, and there were many moments that I worried about him. Mrs. [Saidee Herz] Grunwald liked to make large parties, and he would not be well but he would keep himself going, very often standing over a barbecue. I remember standing with him one day [when] he was very ill, and there was this great party going on. She liked to travel, too. She was a younger and very agile kind of person who made him very happy. Because she, first of all, was an American, and he was very proud of that. And she liked to dress, and he loved to play a role in that. He had great taste himself. I think once they were married he selected all her clothes. It was an interesting relationship. He was very worried about seeing to it that she had everything that she wanted, and he enjoyed all of that. His first wife was a very simple person with no great demands of that sort. It was a new life for him. At precisely that time he wasn't well. It made it extremely difficult for him, but he did manage. I knew about it, and we worked within the ability he had to deal with us. I thought what I was doing—I would go with John Paul Jones to his house and we would organize the exhibitions—pleased him immensely. We'd fit that in on a Sunday when he was relaxed. I think I already told you that he would call me up on a Sunday morning, breakfasting in bed and resting (after all, he went to business every day), [and said] that he would like to talk to me about the things that pleased him most. His collecting was an important therapeutic activity for him. He just could scarcely wait for the packages of prints to arrive so that he could go over the material and deal with it and talk to me about it and all of that. He did all that pretty much on his own and did not necessarily consult with me until kind of late in the game. But he considered me one of the two or three people he liked to talk to and relax with. I offered him no pressure, where there were family pressures on top of it all.

GALM

He was in the sports shirt manufacture area. Is that right?

BLOCH

Yes.

GALM

What was the name of his company?

BLOCH

Grunwald-Marx [Inc.] Marx had been his partner, but they continued to use the name after Marx left. It became a family thing. His son-in-law, Stanley [I.] Talpis, whose name appears among donors and whose wife, Lottie [Grunwald Talpis], was the daughter, has been very active in more recent times. He's the one who'd work with him in the firm.

GALM

There must have been some concern about what would happen to the collection upon his death. Were you aware prior to his death what was—?

BLOCH

What I was aware of was that there had been no firm agreement. Once again, the university's original agreement was very loose. It was almost a gentleman's agreement that they would ultimately be the recipient of the collection, providing they built a print room in good time. The university did not fail to keep up with its commitment, certainly under [Franklin D.] Murphy. But without Murphy it might not have happened. When the new building, the new Dickson Art Center gallery building, was in the planning stage (it wasn't structured in Grunwald's lifetime, but the planning was there), I of course made certain that we were going to have that print room. Murphy was all for that, and we laid out that part of the second floor that would be the print room. A lot depended on how much space we could get. We didn't end up getting as much as we wanted to, but we got pretty much a facility that would work, and that's what I needed after that closet business, which was ridiculous. But that's all Grunwald ever knew was the closet, and the fact that indeed there would be the proper print room he mentioned in his original deed. Now, remember that his gifts were annual, based on a tax arrangement. It would include some good things from his collection, but the majority of the things were things he might have acquired to give to the university as part of a package deal. Grunwald wasn't really at that point in the mood to just hand over everything. He intended that we would benefit, and as far as I can see he had a collection on the walls of his house which he intended would remain in the family. They would go to his wife Saidee. I assume that he felt that she would turn that over to the university in the long run, but he didn't want her to feel that all this would disappear upon his death. They remained as part of the furnishing of the house, and she knew what that was.

GALM

Were those choice items?

BLOCH

Choice items. There was the Cezanne, the Munchs, and the Gauguins. They were things of really important value that were quite handsomely organized; it wasn't cluttered. There was a whole [Comte de] Buffon series of Picasso that covered one wall, I remember, and that sort of thing. As I say, his health was very fragile and one just didn't know from one day to the other where this would go. Murphy must have been aware of this too, and there were moments, if there was a birthday or some special time, he would present a gift through his budget. Actually it was an acquisition for the foundation, but it would be given in his [Grunwald's] name. I remember in the old Dickson Art Center in the little lobby we had, the lounge, there was a little gathering to honor Fred Grunwald, and he [Murphy] presented him with I think it was a Rembrandt at that time. But there were other moments when special gifts were made, which you can find in the records. Everything was made to make Mr. Grunwald feel comfortable. At that particular moment, I remember Fred speaking out, thanking, and saying that he was going to make certain—and I suppose he was referring to his will—to make certain that the collection, with certain exceptions, would come to the university. But that will was never made out. He died before that happened. He kept putting it off and putting it off. Of course, he didn't die immediately after that. He was finally hospitalized, and then he came out of that, but the next time he was hospitalized, it was the end. I dislike speaking about it now, but certainly I've come to believe that Mrs. Grunwald was very anxious to get as much as she could. It wasn't just the money. Of course, that was important, but Fred Grunwald was very concerned that she would have nothing to worry about, and moneys that came out of the business and so on were really put aside for her. But in the back of her mind was the concern about the collections, which she knew were valuable. While she knew that the collection of the house would remain on the walls of the house—the installation would be always there—the impression other people have had, in the family and so on, is that she really wanted a chunk of the collection itself, even though she knew Fred Grunwald's feeling was that the collection should go to UCLA to join the [rest of the] collection. Now, remember that when he died the plans were already fixed for the new building. It was just a matter of breaking ground and getting on with it. So the commitment was there, but there was nothing in writing that spoke in terms of numbers. Mrs. Grunwald always said that she would continue Mr. Grunwald's intention of giving, but her interpretation was on the annual basis, and that's what she proceeded to do. Now, she did this with good intention. Each year she selected the material or I worked with her. It became gradually much more my pushing and shoving to get the things I really wanted, because as the years went by, I became a little more alarmed as she began to speak with not affection but determination about certain things in the collection. I wanted to make certain that certain elements in the collection that reflected his collecting pattern would be there, especially if we speak about German expressionism. But you remember she had a limited amount that she needed each year. It might be only $5,000 or $10,000. There were the moments when she decided to help her son-in-law [Robert Calvin Goldberg] and would hand over some material to him, and that name appears in the record. But she didn't always do that. It depended on her mood or whether she and they were on speaking terms or something of the sort. It was all a family kind of affair. But we managed to do very well during those intervening years between the time Fred Grunwald died and she died. But I must tell you that when he died and the will was left the way it was, and she was to get one— Well, what happened at that particular moment, in order to take care of the inheritance tax affair, the university was given one share in the collection. His children had another share, and Mrs. Grunwald had a share. I forget exactly how it was divided, but one could easily check that out. I remember very definitely a most painful evening when we all met in Fred Grunwald's print room in her house, with Lottie and her husband, the Talpises, on one end of the table (she representing her brother, Ernest [M. Grunwald], who was in the East) and myself. We were to make selections from the collection, and it was sort of "You pick one, then you pick one, and you pick one." To me it was painful. The setting was painful. I knew what Fred Grunwald originally had hoped, and I think Lottie would have gone along with it and Ernest as well, with perhaps just selecting a few things that he wanted personally. The people who really were determined that that collection would come [to UCLA]—that is, their portions of it—were the Talpises and Ernest Grunwald. He may have wanted it for the moment in memory of his father, but he always intended that as time would go by it would come to UCLA. I think he's kept his promise, and so have the Talpises. But there was this very tense feeling in the room, because the Talpises and Mrs. Grunwald were not friendly and this thing made the rift even wider. Plus a few other problems. So it went around the room. My assistant was there. He was handling the material. And then would come my turn to select something, and then the next one select something, and so on and so forth. It was pulling apart a lifetime of work. That's what bothered me. I kept saying, "I wouldn't like anybody to do that to me." Because I know how he felt about these things. I heard him talk about them. Maybe sentiment has no place in this; it was really a business deal in which the collection was literally taken apart. And Mrs. Grunwald was indeed well prepared for this. She knew what to select. She didn't create any real problem at those meetings, but I could tell that she knew what she was doing.

GALM

But her children were not present at those meetings?

BLOCH

No, no, no. Not at all. They weren't part of that picture at all. I think Ernest had certain things that he wanted. In fact, he had visited Mrs. Grunwald. He's a very pleasant, easygoing, Germanic young man—very gentle like his mother— and he went to see Saidee relative to some furniture that was family furniture. Now, Lottie wanted none of this. Fred had certain things that he had brought with him, which included some genuine antiques that he liked, and Mrs. Grunwald cared nothing for that. She liked Ernest, and she very willingly let him have what it was that he wanted. But then he asked for a couple of major prints, too, that were on the wall. In a weak moment she allowed him to have them, and she always regretted it afterward. I had kind of hoped she wouldn't. Among them was one Toulouse- Lautrec that he [Fred Grunwald] had brought to the hospital room. He couldn't stand the hospital pictures, and so she [Saidee Grunwald] had to each week or so bring him something to look at, you see. One of those was that print, and another one was a Kandinsky I remember. A Toulouse-Lautrec, a Kandinsky, and those famous prints, which were in our exhibitions, were taken by Ernest. I assume they're still with him, since they didn't come to the university. But I think there were certain things they expressly wanted. Not Lottie—she didn't care one way or the other. She was more and more anxious that I get what I felt that I wanted in that share. I did the best I could under the circumstances. As I say, it was not simple. Besides, I was concerned about Saidee. There was no hostility between us at all. She said she was committed to continuing Fred's plan, and indeed I loved Saidee very much. She was an interesting and colorful lady and a good friend of my family. So we continued to have a good relationship during her lifetime. Her sudden illness was a great shock to us all. But the fact was that she made no plans either, except that everything went to her family.

GALM

Did she die young also?

BLOCH

I imagine she was in her early seventies. I'm not sure of how old she was. Women don't generally reveal all of this. She had gotten cancer. It came upon her suddenly and she literally began to wither. But she recovered; she went into a remission after the first bout with chemotherapy. Then a few months later it returned, and this time it went through her system very quickly, so that it affected her brain. I mean, she just was not in control anymore. I think I was the last person to really speak to her when she was still lucid. It went very, very quickly. This was all around the time we did the ULAE ["Words and Images: Universal Limited Art Editions" (1978)3 show. In fact, she showed up at that opening wearing a beautiful gown and feeling quite well. It was only a few weeks after that. There are photographs showing her at that opening. So that happened at that time. But she too made no provision, which she could easily have done, it seemed to me, to see to it that at that point all of the remaining collection went to UCLA. That would have fulfilled Fred's earnest wish. Now, remember that one other thing that she did prior to her death— And this was like a year before, when she was living on Wilshire Boulevard in one of the apartment houses, that she was suddenly told that it was going condominium. She came to me and said, "I must sell some works from the collection in order to buy the condominium." This was a terrible shock to me. Fred never would have done anything like that. But she was worried about money. She didn't want to touch her capital, and she decided that was the way to go. She said to me, "I will not sell anything that you particularly want," and so we went over the list. She had everything appraised. I recommended the appraiser to her. And it seemed to me that what she did was precisely select or allow— The appraiser happened to be a dealer that she went through finally to handle this deacquisition. Many of the things that belonged in the collection were going. I saw some $85,000 or $90,000 worth of prints, some sixty prints, literally disappear under my eyes.

GALM

Do you think that she was hoping that somehow you would find a buyer, a university buyer, for them?

BLOCH

No. No, she didn't say, "If you can find someone to buy it—" She said she needed the money in a hurry, and the San Francisco dealer was somebody she trusted. She felt that he took them on consignment and he would sell them.

GALM

So she wasn't giving you first—

BLOCH

No, there was no discussion of that kind. She simply said, "I have to sell. I'm sorry, but I have to," and she consulted. But then after that first consultation she became very secretive and more and more concerned, and when there wasn't enough and she needed that much more money, she said, "I have to sell more." Then she frequently would show up when she knew I wasn't there and take more material out. Of course everything in her collection, with the exception of those things on her wall, was in storage at the university so we could use the material. Which made it even more difficult for me, because I would see key things disappear from the collection. But then perhaps I thought everything was key. But it is true it was very difficult with Fred. He was a true collector who saw the works of art as an early- middle- late kind of thing. He saw them as groups, especially an artist that he particularly liked. Some of these things were irreplaceable; certainly we didn't have the money for it. There was never any discussion from the administration, "Let us buy this material," which they should have done perhaps. But I can't say that occurred to me at that time. She simply had made up her mind this was the way she was going to go. It made it difficult for me because the dealer in question I had recommended was an old friend and a very reliable person to deal with. It was just a matter of business. As I say, some sixty things disappeared. She became very difficult about it. She was never an emotionally unstable person, but she was a little hyper, and she would get excited very easily. Sometimes she'd select something as a gift, nothing very important, but if she would— One of my assistants once said "Oh, but that's not duplicated in our collection," and she really let that assistant have it, you see. She was very touchy and I think a little bit self- conscious that she was doing something that she shouldn't be doing.

GALM

So then what occurred upon her death?

BLOCH

Upon her death, what remained of her collection, including the works on the walls, was divided between her son [Howard Stanley Herz] and daughter [Gloria Herz Goldberg]. I never even knew how the division was made, who got what. Material remained in our hands at that time, and one day the son came to see me. Howard Herz came to see me, and he said that his lawyer said would I be willing to still keep these in storage. I simply told him at that point that I needed something more definite, that I didn't wish to be a storage warehouse for the Grunwald collections unless I had some assurance and some gesture from the family that we would indeed be the ultimate recipients. He said at one point, "Oh, I intend to give to UCLA," because he'd been a former student, and so was his wife. But greed being the endgame for many of these people— I mean, they weren't satisfied with all the money they got and selling the condominium at double what she paid for it and all of that. They were doing very well indeed. I had the definite feeling that the collection would not be held very long, because he said to me, "Well, you know, I may have to sell something, God only knows what." I said, "No, I would need a gesture. If, let us say, you and Gloria decided to give us the Comte de Buffon series of Picasso, I would feel that was a grand enough gesture to make me feel that we owed you some responsibility at this point in time." So he went away, and the next thing we knew his wife came down and removed everything. From that point on, I began noticing in the same dealer's catalogs certain objects that definitely belonged to Grunwald appearing, illustrated or being described. I didn't make any effort to pry further into it. It was a matter of business again— it had nothing to do with me. But it was painful, because these were things I knew were on the wall. I know where some of these things have gone. The Buffon series ended up at the L. A. County. How did it end up there? They got the Ahmanson Foundation via Murphy to find the money. But Murphy admitted to me that he never knew that that was the series that belonged to Fred Grunwald. They kept that little bit of provenance from him, which I felt was not exactly an admirable gesture on their part. That particular series really belonged with the rest of the Picassos, because Fred Grunwald, toward the end, his desire was to keep together the things that he particularly liked. The dealer I mentioned to you who was a friend felt himself right in the middle. This wasn't easy for him, but, after all, business is business. He eventually got Gloria Goldberg to give us $500 plus an important Munch, a color woodcut in the collection. So that we had practically, with one exception, all of the Munchs that Fred owned. The other important one happened to have gone to a member of— I think he's a member of our faculty here. His wife is at least on the library staff. And so they have it. But they know about it, and they're committed to the Friends [of the Graphic Arts at UCLA] and someday they would like to see it back here. I mean, with the collection being split as it is, now there's no hope of our being able to pull that together. Except that if you look at the memorial catalog, you can see I've made notes in my own catalog as to where all these things were at that time, the notes I made when they were still in Saidee's hands. Plus the few things that she deposited with her son or daughter while she was still alive.

GALM

How large was the collection before it started to become dispersed?

BLOCH

I can't really go into numbers. I never attempted that. I suppose one could. We always estimated there were about five thousand prints; that would probably be in excess of what there actually was. It was a highly selective collection, so you don't think in numbers. It may have been considerably less. But if you're thinking of books and you're thinking of all of that kind of thing, the numbers grow.

GALM

I guess I'm trying to get at a point of how much you think the value of the collection diminished through the dispersal. I'm talking now of the monetary value.

BLOCH

Well, I can't speak in monetary values, because it's almost impossible. If you think in terms of current values, we did extremely well. But in Fred's time those values didn't really exist on the same level. If you take all the Munchs we got, we're talking about a six-figure kind of thing for that group alone. What I attempted to do while working with Saidee— And I couldn't always do this with Fred, because he had his own mind as to what he wanted to do and I had to leave that alone. But Saidee did turn to me, as time went on, to select the things that we needed. Sometimes it was rather amusing. She'd say, "That's the only Klee I own." It meant nothing to her, but she enjoyed that being the patron who could be a little difficult kind of thing. And it was okay. We got, I would say, of the German expressionists, most of the important works. We lost out in other areas. Certainly as far as the collection at home was concerned, we did lose out on several important prints. But in other cases we made up for it by getting— Let's say Cezanne's [The] Bathers, we got it as a gift from somebody else, in fact a better impression. But we couldn't always count that we'd make up that collection. It really ends up with the dream of one man to see everything in one place being slightly changed, and the firm edges become less firm and somewhat difficult to imagine. The whole idea was that it would be wonderful to have one man's collection—especially a man who was such a good collector—in one place, and that was his wish. That never happened. What they have is a grand nucleus of what that collection was. And what they have in the catalog is basically a good indication of what's missing—whether anybody but myself has attempted to do that is another thing. The Renoirs, for instance, we got very little of that. That's all gone. All the color prints we didn't get. All I remember is that Fred Grunwald at one point, in a weak moment— He didn't like big prints because he didn't store them. He had a big printer's proof of Renoir's Maternite, which wasn't so much beautiful as terribly interesting. It had been salvaged, and we had it in the collection. It was a very important print for us to have as a demonstration. At one point Fred [Frederick S.] Wight came to me and said that he had a demand from the president's office for a print to be sent up for display in the president's office or home at [University of California] Berkeley. I said, "But we can't really do this, because we promised Mr. Grunwald we'd never lend for this purpose." He said, "Well, you cannot refuse." He was very upset that I would be offending the chief administrator of the university. So there was very little I could do—because I didn't have tenure—but accede to this. But I never told Fred what we were doing, or else there would have been a great howl about it. So we framed it. We had our own frames, as you know, and we had our own standard sizes. So it was framed and was sent up north. Then when Murphy came on the scene, this thing was very much in my mind, but I didn't say anything at the time. Until one fine day there was an exhibition at Berkeley of some of Fred's collection, and Fred was invited to go up there, (I'm talking about Fred Grunwald, of course. ) As he is standing around, either the president of the university or a chancellor—I think it was a chancellor—came up to him and said, "Oh, Mr. Grunwald—" And blew it, you see. That there was this print from his collection up there. "And we would like very much to have other things up here from your collection." It was the Picassos. The Picassos went up there after the show we had here. Fred came down with fire coming out of his ears and his nose about this thing. This is not something he wanted. He would not lend a thing from his collection to be shown. It was not his principle. He wanted it to be seen here and enjoyed by the students, and did not he say all this, and so forth. I had somehow to cool all of this down. But I finally recalled the print with the excuse that I needed to check it out conditionwise. Well, by that time it was no longer in the president's house. It was in this chancellor's office, I think. What they had done was reframe it and cut it down, because we kept records. So that gave me precisely the excuse—

GALM

Ammunition.

BLOCH

Ammunition is the correct word. I went immediately to Murphy's office and said this can't go on. He agreed with me immediately, and he had the whole thing recalled. That was the last of it. So sometimes you have to go through one painful experience in order to get something clarified. I don't think that has ever been done since. What we did develop on this campus—I didn't, but it was developed—was a rental program in which I actively participated, and assistants of mine were active on the program as well. At one point Bullock's [department store] had a kind of a Sears [Roebuck and Company] program in which they had prints that would be for sale. They had someone like a Vincent Price going around and selecting things, and so they formed quite a collection of paintings and prints and drawings. No, paintings and prints. There were a few drawings, I should say; there was no restriction on that. But they no sooner had started the program than they decided to discontinue it and turned to Dr. Murphy and offered it to the university through the art gallery. I can remember the very amusing thing that went on there. Mr. Wight had just appointed an assistant director to the gallery. He was not in town when this matter came up, and that assistant director, who had been a museum man, Henri Dorra, simply took one look at the material and found that it was of such odd quality that he wasn't interested. So he, without consulting anybody, simply refused the collection. He didn't consult with me and certainly didn't consult with Dr. Murphy, who had already accepted it. So the next step was some more fury, in which I was summoned to Dr. Murphy's office to discuss this matter. I said, no, I knew what was there in the way of prints, and there were some major things which I wanted. As far as I was concerned, the rest of the material did not have to be kept by the gallery but could resolve a demand on our campus by various offices to hang these things. There was an evolving faculty center, and all of these things would have a home. He said, "That's just—" Well, you know. He was just infuriated. So the collection did come, and we got some really major things. In fact, there was at least one print that was duplicated on Fred's walls. Anytime I found something that was on the walls of the home that I knew we wouldn't get, I wanted it, because it helped to fill out that idea of the complete Grunwald collection, whether it really belonged to him or came from another source. But there were Rembrandts that made up many, many times what we could have possibly bought in later years. It has worked out. That material is never around—it's always out.

GALM

Do you know whether that Bullock's collection would have been centered in one particular store? Or were they going to make—?

BLOCH

I think it was to be centered in one store. But they went through some reorganization at that time, and it just wasn't something they intended to do. They no sooner started it than they ended it. But we did get the collection, and it was some— Surely some minor things that I could understand a curator would not want, especially the paintings. But they were paintings that were not distasteful. They're still hanging in the Faculty Center. You may walk past them without looking at them, but they're there and they suited a purpose of decoration. The few major things there, we had to have.

1.12. TAPE NUMBER: VI, SIDE TWO APRIL 16, 1987

GALM

Professor Bloch, I'd like to talk now about the actual exhibition that took place in 1966, spring of 1966. It was called "The Fred Grunwald Collection: A Memorial Exhibition." Let's talk a little bit first about the planning for that exhibition. How did you determine that this was going to be the show that opened the facility? Did it just seem appropriate?

BLOCH

Oh, it was definitely appropriate. First of all, there was no preconception on our part of what we might get out of this; the whole idea was to honor Fred Grunwald. And in fact it was accompanied by a series of symposia through [UCLA] Extension, from which we benefited financially, in order to buy things in his honor. So many things were done in his honor for at least a year afterward. Dr. Murphy's foreword bears out our genuine admiration and caring for what Fred Grunwald had in mind, what he intended to do, and what we felt was deserving. We had over the years done small exhibitions while he was alive, and that was all meant to encourage his interest in what we were doing. He had no reason to feel that there would be no continuity of this. I'm sure that the additional thought was that eventually all this material would come to UCLA. Hence the borrowing from the family collection. But the other reasoning was that we wanted to show the comprehensiveness of the collection. I've always felt very keen about that kind of thing. While it's possible to do it, to do it. Because it becomes an important historical document. I'm sure Dr. Murphy must have felt as I did. There was no guarantee that everything would come to us. The hope was that it would, and certainly we had the promise, but this was the moment to show the collection in its comprehensiveness. This is exactly what it was. So what you've got here in this [catalog] is the core of the collection. If you're speaking about numbers, you can tell what that comes to. Now, as befits this kind of thing, the fact that on his walls he had what you would call sort of a key collection— They were keys to various parts of his collecting interest. As he could move from room to room, he could get a sense of the direction his own interests were. Some of them reflected Mrs. Grunwald's love of certain kinds of pictures. His went in the direction of Kandinsky and people like that, that Saidee didn't particularly understand. I think he began to collect Renoir with her in mind. Because that, he felt, she could relate to. So his idea was to have as complete a Renoir collection as possible. He came pretty close to that? there may have been two or three things missing from that collection in the end. It was therefore my hope that that collection too would come. We did a Renoir show at one point in order to show the comprehensiveness of what we had, and we had Jean Renoir working with us. We borrowed sculpture from him, and he was present at the opening. We did all of that not only to encourage Mrs. Grunwald, but also because it was appropriate to what we were doing to show various aspects of the Grunwald collection. It was the kind of thing Fred would have loved. So as you go through this [catalog], certain of the illustrations— And that wasn't done with any directness. The fact that they were selected was because they were keys. The color frontispiece by Renoir, Le chapeau epinglé [II], was from the house collection. As I go through this quickly— Since this is kind of engraved in my memory, I can point out the— [leafing through the catalog] Pablo Picasso, Faune musicien [No. 4], was also originally in the house, but by that time was on loan to Saidee's daughter, Gloria Goldberg. The Kandinsky, [catalog] number 144 [Abstract Composition], was also in the house, but that Saidee gave to Ernest Grunwald at his request. It wasn't, as I say, a print she particularly understood or loved, but to a chemist this did have some meaning.

GALM

Is that the one that you said that he [Fred Grunwald] had in his hospital room?

BLOCH

No, no, no. The Cezanne Bathers was the color impression. Fred had given us the black and white impression, but the color impression was the one he retained on his walls. Now that, of course, remained in Saidee's collection and was eventually dispersed. But we were given that by somebody else, so we have in the collection at the present time both the black and white and the color. We also have the small Bathers which he gave us in color, and we bought the black and white. So we have the four prints. The Edvard Munch [The] Kiss, the woodcut, number 238, remained in Saidee's collection and was one of those that was dispersed at sale and is now in a private collection in this community. The print you were referring to is number 363, the Toulouse-Lautrec Elsa [dite la viennoise]. It was also in that collection, and that was one that was in his hospital room while he was ill for the last time. That one also went to Ernest at his request, probably feeling that it represented his father. On the next page, number 370, the Toulouse-Lautrec Le jockey also was in Saidee's collection. I haven't seen it up for sale, but either it was sold or is still in the family collection. Now, as I just turned to Edvard Munch, the Coastal Landscape, number 239, was in that collection, but Gloria Goldberg presented that one to the university. So that with the exception of The Kiss, the university has every other Munch that was in Fred Grunwald's collection. Now, that was my modus operandi while Saidee was alive, because I always had the feeling that we could never count on the whole thing. As it turned out, I was prophesying correctly. If you turn to Picasso, I simply indicated that the Faune musicien was at Gloria's house at that time. The Histoire Naturelle, [Georges Louis Leclerc de] Buffon, the whole series of thirty-two aquatints which hung in the house on one wall—it was part of the major decoration of the house—was sold and ended up at the L. A. County Museum in more recent times. If you turn to Toulouse-Lautrec, you will see that Saidee had the Mademoiselle [Marcelle] Lender, which we happen to have now only because we got it through the Bullock's collection. But the Poster for La Revue Blanche was sold at auction. The Elsa, as I said, is in Ernest Grunwald's collection. Le jockey belonged to Saidee, and have no idea of its current whereabouts. I'm looking now- Another of the illustrations, catalog 376, the Baudelaire [avec socle] of Jacques Villon never came to us either. The Auguste Renoir, of which we selected a group, was only a group out of the more than fifty prints of Renoir that Fred had collected with the idea of trying to have the comprehensive, if not complete, collection of Renoir. Well, we got very little of that in the long run. All the color prints, most of the rest of it— With reasons that I think I probably had something to do with, we allowed it to remain intact in Saidee's hands, because she enjoyed them and some were on her walls. But we didn't end up with very much.

GALM

Is there any documentation of what actually hung on the walls in his home? Was there any photographic record made?

BLOCH

No, there's no photographic record as far as I know. Only my own remembrance, my own record, which could be very easily brought back to play. I know pretty much what was there.

GALM

Is there any record of what was at one time held here at UCLA, even though it may have gone elsewhere since then? How did you keep track of what was here?

BLOCH

Oh, we had lists. We had to keep that kind of record because Saidee's own records were never complete, and sometimes she'd suddenly say that there was something missing when it wasn't. So we had to keep pretty careful records, because she'd come in sometimes for something for a Christmas gift to a friend. These were not the major things—she was very careful about that. But at one point she did take something off a wall, a [Maurice de] Vlaminck, and gave it to the KCET auction, and of course they made a big splash about it. Which upset a lot of people in this community, that she was— You see, people do watch this sort of thing. And she was very sorry afterward that she, in a spirit of generosity, had taken something off the wall. But no, there are records unquestionably at the Grunwald at the moment relating to what was in our hands from that collection.

GALM

Do you remember anything else about, say, the opening of the exhibit or any special memories of that exhibition?

BLOCH

Well, there was a great deal of wonderful warmth and good feeling. I mean, that's what the whole thing was about. Saidee was very touched by the whole thing, especially the symposia, at which members of the faculty appeared. There was a wonderful feeling and great love for the Grunwalds and what they were trying to do. There was nothing quite like that anywhere in the community.

GALM

I don't know whether this would be an appropriate time— Why don't you tell me if it is or isn't. Another collection that is so major now is the [Robert Gore] Rifkind collection in German expressionism. Was that started at that time also?

BLOCH

No, that started sometime later. We came to know Bob Rifkind, of course. I think he was inspired by Grunwald's interest in German expressionism to do this kind of thing. He had been a student at UCLA himself, so he was familiar with collecting. He wanted to find a focus, in any case. He's an intellectual in his own right, has a deep interest in the literary aspects of the movement. He worked with a local dealer, Orrel P. Reed, who traveled with him and who has excellent judgment in building such a collection. He would frequently come to the Grunwald to learn something about the quality of what we had as against what he might be doing. What Bob Rifkind did was not to emphasize the prints as much as the literature. He did what Fred did not do. Fred had some of the literature, which came to us, but he [Rifkind] went very deeply into the books, even newspapers and that sort of thing. It is very much a literary backdrop for the German expressionist movement that you'll find in Bob Rifkind's collection. It would have been an incredible pendant to what we were doing. I can remember one time speaking to Bob Rifkind, who's an extremely independent man with his own mind and sometimes not easy to reach. But at one point I went to him and said that if he was interested in coming over here that we would certainly dedicate one gallery to that collection. And we had limited space. That would have meant we would have had to take over the exhibition gallery and make a print room out of that. That was always the problem as other kinds of printmaking evolved through the various workshops. What would we do if we got involved with Gemini [Graphic Editions Limited]? We just didn't have the space. Considering the particular problem we faced in the gallery, that we were restricted to where we were without any real acquisition commitment on the part of the gallery to play along with us in helping this to happen, we had to live within the limits of what we had. And during the years, as our collection grew— Not just through Grunwald. Our acquisitions went far away from that. People who assume that the Grunwald collection was the collection are quite wrong. It may have, for a long time, been called the Grunwald [Graphic Arts] Foundation, now and then the Grunwald Center, but Grunwald was only a nucleus. If you count the numbers, you will see it's a very small quantity compared to the 25,000 or more prints that were eventually collected through acquisition and gifts from other sources. Once we got past the idea of the foundation—which was an onus as far as gifts were concerned, since there was no money—through Murphy and through our own resources we began gradually to build a comprehensive collection, at numbers I've already mentioned. That involves the Tamarind archives and so on. Our hope was to build a great modern archive which included some of the other workshops, but we really couldn't do it with the space we had. So when I spoke to Bob Rifkind— And this was not asking him to commit anything. At that time his collection was really held in his offices, and he was still building the collection at an enormous rate over a short period. [I said that] I wanted it to remain intact, no matter where it went, but that we would like to be considered as a possibility. But I can't say we were getting any great help through the university. Certainly not through the gallery. Nobody was offering space. Space was limited; there was no room for storage except what we had. So I was again working alone and working through the good will we had. We did eventually put together an important Rifkind exhibition ["The Robert Gore Rifkind Collection of German Expressionism" (1977)]. That was when Gerald [J.] Nordland was the head of the gallery. It was difficult to do, but the gallery worked very hard to make that happen. Not with the idea that it would come to UCLA, because Gerald Nordland wasn't here long enough to get involved in any real acquisition program. His disappointment when he came was that there was no collection to deal with. He was really very upset by that. The collection had been dispersed, and the decision had been arrived at by the administration that the gallery would not collect. For some reason as yet completely unknown to me—or unable for me to comprehend completely— the university decided it would not collect. Well, the gallery's collection was no great shakes. I mean, they had collections they couldn't dispose of, that were given as a gift in perpetuity and they were stuck with that. It was a kind of study collection of older masters. Then there was the kind of motley collection, very scattered, that had been formed in the years sort of by gifts of one kind or another. Very rarely an acquisition, almost no acquisitions, because they didn't have an acquisition policy. So the decision finally when Mr. Wight retired was to simply dispose of it. He knew this was going to happen and I think okayed it, so when Nordland came aboard, there wasn't anything. I can remember very distinctly speaking to Gerald Nordland. Since he was interested in photography, I said, "Why don't you build in the photography area and we will take care of it." And he began to do just that, using whatever funds he could get his hands on. It was my hope at that time that Gerald Nordland would recognize our existence in the sense of not just giving us money for exhibitions but also becoming involved with us—the kind of thing I never got from Fred Wight. I think it was happening, except that Gerald was unhappy in the job. He did not have tenure as Fred had; he never had a sense of security. He was very unhappy in the few years he was here. He came with a feeling of unhappiness in the way he was really welcomed or not welcomed by the department, and that remained with him all the time he was here, which wasn't very long. But he did begin the photography.

GALM

Was he hired on only as director of the gallery?

BLOCH

Yes. There was a very definite feeling at that point that they didn't want to repeat the performance that Fred had, for whatever reason. That was part of the art department's involvement in the recommendation, because there was already the antimuseum buildup taking place in the department, chiefly with the art historians, I assume. So the idea was we don't want any involvement with museums or galleries. It had to be chiefly art historians, because the painters, after all, used the gallery and so did the design people for their exhibitions. So they had to deal with the gallery personnel. But the art history people had determined that museums were out, as far as they were concerned. Which was part of my problem ultimately too, since I began to be associated with the onus of being related to a museum operation. So they were insistent, although Fred Wight recommended Gerald Nordland and tried earnestly to have him given an appointment as he had. Because he felt it would be disastrous otherwise, and he was right. The man had no sense of security, and he felt that there was a hostile element in the department—which involved us, to a certain extent. I mean, he felt that he had no friends, and so he worked pretty much on that basis. But when he came, [David S.] Saxon, as assistant chancellor, made it quite clear that the budget for the gallery exhibitions would be in the hands of the gallery director. I had no objection to that; I never had before. Except that it was better at that point, because at least we knew there was a budget, I never knew where we were. I never had any understanding of what share of the budget we would have. Budget became naturally a big question. Budget is always the big problem if you run an operation. I knew where I was getting my acquisition funds, because Murphy saw to that and so did Chuck [Charles E.] Young when he came aboard. He told me specifically that I would understand what I had, and if I needed more, I was to come to him. Whatever else we did was something else. But exhibitions [were put] in one hand. As I say, it was perfectly all right. As far as Nordland was concerned, he certainly encouraged us to do the major exhibitions we did, which we didn't have as a condition before. So it worked perfectly all right—up to a point, of course. There's always a point of departure in all of these individual cases. But we did some major exhibitions during that brief period.

GALM

I don't want to lead you too far ahead, but— So there was some attempt at getting the Rifkind?

BLOCH

Oh, yes. Certainly doing that major exhibition was, to some extent, encouragement to him to feel that he had a home at UCLA, since that's where he came from. But he indicated that he was in no rush to do anything about it, that he wanted the collection at his offices and he enjoyed acting as caretaker of that and hiring curators. We visited him at his home and he was always the genial host, and when we started working on the Friends group, he certainly participated in making suggestions. We worked very hard on that exhibition, and the point was that Rifkind was very involved in that show, in supporting it fundwise and actually even to the point of appointing people who would write the essays. That, I felt, was perhaps going a bit too far, but he finally agreed not to participate in that, because it was rather ticklish. But in fact I felt that was basically O. P. Reed's responsibility, having formed the collection for him, and that's what went on. So the decision to go over to the County, I think that happened after I had left.

GALM

Are there things in the Grunwald area of German expressionism that aren't in his collection?

BLOCH

Yes. The major prints. He was not a print collector. I mean, he has some wonderful things, and he gave us some things—he gave us a couple of major things. In fact, he gave a major drawing, which ended up being exhibited in the chancellor's house. He gave it to the gallery rather than to the Grunwald. That was, again, a problem we had. The gallery had several important things in the way of drawings that they would never give to us. Some of those things are hanging in the chancellor's house at this very moment. There was never any clear-cut understanding that basically everything on paper should be at the Grunwald; that was never clarified. I remember Rifkind carrying on about that. He thought that because he'd given it to the gallery, it would be our responsibility. He didn't understand that this wasn't so. And he carried on when he finally spotted that in the chancellor's house. He was very angry. First of all, he wanted a big label on it to say it came from him, and he didn't want it there, he wanted it hung in the gallery. He assumed somehow that it would be something we would handle, and of course we had nothing to do with it. But I couldn't go around talking about that. That wasn't something I cared to talk about—the fact that it wasn't exactly a very amicable relationship we had in every case. We tried very hard to make it seem that we were operating very well together, but it wasn't always easy. I will always say, and I might as well say it now, that the university never understood the problems of a museum, a museum on a campus or a gallery with a collection. Cutting out a collection altogether, suddenly, was a strange gesture. The reasoning behind it was that we weren't in competition with the County. Well, we're not competitors. We operate on a completely different premise. We need material for study purposes. We need to have this kind of thing.

GALM

When was that decision made? What time period are we talking about?

BLOCH

The decision to sell off the collection?

GALM

Right.

BLOCH

It was right after Fred retired. It began slightly earlier, and I guess they talked about it. But suddenly they decided that we were not a collecting university. Well, we collect for the library in special collections, and we certainly were doing it for the Grunwald. But they will still to this day shake their heads when you say, "Well, we don't want to quote, 'compete, ' with the County Museum or any other collective." Oh, they vigorously shake their heads, you know, as if we must not do this. Well, you don't have to be a competitor. As I tried to emphasize to my colleagues over at the County, we are not competitors. We're a completely different operation. It's like the relationship of the Fogg Art Museum [Harvard University] to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. They collect for other purposes. Whether this had anything to do with the political change in the department is something else. But I doubt that. The university never really considered that as a permanent fixture. They regarded that as one of these changing phases of a department's operation. But you have to live a lifetime to see those changes sometimes. I can never understand it, but it's based on the fact that universities basically do not understand. The Fogg has had this too in its relationship to the administration at Harvard University. There were very bleak periods for the Fogg, when a president of the university with absolutely no talent for this particular area, the fine arts, would suddenly cut them down to the bone on a budgetary level, where they had to do their own packing and their own shipping and their lending policy went down to zero. Those things do happen in universities, even major universities like Harvard. But my problem was that we never had a fixed policy, not even within our own little operation. So how can they think of a much larger operation when they really haven't been able to determine this? I've pointed this out quite clearly from time to time.

GALM

What is [University of California] Berkeley's attitude in this area?

BLOCH

I'm not very clear, but I think that up there it's somewhat different. They have a faculty that does participate with the gallery [University Art Museum]; they do have some involvement. It isn't the political problem we have here. They may have politics, but it's not an all- encompassing problem such as we have here. I'm speaking about the department, not the university. I think the university itself looks benignly on all of this in the hope that everybody works together. But at Berkeley there are people who do work with the gallery. They have a very talented man [James Elliott] who is the director of the gallery, an experienced museum man, which is important. We've never really had that on quite the same level. We haven't had a scholar-director with that kind of all- encompassing skill in not only administering but curating and understanding the meaning of collections. If we had had that, I think things would have been somewhat different. But it didn't evolve that way.

GALM

I guess what I'm asking is whether Berkeley has collections in depth.

BLOCH

They have collections. I'm not saying in depth. They certainly haven't anything comparable to what we have at the Grunwald. But they have built in other areas, and they haven't dispersed it. They do have a regular staff and they do have exhibitions, and so on. It's sort of low- profile, but it is part of an ongoing operation, and I think it's a healthy operation. Stanford [University] certainly has an equal— Actually, that's rather comparable to Harvard or Princeton [University]. I mean, all the members of the faculty are in a sense on a curatorial relationship with the gallery. What you need are people who are interested enough to participate in an acquisition policy. The fact that we never had that—or it dropped away fairly early and then got involved in a whole political situation—destroyed the whole possibility of our building any kind of collection, a permanent collection.

GALM

Why don't we return now to 1966? On April 22 you were honored. You mentioned a bit about that off tape. It was a little dinner put together by Saidee Grunwald.

BLOCH

Yes. As I recall, it was done really to honor the beginnings of the gallery, for the first time, and perhaps the only time, at Saidee Grunwald's request, who sponsored the dinner. This was the kind of thing that she loved to do and did very well. A dinner in the small gallery of the Grunwald. It was set apart for the evening. The group of honored guests, members of the faculty whom we knew, friends in the community— And you already have a copy of the speech that Jake Zeitlin presented on that occasion. I don't have a guest list, but it was all done in a rather charming fashion. Peter Alexander, who's now a very well known artist, was a student at that time, and he did a little etching which became the little— It wasn't in the invitation; it was the table-setting affair. It was done rather well and with great goodwill. Saidee was generous enough to use my name and have it in my honor, and I was very touched. My parents [Rose von Auspitz Bloch and Leonard Bloch] were there as I remember.

GALM

Seems like an appropriate—

BLOCH

It was very nice, yes. Well, it was related to the kind of warm feeling we had with Fred and which we hoped would continue—and which did for many years.

GALM

Franklin Murphy left in '68, and that wasn't so long after the opening of the new buildings and the print gallery and so forth. But I'm wondering specifically how his departure affected your operation.

BLOCH

Well, basically it didn't affect the operation beyond the fact of not having the intimate kind of relationship with a chancellor that I had, that we could hope would continue, because Chancellor Young is not that deeply involved in collecting and in all that. But he was very anxious that my work continue and has always been encouraging. He summoned me quite early to assure me that whatever budgetary arrangements we had (which were on a casual basis; there was nothing formally set up) would continue. In fact he did formalize it and did set up a specific amount of money. We didn't need to select material together as Murphy enjoyed [doing]. Murphy was no longer involved at that point. He would come to all our shows, and he allowed me to know that he was always interested and that sort of thing, but he wasn't at a point where he could commit funds to us. He did none of that. Although he had funds available, he had other commitments. I think what he finally did and has been doing to this day is committing his main thrust of interest to the library, or libraries, on this campus, and those benefit enormously. But we did not, except on special occasions, such as when we did the ULAE [Universal Limited Art Editions] show. We were desperately trying to get all the books together to do a show of all the books produced by ULAE, which was the thrust of the show. It was a [UCLA] Art Council show. His wife [Judy Murphy] was very much involved with that show, so that we were constantly on the phone. One particular moment I remember, we tried to borrow— Did I mention this before?

GALM

I think so, but I'm not sure that it was on tape. Go ahead.

BLOCH

Well, we wanted to borrow the [Robert] Motherwell book, A la Pintura, and could not get it. I think I did speak of this. We found it for sale, and he said, "Well, buy it." And he turned that money over to the Art Council, so it came as if it was an Art Council gift. So he didn't allow his funds to get involved with anything except the library. Or on the occasion when Henry [J.] Seldis died and I went to him with the idea of having some special gesture in honor of Henry, who had been supportive of the Grunwald. He loved the idea, and we got a Henry Moore book. He found money through the Times [Mirror] Foundation.

GALM

So when he went on to become involved with the Ahmanson Foundation, there were never any purchases through Ahmanson?

BLOCH

Nothing significant. As I say, he's continued to be involved with the library, and that was his selective approach. He became very much committed to the County Museum. So the major gifts from the Ahmanson go to the County, not to us. He remained a friend, but it wasn't the same kind of thing. But Chancellor Young did formally set up a budget, which he enlarged from time to time. When I needed additional help in the gallery, he certainly came through at all times. So he was available to me on that basis, although it wasn't the very personal basis that existed before. The budgetary thing was something he usually turned over to somebody else. It was Saxon, as I say, who organized the budgetary change, and that, I think, at that time included the Museum of Cultural History. Their exhibition budget and our budget all went into one place. However, I think that has changed since.

GALM

But you did have a sum that you were given for acquisitions each year?

BLOCH

That was through Chancellor Young, formalizing the situation I had with Murphy before, which was casual and personal.

GALM

And then that continued on through?

BLOCH

Absolutely. That continued on. We could always count on, I think it was eventually something like $12,000 a year, which is nothing today, but it was fine for us. It brought in the bread-and-butter material that we needed, so we gradually could add by judicious buying. Today that's absolutely impossible. But we already had done all that, so that if you look today and value the materials that are there that we bought for that bread-and-butter money, you just couldn't duplicate the collection. There was only one condition we ever placed on the collection. We didn't try to buy, first of all, where popularity was high. We'd buy when opportunity came along, and we bought in terms of quality. Quality and opportunity were the two areas we worked in. The result is we did very, very well. Now, when it came to trying to get anything very special and we were supposed to go out and find the money, by that time we had a Friends group. They would help us as far as they could go, but it was always a small group. The question of buying something major— As I remember, at one time something came up for $25,000. We couldn't raise the money. First of all, there was already at that time a group at the County that was completely dedicated to the County Museum, most of the collectors. Ours was a small group of collectors and did not have that kind of funding to help us. And because of the university's arrangement in trying to evolve and gather moneys for the foundation, we couldn't go to those people. That's forbidden. We were even more limited. So we didn't have much opportunity to find large funds in the community.

GALM

When Franklin Murphy left, was it made pretty clear to you that that was the end of your relationship with him, that you were not to approach him?

BLOCH

Oh, no. It was never that. No, no. Franklin has always remained a good friend, and he's always approachable. But I think in his mind the business of his supporting the university was going to be limited to one particular area. He loves the [William Andrews] Clark [Memorial] Library. He always said that if he had his life to live over again, he would be the librarian of the Clark- he loves that sort of thing. And that pleased me. Because we used to talk over here in the library, me and Wilbur [J.] Smith used to talk often about what we would do if there was money available, and develop incunabula was part of it. When Franklin Murphy began to be generous with us, he was generous with the library at the same time. He was doing both at that time. But when he left the university— I never questioned him, so I don't know. It seems to me that he made up his mind he would concentrate on the library. I could approach him, but it was a rare moment indeed that I could go to him with the hope that we would buy an important original print.

GALM

In 1974— We've mentioned the "Twenty Years of Acquisition: [Evolution of a University Study Collection]" show, but that was also the point at which the Grunwald became the center rather than the foundation.

BLOCH

That's right. That was precisely at that time.

GALM

What was the background on that? How did you get that accomplished?

BLOCH

Well, I think I've hinted, if not said, during our discussions that I always felt that the foundation was—

GALM

A misnomer.

BLOCH

Yes, and a stumbling block. I not only felt it, but knew it from other people who said, "Well, you've got money." As long as Saidee was around, she liked people to think that we were getting money through a foundation, just as the Grunwald family always assumed that I was appointed to this university to be their curator. It was something they just delighted in doing. That there was no payment involved was something that never occurred to them. But the idea of getting any gifts from people was, in my opinion, impossible or very difficult. If, as Fred Grunwald indicated in his original gift, everything that would be given to the university would come under the heading Grunwald Foundation, what happens to the collector? I had to finally set up a complete understanding with all the collectors I could reach that anything that would be given would be properly labeled whenever the material was exhibited as "gift of"— regardless. That this was simply the umbrella under which everything came. There were people who didn't like Mr. Grunwald. There were people in this community who, feeling what was going on at the County, didn't like galleries that were named after individuals, and the County lost out on several occasions, such as the [Lucius P.] Green collection. There were people who didn't like this business of labeling galleries with people's names, meaning that they would be buried in the midst of all this. But I think we managed very well with the collectors we approached, who understood gradually what was happening. But I always felt that a change in name was important. The "center" title was used in other areas, particularly for ORUs, although we weren't talking about ORUs in those days. But I knew it existed. There were institutes and there were centers, and I felt that what we were doing was appropriate to that activity. Because we were involved in teaching, not just collecting. We were using that for teaching purposes; we had programs going. Whatever we did was much more appropriate to the university than even the gallery. The gallery was just putting on exhibitions. It was a rare moment that students were used to put together exhibitions. Well, that was primarily our purpose. The idea that this would be a stage for me was not in my thinking at all. If you look at all the publications, the most I ever did was write the introduction or foreword and try to train the students to learn what it is to do an exhibition, what it means to do the research toward an exhibition, all of the kind of experience. We may go into that another time when we talk about how this was done and how some of these students fared in that kind of relationship, how that really works and does work well. I think we did it successfully. We did need something more than just a foundation, which meant nothing. It came to Mr. Grunwald through the Achenbach Foundation [for the Graphic Arts] in San Francisco. But I must tell you that that was a completely different setup. That was within a museum. At that time they had a director. After that director died, they then made a curatorial thing out of it, but at the time that the Achenbachs [Hazel and Moore S.] were involved, that was to be an autonomous thing with its own director. It was the collections of Mr. and Mrs. Achenbach, and since they had no children, eventually all the money, as well as everything they had, went to that center.

1.13. TAPE NUMBER: VII, SIDE ONE APRIL 24, 1987

GALM

Last time when we concluded the tape I had asked you about the name change for the Grunwald from [Grunwald Graphic Arts] Foundation to [Grunwald] Center [for the Graphic Arts]. You certainly talked about the reason why a change was in order and perhaps also the reason why [Fred] Grunwald had wanted the foundation name in the beginning, but that it wasn't a workable title for you. I guess what I would still like to perhaps understand is the actual sequence of events and people that you had to go to get that change accomplished. Off the tape you've been going through some of the correspondence of that period. I wonder if you could sort of, for the record, give a sense of just what was necessary to finally achieve that change. It wasn't simple.

BLOCH

First, let me make this clear. This wasn't just something I was doing on my own. The university itself was very concerned about the whole museum picture, as a museum picture was beginning to unfold before them. The beginning was fairly simple: we just had art galleries and so on. But in the meantime we were involved with a collection of ethnic materials begun under Dr. [Franklin D.] Murphy. The acquisition of materials of various kinds relating to art and culture was beginning to really become rather a large responsibility for the university. So it wasn't just my problem. This was a problem the university was beginning to realize was beginning to unfold before it, and they wanted to act on it. So I just don't want anyone to feel that I was somehow at the forefront of this. I was not. I have in front of me a letter of October 7, 1968, which was directed to Vice-Chancellor [Paul 0.] Preole, Vice-Chancellor [Foster H.] Sherwood, and Dean [Charles] Speroni from Chancellor [Charles E.] Young. There was one part in this in which he says, "You will recall it has been my view that the graphic arts and ethnic museum functions are really academically oriented." Oh, let me start at the beginning. [reading] From time to time in the last three months, we have talked about possible modifications in the organizational relations of the [UCLA] Museum and Laboratories of Ethnic Arts and Technology, the art galleries, and the Grunwald Graphic Arts Foundation. You will recall it has been my view that the graphic arts and ethnic museum functions are really academically oriented—that is to say, an integral part of the teaching and research function growing out of materials owned and managed by us for these purposes. The art galleries serve a different even though related function, putting together exhibits for exhibitions in our galleries directed very heavily, if not exclusively, toward the outside community. This directive was, in effect, to try to create a functioning arrangement that would more properly reflect the purposes of these various areas developing in our midst. It was no longer just simply the art galleries and their fairly simple condition. It was at that particular time that my name was mentioned as being appointed director of the center or museum. Actually, that was the first time I think that the word "center" was used instead of "foundation." We were still a foundation at that time. Nothing really came of all of these discussions. I mean, these were all discussions, and somehow they were finally put to rest and we just went on trying to manage within the not very clear structure we were dealing with at that time. Which resulted in a certain amount of abrasion and conflict as we tried to manage in our separate ways. Clarification is what we were all aiming for, and that was certainly typical of all of these things. It wasn't until 1972 that Chancellor Young finally wrote [a letter] to the Grunwald family in which he discusses the term foundation and the Grunwald collection. In this letter of October 1972, he said: [reading] As you know, the term foundation, as applied both to the physical facility where the Grunwald and other collections are kept and to the Grunwald collection itself, is not a descriptive term, has proved confusing, and in some ways has discouraged the contribution of other important collections which Mr. Grunwald hoped would follow from his initial gift. In consideration of our mutual desire and concern that the facility named for Mr. Grunwald become a true center for the enjoyment and study of the graphic arts, that other donors be encouraged to add to the collections held within that center, and that perpetual recognition be assured Mr. Grunwald's name for his generosity to the university, we have agreed as follows: that the name of the physical facility be changed from the Grunwald Graphic Arts Foundation to the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, and that the name of the Grunwald collection be changed from the Grunwald Graphic Arts Foundation to the Grunwald Collection of Graphic Art. This was simply to inform the family and to get their approval, which was received at that time. It was on April 10, 1973, that a formal announcement went out, the announcement about the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, created at UCLA, with me named as director. That was the press release at that time. But with that, of course, there were still some lingering problems which even I couldn't realize. I assumed that in a sense we were an organized research unit, because we were doing exactly that. I lingered under that misconception for some years and only found out really about the time that I was leaving that indeed this hadn't formally taken place. That was the one little area that would have given us the kind of autonomy we needed in order to operate, but without that we were left open to, once again, the discussion of whether we should be put under the gallery. Now, we shared budgets, that was true—at least exhibition budget, not operating budget. And that was okay. Because after all, the exhibitions were held in the [Frederick S.] Wight [Art] Gallery building. But not having some understanding that what we were doing was being totally recognized, that our relationship to other branches of the university on an academic level, planning exhibitions in collaboration with other research units— which indeed we were doing—was within our sphere— It hadn't been formally done. So once again the whole thing was thrown up in the air, with the new director of the gallery [Edith A. Torelli] assuming that the new director succeeding me should really be called a curator, working under her direction. She was attempting to gain accreditation of the gallery as a museum and desperately needed a collection to make this happen since there were no collections within the gallery. And indeed the accreditation, which has only happened very recently, could not have happened without that collection being there.

GALM

Now, when you were trying to separate yourself off from the gallery, was there a strong ally that you had in the Museum of Cultural History, since you were both trying to accomplish the same thing? Did you have any discussions with anyone over there to try to join forces or was it a separate?

BLOCH

No, no, no. This was a separate thing. The ethnic laboratory which had become the Museum of Cultural History, was not operating in the College of Fine Arts. It was operating in another college.

GALM

I see. [The College of] Letters and Science.

BLOCH

That's right. Anthropology. The head of the museum was, and still is, Christopher [B.] Donnan, who's connected with the Department of Anthropology. I think that the new dean in the College of Fine Arts felt that that all should probably be under his bailiwick, but that didn't happen. There was enough of that going on to prevent that from occurring. And that was of course one of Dr. Murphy's pet babies anyhow. During the years that we were struggling, back in the sixties, for some kind of reorganizational scheme, Christopher Donnan wasn't there. That was Ralph [C.] Altman's time. He never was, as I understand it, more than just a curator. The title director, which sort of was also a key to the whole thing, really couldn't happen until the director of the art gallery had retired. There was constant friction on another level, and I was told at one point there could only be one director. This made this kind of thing extremely difficult. I remember one time even speaking to one of our vice-chancellors on just this matter. He said, "Well, we don't care. You can call yourself president if you want to." I said, "But that's not the point. It has to be an official kind of scheme in order to make it work." I think he couldn't understand that all of these things, which may seem not major, had to do with an administrative scheme of things and had to be done. But no, there was no collusion between the Grunwald Center and the Museum of Cultural History, because I felt those were two different things in two different colleges and that their responsibilities should be equally clarified as well as ours. We didn't act together on this. The university was well aware of the problem, as you can see from Chancellor Young's letter at a much earlier period. And I know he was struggling mightily with this over the years.

GALM

How did Dean Speroni fit into all of this?

BLOCH

Well, as the dean of the college, from my standpoint, in a sense he was responsible for recommending my appointment year to year. The authority was vested in him to recommend my appointment year after year to the Grunwald Center, or whatever it was at that time. Unlike Chancellor Murphy, who liked to be personally involved, Chancellor Young more or less delegated some of that authority to Speroni. If I had a discussion, something I needed or wanted, I would go to Speroni, and he would in turn relate this to the chancellor, which didn't mean that I couldn't direct myself to the chancellor on some acquisitional problem or whatever. I must say Speroni was remarkably generous and deeply interested. He came to every meeting, joined in every effort we made to make ourselves known in the community and the evolution of the Friends [of the Graphic Arts at UCLA], and so on. These were things the chancellor couldn't take the time to be involved in, and that's why some of that was delegated to him. But I couldn't have had a better friend who really tried very hard to do all this.

GALM

In going through your file— Did I misunderstand? You were talking about a resignation that you were considering at this period. Is that—?

BLOCH

Yes. I mean, not that I hadn't considered it before, because the stresses were great, although I didn't realize then how great the stresses could be. These stresses between the gallery and the Grunwald Center were sometimes a little bit difficult to digest. Because, after all, I was teaching full-time, and the complaints would come to me from my assistants in the gallery that this couldn't be done. An exhibition schedule was difficult to maintain—there was interference. And I might even point to one particular moment of interference. We at one time agreed to do an exhibition of Picasso's prints. This was in the spring of 1970, so this was a little preceding this moment when I— Something else came up and I decided I just about couldn't deal with it anymore. It was an exhibition called "Picasso: 347 Gravures," which had to do with an exhibition based on Picasso's having produced 347 prints all in one season. Here the old man really planned to do one or two prints, had his printers come all the way out to his chateau, his villa, and they ended up spending about four months there as the old man's energies began to unfold. It was pretty much of an autobiographical show based on the great passions of Picasso, seeing himself as a satyr and all of this kind of thing. We're all familiar with Picasso's great energy and great virility, and this series of prints ranged all the way from fairly— There were absolutely marvelous drawing in the prints? the great flow of line remained absolutely unchanged all through those years. And the more he got involved in this, the more the personal passion began to unfold, and some of them became fairly erotic, maybe twenty or something of those. But if you're involved in any way with the art of Picasso, that part of it doesn't offend. You're absolutely intrigued by the aesthetic part of it and the fact that this is Picasso, this is the man himself reflecting his own image over and over again and his own feelings, his own passions. So if you remove those particular prints, some twenty of them, from the main exhibition, you really have a more or less diluting the blood of Picasso. It was quite fascinating. But of course in some of the exhibitions that were being held with these, there was a publication. They would have a sort of a separate folder with those prints slipped in or slipped out depending on the situation. And I imagine it was a problem that many museums faced as to what to do about this. When we agreed to do the exhibition and the prints arrived, I called in several members among the painters and graphic artists in the art department for a consultation as to what we should do. I felt personally that we should exhibit all of the prints. Why shouldn't the students be exposed to the whole picture, in order to understand Picasso as the man and the artist? They agreed with me and of course were terribly impressed with this production of this old man. Mr. [Frederick S.] Wight became very nervous about all of this. He didn't say very much. (Actually it was a Grunwald Foundation show. ) We were simply discussing it, and we had more or less decided we really should try to show the whole collection and not deprive the students of this chance to see all of this at once. Somehow or other, in my absence, one evening prior to the show really being organized and set up, Mr. Wight somehow got a key to the Grunwald Center and removed those prints without consultation and sent them to New York, where there was to be the next show. That's the kind of thing that I felt was not easily digestible. It could have been discussed and should have been, and not a covert action on his part. That was the kind of thing— And yet, you know, this wasn't part of his personality, not even in his own art. I mean, it was not long after that he exhibited a photography show which was on his part quite a daring show, since those things have nothing to do with art.

GALM

So who was he protecting?

BLOCH

I have no idea. I think it was a sudden fear that there might be screams of outrage in the community or something like that. I'm sure that was what was in his mind. I don't think he communicated with anybody. I think it was just concern on his part that this might not be acceptable. But even in those years this sort of thing was no problem. And I felt it was really a decision that had to be not a personal one. I had consulted with my colleagues. He knew about that and should have entered into the discussion himself.

GALM

How did you respond to his action?

BLOCH

I was outraged, but I tried to realize that he was doing it in order to avoid any outrage or screams of protest in the community. I felt, after all, it was his gallery. But, after all, it was my exhibition and my responsibility, and if I was to assume the responsibility after consultation with the faculty, that's the way it should have been. But I didn't go out to—

GALM

Do you recall who was loaning the material?

BLOCH

It was a traveling show. It may have been the Museum of Modern Art [New York]. I don't recall at this point who was circulating the show, but I think it must have been the Museum of Modern Art.

GALM

So when you were considering a resignation, it was really a resignation as curator of the prints?

BLOCH

Curator and director, yes. I mean, it seemed there was always something similar to this that would always get in the way. As I say, it might have been a question of planning or something of the sort. There was always something that offended our relationship from time to time and made it very difficult to work. If that was all I had to do it might have been less of a problem, but that wasn't all I had to do. That was a service responsibility, and I did feel that something needed to be done organizationally to give me the kind of space I needed to get the job done. Now, I'm not saying it was always this Picasso kind of problem. That's only an indication of what sometimes would get into the act. Because basically what we were trying to do was involve the students in a thoroughgoing exploration of graphic arts.

GALM

With the announcement and with the push to change it to a center and that there would be a director named, was it always completely understood that you were going to be the director?

BLOCH

Oh, yes. I think there was never any—

GALM

Any possibility of them—

BLOCH

Appointing someone else? No. Because it was a service responsibility; it wasn't a matter of my having a paid appointment.

GALM

So, again, it was just a name. It didn't affect your salary.

BLOCH

No, absolutely not. I mean, there was at that time, I think, a stipend added, which is what anybody gets who works at any administrative post in the university on a service level. No, I think they were quite sure they had a bargain. [laughter]

GALM

I'm sure they did. One of the things that I wanted to talk about today were the many shows that you did with students and with your classes and such. We've talked about a few of them—like we talked about "Made in California," that particular show. But there were earlier shows, and I think you talked about the one "The Special Artist of the American Wars." Was that the first one really that you did that came out of a class project?

BLOCH

Yes, that's the first one, April 1959. But even before that time, it was my feeling—and certainly I was encouraged to think that way—regardless of all of the little problems that ensued, that those problems were to be expected. That's all part of the challenge in any job. Everything is not presented on a silver platter; you do have to go through it. Especially since what I was trying to do was essentially fairly unique, certainly unique for UCLA. There were similar—similar but not exact- situations that developed at Harvard [University] and Yale [University] and even Princeton [University], where there were collections of this kind. My initial experience at Harvard involved the work we were doing at the Fogg Art Museum, which was one of the great collections in a university in this country. There the teachers were involved in the actual collecting process. Many of them had curatorial appointments; even the director was a member of the faculty. It was very closely integrated, and objects were brought to class or we went to the Fogg and examined original materials. I don't think they went so far as to put on exhibitions. That kind of deepening involvement was not so. It was no museum training course. The object was simply to confront the students with works of art by people who were themselves experts or connoisseurs in the field. It was a unique experience there. What we did was one step farther, and that was to actually develop a teaching program that would be allied to the collections. (Which we were in the process of developing—theirs were extant collections. ) We actually went so far as to make the Grunwald Center, as far as I was concerned, a focal point for teaching and to make teaching more effective by exposing the students to objects of art, in addition to the classroom courses, and to go even one step farther and actually involve them in putting together exhibitions. They actually handled the material and came to know the material more intimately. This was not to seduce the students into a museum career. It was simply to give them the kind of experience which I had at the Institute of Fine Arts [New York University] in New York, where we had a so-called museum training program. But what we got out of it for the most part was not the stimulation to become museum people. It was a stimulation provided by the experience of knowing how a museum operates, what it means to put an exhibition together, what it means to do the kind of research toward a museum experience, which not many people know. So it was quite exciting. That was the one thing I could do here, and indeed I was given all the leeway to do it. Remember what I'm saying, and we will probably be getting into this a little further on. We were not urging the development of a museum program. That was ultimately to be the sort of thing that Dr. Murphy believed in and wanted to happen, through the gallery, through the Grunwald Center, through the Museum of Cultural History. That we would actually have a museology curriculum. Not a major program, but that students who really then wanted to proceed to a museum career would be able to get a certificate, let's say, added to their M.A.program—the sort of thing that would enable them to use that as a means to getting a museum job if that was the direction they wanted to go. But that's a whole other story, which we can get into. What we're speaking about is the Grunwald developing its exhibitions. Beginning in the fall of 1956, we began to do a series of exhibitions. I remember telling you before that John Paul Jones and I would work with Mr. Grunwald and we would do these series of shows. But finally in April of 1959 I developed an American seminar exhibition project out of the Grunwald with a group of several students, which was called "The Special Artists of the American Wars." This was not just an art project, but it also involved the history of American wars. Some of it was material I myself had gathered because of my interest in the Civil War and the Spanish-American War and that sort of thing. Each student was given one segment, one war, to follow through, and we were able to borrow materials. This was one of the first times we really went afield with some funding to borrow materials from New York, the Library of Congress, or whatever, to put it together. There were some artists who themselves had been involved in World War I or II who were still around and gave us assistance. This was still in the old building, so this was not in the gallery itself.

GALM

In the hallways.

BLOCH

But were in the hallways, in the cases. We worked with one of the design people who was involved in exhibition design, so that the students also had that experience, seeing how installation took place. It's interesting to note that among the students who were involved at that time were Henry [T.] Hopkins, who later on became the director of the San Francisco Museum [of Modern Art] and is now connected with the Weisman collection [Frederick R. Weisman Foundation], and Larry Curry, who became the curator of American art at the [Los Angeles] County Museum [of Art] and then went on to Detroit. So some of this, I have always felt, rubbed off a bit. It was their first experience with a museum activity—an "exercise" I liked to call it. And it was a very beautiful show. We still have photographs relating to that show, which went all the way from the American Revolution to Korea. Now, still within that period we were doing a number of exhibitions either drawn from private collections or from Mr. Grunwald's collection, single artists and so on. But the students were always very much aware of what we were doing and consulted on various aspects of it. The next great exhibition project was in 1963, and that was called "The American Illustrator." That was another seminar project which involved a number of students. Then I'm trying to see from my own records where we went from there. There were some of the exhibitions that were even single shows, like "Picasso: Linocuts, 1958-1963" [1963]. The catalog was prepared by a graduate student, a single student. "The Hopfers of Augsburg" was a show of 1966 that Richard [A.] Vogler and my assistant did. I should point out that all of the Grunwald Foundation and Center employees, the people who came to work for us, were never outside people. They were always graduate students, students who came to me with an idea that they wanted to have a day-to-day experience in operating a museum responsibility. One of the first people we had was William [E.] Landon, who worked first half-time and then full-time for me, and he was the only employee I had. He was a master's candidate. He eventually went on to a permanent job at the [Henry E.] Huntington [Library and Art Gallery (San Marino, California)], until he retired a couple of years ago. But from the very beginning we never used anyone but graduate students. Now, that didn't mean they necessarily had to be from art history. Richard Vogler came from the English department, but he had a great interest in graphic arts, and to this very day he operates this way. That's part of his life. He's the [George] Cruikshank expert. In this case he did a study of the Hopfers of Augsburg, who were the first etchers of the sixteenth century. And these, of course, were areas in which I certainly played a role in stimulating their interest. They were people who would stay on the job as long as was necessary for them to gain the experience they wanted, with the understanding it was not a permanent job. They knew that ultimately they would have to move on, to finish their own work, as certainly was the case with Vogler and others. But some of them stayed as long as six years and could rise. I mean, the positions were finally titles we set up. Assistant to the director was an administrative assistant. The assistant to the curator—and I had both titles—was someone who acted on a curatorial basis and worked with me on acquisition and that sort of thing. Then we would have a preparator. The preparator most often came out of the design ranks. Those appointments were appointments that the administrative assistant and the curatorial assistant would help me in discovering the right kind of person to do the job, and they would administer that person's work, so there was a delegation of authority. But under no circumstances was it ever my intention, or certainly not an action, to hire people from the outside.

GALM

Did some of these people that came on the staff come directly from your classes?

BLOCH

Sometimes.

BLOCH

And did you ever approach any of them to see if they were interested in working for you?

BLOCH

As I recall, it wasn't that kind of thing. They might come and work on a part-time basis, even volunteer, and always came to me with the idea that they were interested in a position if and when it was available. I don't remember really singling out people for this purpose— it was a kind of chemistry that eventually evolved. Most of the people that came to work had been students of mine who had taken the courses in prints or drawings. Remember there was a whole series of courses in the history of prints, and then there was a series of courses in the history of drawings, with seminars and so on. These were people who had gone through that and were entranced with the subject and felt they wanted to know more by being actively involved. They were involved through the seminars by being on the scene and observing what was going on in the Center, and they would then let me know that they would like a half-time job or a full-time job, depending on how their studies were moving. My concern was that their primary concern should be to get their work finished on an academic level. My job was to see to it that either it was a half-time or a full-time job, depending on where they were, and if they wanted to make that sacrifice that was something we discussed. It has always been my modus operandi to be very closely involved with students on a professional level as well as in classroom procedure, and it has continued that way. Now, going down through this— "The English Image" [1968] was a show we invited William Wilson to curate. He was the organizer and he did the catalog. He had been at one time a student of mine and an assistant, but he had gone on to be associated with the Los Angeles Times as a reviewer. I'm just giving you an idea of the general—

GALM

Right. How did he get that job at the Times? Did he go directly on to the Times or had he been a critic elsewhere?

BLOCH

No, I don't think he was a critic elsewhere. He had been my—

GALM

He was a junior critic, of course, under [Henry J.] Seldis.

BLOCH

That's right. That's it. I remember the day he came to me and said he'd been offered that position and should he take it. I indicated that that was a great opportunity, and so he did. Whether he taught in [UCLA] Extension during that period I am not certain. He may have also been doing that and may have done occasional reviewing. I can't remember the details of that. There were several collections we exhibited. Among these lists are exhibitions we took as loan shows. There were traveling shows like the Mary Cassatt show ["Graphic Art of Mary Cassatt" (1968)]. Then as I look down the list, in February 1969 we did "An Exhibition of the Views of Venice in the Graphic Arts" [1969]. This was the first time that an M.A.subject also became an exhibition project, and the thesis was in a sense the catalog for the show. That was a unique experience for us. That was a show Paul [J.] Karlstrom did. Now, Paul Karlstrom was working for me, and like many others, Paul Karlstrom is probably the more interesting case, because he started out as a preparator and ended up becoming my administrative assistant. He went right through the ranks, as it were, to that job. After the M.A. he went on directly to his Ph.D. in American art, and when that was completed, he assumed the job as [regional] director of the Archives of American Art [Smithsonian Institution], which he still has.

GALM

Now, in something like that, would he have had a faculty committee for that?

BLOCH

Absolutely.

GALM

And would you have been the chair of that committee?

BLOCH

I was the chair of that one. That didn't necessarily follow. There were other exhibitions— Because the idea was unique to us. I think it was about that time that [J.] LeRoy Davidson was chairman, I seem to recall, and he liked the idea immensely. But we did other exhibitions. For instance, "The Graphic Art of F61ix Vallotton," 1972, was an M.A.exhibition project that was chaired by Julius [D.] Kaplan. So was "The Graphic Art of Andre Dunoyer de Segonzac: [A Tribute]" of 1975. That was also under Kaplan. So it didn't have to be something that came directly from me. It had become a pattern at that particular time. It wasn't a formal pattern; it was just an idea that occurred to us. It was a wonderful opportunity for the people involved. The young woman who did the Segonzac show ended up getting a fellowship at Stanford [University] to go on for a Ph.D. there. The young woman who worked on the Felix Vallotton show went on to become recognized abroad as the Félix Vallotton expert and went to the University of London and did exhibitions there—not only in London, but I mean on the continent—based on the catalog she produced here. So it provided a stepping-stone, a publication of some substance beyond an M. A., which is usually just a paper.

GALM

So the Vallotton was Ashley St. James?

BLOCH

Ashley St. James. But then as you go on— I think one of the most important shows we did of this kind, one of the most ambitious ones— We spoke about the "Made in California," which was also, in my opinion, one of our more impressive shows, an important show. That was 1971. That was based on a seminar.

GALM

What about that 1970 show "Studies in Drawings: [Selections] from the [Milton and Cecile] Hebald Collection"?

BLOCH

Yes, I'm glad you mentioned that, because that was the first one of any consequence that we did on old master drawings. That was a wonderful opportunity, because Milton [E.] Hebald, a sculptor who was long a friend of mine, left his collection with us on long-term loan with the understanding that we could freely do an exhibition, making our own attributions and that sort of thing. With drawing collectors you do have this problem, particularly with old master drawings. Old master drawing collectors are a particularly sensitive lot: they like to think they have purchased a masterpiece and don't like anybody to reduce its stature in any way. But Milton Hebald wasn't like that. He himself had a kind of scholarly interest in all of these, and he had picked these things up during his life abroad (he lives in Rome). So he left the drawings with us, and we had twelve students working on this project, including some of the best students on a graduate level. They weren't all my students; they were students from throughout the department. I've made a list of some of those people, and several of them were Ph.D. candidates. One stands out rather clearly in my memory, Dewey [F.] Mosby, who now is the director of the Picker Art Gallery at Colgate University and who left UCLA to get a full scholarship at Harvard. I remember this quite distinctly because for many of these people it was the first time they'd really been involved with old master drawings, which is a very fragile area, an area where not many even seasoned scholars like to tread because of the conflicts of attribution and so on. But they were young and fresh and eager and very talented young people with great imaginations, and they jumped into this project with a great deal of energy. I can still remember the battles that went on among them in arguing over attributions, examining each other with great care and energy, and I standing back and watching this. I think it was an amazing performance. We invited Hans [H.] Brummer, who at that time was a young assistant professor of art history who had come from Sweden and who was himself working on the Queen Christina collection and who had particular interest in artists like Giulio Romano and so on. We invited him to be a guest contributor to the catalog. I can still remember that when he submitted his entry, there was a great deal of discussion about this: they criticized the writing, they criticized the contribution—to the point that they compelled me to confront him with the problem, you see. He was very upset by this and offered to withdraw. A lot of emotions were raised in that period. It was a very healthy kind of thing. Mosby, I remembered him particularly because it was shortly after that that he was given the offer to go to Harvard on a fellowship. When he got there he said that Agnes Mongan had read the catalog of the Hebald show and had seen his entry and assumed that he was an authority—at least he said so—and that she thought that he should pursue his work in drawings. And indeed he did and published, I believe, an article under her direction. He said, "She thinks I'm an authority. "

1.14. TAPE NUMBER: VII, SIDE TWO APRIL 24, 1987

GALM

Professor Bloch, you were talking about students who had participated in the Hebald show that you did, "Studies in Drawings." I believe you were going to mention another student who had participated in that show.

BLOCH

There are actually many, many stories that emerge from that particular experience, specifically because each of the students was such a distinct personality and, as I say, among the very best graduate students we had. They were all drawn to this project, and if you think of twelve students working together in close communication, this could evoke a great many emotional considerations. I should say this in prefacing this: the students were encouraged to make all the contacts they needed for their research. It was the kind of research project on a complete graduate scale that any student would do on a specific subject. They were given several drawings to work on, but there were some rather significant drawings that would have merited an article on their own in a scholarly publication. So they were encouraged to do their research in great depth. In the case of someone like Merle Schipper, she was in contact with a curator at the Louvre on her particular subject and eventually became so close to it and so impressed that curator that when she went to Paris she was welcomed as a colleague. This is precisely what I wanted to happen. I wanted these students not to think of this as just a student project but as something on a very serious level. I always underlined to them, particularly when we went into publication, that they were responsible for whatever they had to say, that they had to stand by what they had to say and their own discovery and they had to prove it. It wasn't something that would just land in the circular file. It was the sort of thing that would be forever under their name, and so they were responsible for the character of the writing, for the content, and so on. And this particular group indeed carried all of this out with a great deal of energy and care. I can remember one other student, who was rather new to the game and who— A little more temperamental than some of the others. But the one aspect of research that she particularly became attracted to was the actual research, the ferreting out of information and of course the conclusion. She was an M.A.candidate. This was eventually to become her way of life. She found that the research and the discovery was exactly what she wanted to do in life. She didn't want to become a museum person; she wanted to become a researcher. In those days this was not the sort of thing you found as a career. She eventually went on to New York where she had a project at the Metropolitan [Museum of Art]. She was in the American art field. This was Sandra [K.] Feldman I'm speaking about. She was not that excited about even completing her M. A., although I pointed out to her that if she wanted to pursue a museum career, she had to at least have a master's degree. But after she had the experience at the Metropolitan working on a catalog in the American department, she decided that really she wanted to just pursue a career as a researcher working with the galleries. And that's precisely what she proceeded to do. She became first-rate at this and continues to do this as one of the best-paid researchers for one of the main galleries in New York, and that came of this kind of experience. I'm mentioning this in detail simply because there were all kinds of things that could come from this kind of experience. It wasn't just casual. For many of them they had found a direction they wanted. It doesn't always come out in a course. They might become attached to a subject, such as Larry Curry was. He found American art was something he wanted to be in after taking the courses and deciding to take an M.A.in the field. But for others, the various aspects of a kind of museum experience without necessarily being in a museum, the approach to research in particular— The particular problems of research come out in working with original materials, and we were able to provide that. That's why I constantly emphasize the fact that what the Grunwald was able to do was provide a rather unique experience (and I had the freedom to do that) that went beyond what you will find at Harvard, Princeton, or Yale, where they did not have courses attached to their program, not in prints, not in drawings. What I discovered eventually is that a curator at, let's say, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston would act as a kind of catalyst for students. She would have students come there and work under her direction at the museum. This was done right here at the university and was an offshoot of the courses or directly related to the courses or seminars we were doing. It was much more compact, a much more organized kind of concept. Which wasn't done deliberately—it gradually grew and it happened as we went from one project to another.

GALM

Does this type of seminar attract an older student?

BLOCH

Not necessarily. Oh, no. I mean, among the twelve students on the Hebald there were some older students, but there were many very young students.

GALM

So there's no particular—?

BLOCH

Oh, no. It has nothing to do with age, and of course that never troubled me. As long as a student could deal with the subject, we had them of all ages. And that was the fun of it. In fact, the older student frequently was the most mature in really getting at the subject and frequently served as a driving force toward the younger members of the group, who tended, perhaps, in some cases not to be as seriously involved. Certainly with that group, one was interacting with the other. That was also true of the "Made in California" show, which you have already mentioned, in 1971, where each of the students had to really go out and interview the directors of the various workshops. So they actually saw how the workshop operated, and of course we did also involve Ed [Edward] Ruscha in producing the poster and the cover design for that. I see one name, Patrick [H.] Ela, Pat Ela has been with the Museum of Contemporary Art here for some years—still is. This was a completely contemporary seminar. So, again, it wasn't restricted to an area in which I might be particularly interested. I always wanted to make that clear. True, there were some areas that were kind of favorites of mine which the students themselves wanted to join. There was always that feeling in some parts. They wanted to get close to what their professor was interested in and to carry out a project along those lines. That sometimes happened, but it was never the sort of thing I enforced. The only thing I could do sometimes was to provide the material if we didn't have it at the center. I for a long time have been interested in American drawings. They knew about that, and so they wanted to get closer to that. So I would open up my file, my personal file, to them. That was what "The American Personality: [The Artist- Illustrator of Life in the United States, 1860-1930]" was. It was perhaps the most ambitious exhibition we had done up to that time. That was the 1976 show, which I think was the first time we were really involved on a budgetary level with the new director of the art gallery, Gerald [J.] Nordland. He, more or less being in charge of the gallery budget, made every effort to impress us with the idea that we could, if we wanted to, do an ambitious catalog, and that was the first one of that kind. So the door was open to do something we weren't really able to do before. Along with the provision made by Charles Speroni to find the money to send the students east, those students who were participating in it back east to make the final selections. Actually, as those things went, they made selections which they then had to come back and persuade the director of the center were suitable for the total exhibition. After all, someone had to make the final overall judgment. But it was a very interesting experience for all of them. There again I forget how many students we had. [counting to himself] One, two, three, four— About nine students were involved in that, some of them Ph.D. candidates. I see at least three that I recognize here.

GALM

Did students do all the essays that appeared in the catalog?

BLOCH

The students did all the essays for this catalog.

GALM

I have the catalog with me if that might refresh your memory.

BLOCH

I should again point out that although almost all the students were art history candidates and students. There's at least one student here who came out of the English department, who was a Ph.D. candidate who wanted to participate in this show. That was Teona [Tone] Gneiting, who did "Literature and Art for the Masses: [The Dime Novel]." Judy [L.] Larson, who's listed here, did the work on children's literature. She eventually did her M.A. on children's literature and went on to become personally deeply interested in illustration, which is what the whole show was about. "The American Personality" had to deal with the history of American illustration. She became particularly interested in the field and has since devoted herself to this. She's done an exhibition in Santa Barbara on this ["Enchanted Images: American Children's Illustration, 1850-1925"] at the invitation of the Santa Barbara Museum [of Art] and more recently was involved with a Canadian museum which has a great collection of American illustration. She organized a show for them in which I was invited to do a brief introduction. She is now the curator at the High Museum [of Art] in Atlanta. Basically she's continued to base her career on her knowledge of American illustration, and she's widely consulted. The museum in Canada is the Glenbow Museum in Alberta. So that's another example of how an experience of this kind sometimes provided a base of future operations for a student by which they gradually increase their knowledge and move out in the field. Phyllis Peet, who's listed here, was at that time my administrative assistant, and she played a major role in helping to organize all of this material. I even invited another student [Patricia Trenton], who was on the outside but who was a graduate student, to act as a kind of editor. That didn't work too well. They really wanted me to act as the editor, but I thought that another student who had considerable knowledge in editing might be suitable. Evidently that didn't all work on a personality basis, but it was, again, an interesting experience. But Phyllis Peet has just gotten her Ph.D, just been awarded.

GALM

Was it more the fact that they perhaps were unwilling to take the editorial direction from a fellow student?

BLOCH

It was that. Plus, I imagine— This individual's a rather strong person, and they just didn't like to be handled that way. They preferred my gentle hand I guess, [laughter] which wasn't always too gentle. Certainly having them travel, I didn't go with them. They were on their own. That was the whole purpose. Some of them went together, but they were really on their own to continue their research at the Library of Congress or wherever it was necessary to look for the materials they needed to illustrate their articles. Then they would come back with slides and present a defense of this, and then the final selection would be made. As I said, the final selection had to be done by one person, but it was based largely on what they themselves had selected. Many of the things that they started out with and ended up with were things that were already here, things that I was able to provide. I remember even at one point, actually, they found something they liked that we couldn't borrow and we couldn't buy, and so I bought it so that they could have it. Anything to make it work out well. This particular catalog—as you see, it bears a foreword by Chancellor Young—was so particularly successful it's still used as a basic reference in the field. And it traveled to at least one other place. We weren't really that experienced in organizing traveling shows. I really couldn't enter into that, because I didn't have all the time in the world to do these things, and that takes considerable time. I think we would have probably traveled the show to many more places than we did. As it was, it went to one other place [Amon Carter Museum of Art (Fort Worth)], because many of these things we couldn't travel. There were all the problems of traveling shows I really couldn't get involved with at that particular time. But, again, it was an experience that they went through.

GALM

I know the show was also a bicentennial exhibition, the American bicentennial. Were you able to get any bicentennial funds to help with the show or to travel it or to write the catalog?

BLOCH

No. Unlike the Museum of Cultural History— And I don't know how far back that goes, but the Museum of Cultural History has a much larger staff. They actually have someone who works on—

GALM

Funding.

BLOCH

On funding. We never had that. You must realize that we had a very tiny staff and that the staff we had was made up of students. I couldn't add one more element to their responsibilities. The total budget for the administration of salary and all of this sort of thing was originally in the art department, and that created problems we couldn't always cope with. There were many complaints that came from my assistants that they really couldn't get the job done. Eventually we took on that responsibility ourselves, so each administrative assistant was in a sense responsible for the handling of the budget. That was an additional thing. So the problems of bookkeeping became that individual's responsibility, and I must say they handled it beautifully. But it was an all-consuming kind of effort, and I could not really ask them to take on this problem of funding. I think with the gallery that Jack [B.] Carter for a long time acted in this capacity—I'm not quite sure of the whole history of this—and that he may have been the one that lent the initial assistance to the Museum of Cultural History. But they have had their own person doing this. We never were provided with that kind of help. Besides, I always felt that we were doing something that was specifically part of the teaching responsibility of this university, and that is such that we should leave it all in one place and the university should be responsible for whatever we did. I mean, we were taking on large responsibilities when we did such shows as "American Personality." It was a large effort and people worked day and night, the students and myself. But I felt that was the challenge and that the university should provide us with whatever funding we needed. And they did. It was never a problem from that aspect. Today I imagine that it's much more the usual procedure to go to one of the endowments.

GALM

I thought because it was the bicentennial that—

BLOCH

I suppose we could have, but as I pointed out, this was— One had to work with a group of students. I remember working well into the night with each student and each personality to get the job done. And my assistants worked very, very hard at this. There really wasn't time to organize a traveling show? there wasn't really the time to go out and raise the money. Besides, Gerald Nordland had the budget for the publication. If he so chose, he could have gone that route.

GALM

How was the show received by the community?

BLOCH

Oh, it's still being talked about. I think many of the shows that we've done people watched with great interest. I have many letters, and still to this day I have people come up to me and speak about certain shows, "The American Personality" being one.

GALM

Because it too would have such a broad appeal.

BLOCH

It was the appeal of course. It was the visual appeal that was incredibly beautiful, as was ["Prints: ] The Image and the Means" [1964] and shows of that sort. People still talk about those shows. It was the way the show was installed and the selection of the material that really stimulated a lot of interest. We really had a lot of community interest in what we were doing, and we tried to involve them. But I think, as you see, there was a great variety in these shows. Some involved the department. Like the "UCLA Graphic Arts Project" [1979] was something that came out of the department. "Nineteenth Century American Engraving [on Wood and Metal" (1979-80)]—I'm just going down the list very quickly—was the sort of thing that was done by one of my assistants. It was something he wanted to do in particular and which he's now following in terms of his own Ph.D. dissertation. There was always that. Each curatorial assistant or administrative assistant had the privilege of doing a show he or she wanted to do. When we eventually created a series of publications called the Grunwald [Center] Studies, this enabled us to draw on our collections. The first one Cindy [Lucinda H.] Gedeon curated. It was a Matisse show ["The Graphic Art of Henri Matisse" (1980)]. So they had opportunities to use that as the medium of expression beyond an actual exhibition, or we could combine an exhibition catalog within a publication of that kind.

GALM

So was the Grunwald Center Studies publication always a catalog also? Was it always tied in to an exhibition of that year?

BLOCH

It could be. It wasn't laid out that way, but it could be and very often was related to that. But it didn't have to be.

GALM

So the next year, in 1981, was "Picasso and Printmaking." Was there a Picasso exhibition that went with that?

BLOCH

Was that 19—?

GALM

'Eighty-one. Burr [E.] Wallen was the—

BLOCH

Yes. Now, he came from [University of California] Santa Barbara and was invited to do that. I think that came out in the fall of '81 if I'm not mistaken. I think an exhibition he was planning accompanied that and he was invited. I was already not in the picture, so I think he was invited by Cindy Gedeon, who was acting as curator.

GALM

So you'd already left the scene at that point.

BLOCH

I think for that publication, yes. The last one I did was the one in honor of Franklin Murphy. I think that's the one that just preceded that. But going back through these shows, some of these shows were meant to honor special events. If I remember correctly, "The Image and the Means [II: UCLA Golden Anniversary Exhibition" (1979-80)] was to honor the university special anniversary, and I think we were the only ones to do a show of that kind. There were exhibitions, as you see, of June Wayne ["June Wayne: Exhibition of Multicolor Lithographs Realizing the Genetic Code" (1971)] and Joyce Treiman ["Joyce Treiman Monotypes" (1979)]. Both of those were artists whose works were represented in our collections in great depth and who were friends of the university, [leafing through pages] I'm trying to see what— And some exhibitions, like "Willem de Kooning: Lithographs" [1975], were the sort of exhibitions that were especially desired by the art department. After all, we did have an advisory committee made up of members of the art department and students as well who came to those meetings to feed the center, and me in particular, with ideas they had in mind which would fulfill the needs of their own work. I think that worked extremely well, but in the meantime there were things we did. There was the one exhibition of the UCLA Art Council sponsorship which I did, "Words and Images: Universal Limited Art Editions" show of 1978.

GALM

Now, students weren't involved in that show were they?

BLOCH

No, no. My staff was involved with that. I was asked to curate that show by the UCLA Art Council. It was a show I particularly wanted to do, because we had done so much with Tamarind [Lithography Workshop] that I wanted to become involved with its counterpart in the East, though they operated quite differently. June Wayne being herself an artist; Mrs. [Tatyana] Grosman not an artist, but simply a publisher—but an inspired publisher. At that time we wanted to be involved particularly with the books which were being produced, and so for the first time those books were placed together in an exhibition. And, as you see, farther on we were doing "Tamarind Suite Fifteen" [1978]. As I look over this list, it shows that there was a great variety in what we were trying to do to provide the kinds of things that the students themselves would be interested in: exhibitions that would commemorate special events like UCLA's golden anniversary in 1980; shows of artists from abroad; artists and subjects that interested the department in particular. We tried to cover all the needs of both the community and the department, but most of all those things in which the students themselves could actively participate.

GALM

One other activity that you got involved in prior to your retirement was an interdepartmental seminar, The Dutch and America. Could you talk a little bit about that? Nineteen eighty-one, I believe, was the seminar.

BLOCH

This sort of thing, represented the culminating activity of any ORU [organized research unit], and which we weren't always able to do—that is, involving other departments on campus in an activity that would be centered in the Grunwald. Though we worked toward this for several years, it really didn't come to play until almost the last years I was there. It was almost as if we were moving into another era, but I wasn't to survive that era. This was a time when Fredi Chiappelli was able to obtain special funds to organize a program and show. The Dutch government show was one. This was to celebrate Dutch settlement in this country, the three hundredth anniversary, something like that. I remember having a meeting with him, at which point he had Robert [L.] Tusler of music present and a man who was involved with Dutch studies on campus from another department. So we were assembled, and the idea was can we do this kind of thing? There was of course a great deal of interest in the Dutch government: he had the funds to enable us to have a catalog and to go ahead with the festivities. I found this the most engaging kind of activity. It was brand-new for me and one in which I particularly wanted to participate. What we did was to bring together a group of students. They weren't all students in art history; there were two students out of music and a student who was interested in Dutch-American architecture. The other students, Maureen [B.] McGee, Sondra [B.] Pratt, Ann [E.] Lenard, Andrew [B.] Marvick, Ann [C.] Woods, and I think Carline Bouilhet, who were from the art department, worked together. This was quite a fascinating experience to have a seminar held with a variety of people from different disciplines and to see how they would work together. I must say it was very exciting and sometimes very amusing, at least from my standpoint. I was under a great deal of stress at that time and not always feeling very well, but I must say that brought me out of my doldrums from time to time. Our visitors from other departments were not quite ready for my particular brand of humor, and I was feeling it at that point. [laughter] And while not going into all aspects of it, we usually ended up in gales of laughter about certain aspects of what we had to do. But it was a means in which everybody began to work together. There was a great deal of interest in what the young musicologists had to say, and they became interested in what the art historians had to say, and it was the first time there was that kind of communication going. They may have believed that we were kind of a strange lot, since our kinds had never met together in one room. But everybody shortly relaxed and it became a lot of fun. The exhibition itself took place at the Museum of Cultural History, and of course they were involved in the selection of the materials. There was a symposium that went along with it. I originally had not agreed to do this. There were visitors coming from other places. There was a Dutch scholar who came to participate in it. I think at the last minute the person who was recommended to do the American and Dutch connections wasn't able to come, and so I agreed to do that lecture. It was really my feeling that I should simply be on the sidelines helping to organize all of this, because I wasn't quite sure how it would all fall together. But it did, very well, and I think it was a very successful experience.

GALM

One other thing that I thought we might discuss today, if you feel that we've sort of covered the exhibitions of the Grunwald, at least for now.

BLOCH

Well, I think what we've said was to show that there was variety and then what the general purpose of all these exhibitions was, that they were directed specifically as a student experience, although certainly there were exhibitions that were also directed toward the community. Many of the student exhibitions also were the ones that really commanded the most attention in the community, and they became extremely sophisticated shows. I think they were so from the beginning, even though our catalogs were very modest at the beginning. Toward the end, they became full-fledged projects.

GALM

What I thought we might talk about today was two things in connection with George Caleb Bingham, the show that came through that was at the university art gallery in 1968 ["George Caleb Bingham, 1811-1879"], and then also the two-volume study that was published by the University [of California] Press in 1967 [George Caleb Bingham]. The publication, had you been working on that for a number of years?

BLOCH

Oh, yes. The publication, first of all—

GALM

You had your dissertation.

BLOCH

—emanated from the dissertation, but it was completely rewritten. The dissertation part of it was completed in '57, one year after I arrived at UCLA. Then, while there was the chance of publishing it elsewhere, I decided after consultation with the University of California Press that this was the place where I wanted to work. But that continued for several years and occupied a lot of my time, as we went from one editor to another. The press being the press, this is what occurred. It was a very large and ambitious project, and they weren't that well equipped to deal with projects of that dimension at that particular time. But it was an enjoyable but in-depth experience, as far as I was concerned, in doing this. When it was finally published, I think the university press was particularly pleased because it won the [National] Cowboy Hall of Fame [and Western Heritage Center] award [the Western Heritage Award], for which they got a suitable bronze and I got one too. I think that was the first time they'd gotten that kind of an award for a work of that kind. So that was a labor of love in which we were all involved. But the idea of an accompanying exhibition was something I had hoped for. The show actually wasn't proposed to come out coincidentally with the book, but it so happened it did. I'd been invited by the National Collection of Fine Arts to prepare a show on George Caleb Bingham to be shown at the National Collection in Washington [D.C.], and which was then to travel, as I remember, to Cleveland and then to UCLA. UCLA decided to take the show.

GALM

Right. It ended up at UCLA.

BLOCH

It ended at UCLA, but it was organized with the National Collection of Fine Arts, and I went there to introduce the collection at that time.

GALM

And you wrote the—

BLOCH

I wrote the catalog.

GALM

The essay.

BLOCH

That's right. I did the catalog.

GALM

Did you participate in the selection of the material?

BLOCH

Oh, yes, that was my selection. I curated the show.

GALM

It was all your selection?

BLOCH

Absolutely. And the introduction was based largely on the general content of the books, which I wasn't assured would come out at precisely that time, but did. The books came out almost exactly the same time.

GALM

What was the critical reception in the scholarly community to both the book and perhaps to the exhibit?

BLOCH

Well, you must realize that at that particular time American art had not yet reached any kind of important recognition. My own experience in the field—I think I may have mentioned this earlier. I was a Renaissance scholar who defected to the American field at a moment when American art was considered rather exotic rather than part of any formal contribution to the whole panorama of art history. There were many eyes raised when I went into the field at that time. There were very few people really teaching in the field. As it happened, when I decided to do this and then went on into a teaching career and elected to teach American art, that was considered very unusual. To this very day there are not that many courses in major universities in this country that are in the American field. When I was brought here, it was to teach that area, to make that area part of the curriculum, and that was considered very unusual. So when you talk about the general reception in the community, this community was not well prepared. Although one of my students was a curator at the County Museum, that was the first time they had a full-fledged curator in that field. Matter of fact, first time they had a full-fledged curator in almost any department of the County Museum. This was a fledgling museum when it came to this sort of thing. So that the show was received rather cooly in this community. It wasn't so well attended. There was no great hoopla that might have accompanied it a few years later, when a Bingham sold for almost a million dollars. That opened a few eyes. It seems that all it needs is a valuation on a high level and then everybody gets terribly interested, as they are in [The] Sunflowers [by van Gogh] these days. I was amazed. Now there are numbers of sincere collectors in the American field. They have an American art council at the County Museum; many people behave as if they've always collected American art. And yet they didn't. We're talking about something that's happened since 1968, which many of them probably don't care to talk about. They were collecting French art—it was a completely different look at things—and interested in contemporary art, which is again moving back in the field. But American art as such was an unknown quantity.

GALM

Was there any thought of trying to perhaps place the exhibit in a Missouri museum?

BLOCH

No. You see, although the Saint Louis museums and the Kansas City [William Rockhill] Nelson Gallery [of Art] lent to this exhibition, they had already had exhibitions of Bingham. It was normal for them to hold exhibitions of Bingham. The historical interest is the fact that Bingham was only discovered in the East in 1935 when the Museum of Modern Art did a show. Quite unusual to show a nineteenth- century American painter at the Museum of Modern Art. But there was a great deal of excitement over this, quote, "discovery" of an artist, and that was largely through an exhibition that was organized by Saint Louis and came to the Museum of Modern Art and then traveled in the East for several months. Although I never saw that show, the slim catalog that came of it had introductions written by some very well known scholars, who were not necessarily in the American field, but who saw in Bingham something more than just the usual American artist. And that's indeed what attracted me to it as well, since there are many contacts with the Renaissance that I was so familiar with contained in what Bingham was trying to do as a painter.

GALM

So in some ways it was perhaps more important to introduce it to the West Coast than it was—

BLOCH

Yes. Because there had never been a show of Bingham on the West Coast, and indeed the show we did in Washington was the first of its kind. The West Coast had had no exhibitions involving Bingham as far as I can remember: that was the first time. But it wasn't truly- understood. It was a little early for nineteenth-century American art on the West Coast. There had been collectors in the past who had collected latter nineteenth century. There were certainly representations in collections here, and through its curator the County Museum was trying to put together a comprehensive collection. But there wasn't the funds and there wasn't the support for this kind of thing.

GALM

Now, does your publication still stand as the work on Bingham?

BLOCH

Yes, I still think it stands as the definitive work, although I've since published a catalogue raisonné [The Paintings of George Caleb Bingham: A Catalogue Raisonné] that supplants the catalogue raisonné that accompanied that earlier publication.

GALM

I see.

BLOCH

That one has been supplanted by a much more in- depth and enlarged study that was published this past fall.

GALM

Who published that?

BLOCH

University of Missouri Press, which also published a study of Bingham's drawings which I did in 1975 [The Drawings of George Caleb Bingham, with a Catalogue Raisoneé]. Now, that show that we had in 1967 also showed about fifty of the drawings. It was really a very, very handsome show and rather comprehensive, which is difficult to do these days because of insurance problems.

GALM

During your teaching career at UCLA, did you teach an American art course class each quarter?

BLOCH

No. I was brought here certainly to be the specialist in American art, but when I began to be involved in the Grunwald, I felt that really what I wanted to do was to also have a teaching relationship to that area, so that students could go from the classroom to the Grunwald and thus become involved in all of those things we've been talking about earlier. I developed a core curriculum in the History of Prints, which ran for at least two quarters, and a seminar [Studies in Prints]. Then there was another core curriculum in history and connoisseurship of drawings [Critical and Historical Studies in Drawing] that also ran at least two quarters, and a seminar [Studies in Drawing]. So it was every third year that I could do the American, and that was at least three quarters and a seminar.

GALM

And what period were you actually covering?

BLOCH

It covered everything from the colonial period up to approximately 1940. Mr. Wight was responsible for courses in the more contemporary area. We tried to create that kind of a division. He would be responsible for 1940 on. There might be a slight overlapping, but I sort of had to culminate at that period. But remember that it included painting, sculpture, and architecture, because I had a particular interest in American architecture.

GALM

When Professor Wight left, was someone brought in to help you in that area?

BLOCH

It became very spotty after that. They really never got anybody to teach contemporary art as they should have to fill that slot.

1.15. TAPE NUMBER: VIII, SIDE ONE MAY 1, 1987

GALM

Professor Bloch, today we were going to begin by discussing a bit in a little more detail the [George Caleb] Bingham project. You had the publication that came out in 1967 [George Caleb Bingham] and I guess then the subsequent publications related to George Caleb Bingham. The initial one, as you said, was done by the University of California Press, and it was an outgrowth of your dissertation material, but with quite a bit of material added.

BLOCH

Yes. I think the point I really wanted to make was that— Because very recently I had to write—[Not] had to write. I wrote a tribute in honor of Lloyd Goodrich, the former director of the Whitney Museum [of American Art] in New York, who was essentially my first mentor when I decided, as I said in the little memorial I wrote, to defect from my studies in Italian quattrocentro painting at the Institute of Fine Arts [New York University] and move on to nineteenth-century American art. This was unheard of, unprecedented in that time, and the only person I could turn to at the Institute who would act as my adviser was a medievalist [Dimitri T. Tselos]. And it continued to be that way since there was no one in the American field on the faculty, and to this day there is no one. There were very few senior scholars in the American field at that time that a student could turn to for support or advice or what have you. In terms of publication of any seriousness done in the field, one really had to go back over many, many years to find anything done on an in-depth, scholarly basis in the American field, which essentially involved what is called a catalogue raisonné of an artist's work. Now, in terms of Bingham, there hadn't been anything published since 1940. I was thinking about doing this in the mid-1940s, after I came back from Missouri, where I was first exposed to Bingham as a strong possibility. I think I pointed out that there had been an exhibition in 1935 at the Museum of Modern Art [New York], which again was very unusual. The Museum of Modern Art was certainly pioneering in a great many areas, but it was unusual for them to turn to a nineteenth-century artist. There were several scholars, who were no longer around when I was interested, who saw the special qualities of Bingham and essentially his Renaissance-like approach to composition and form, which attracted them. That's what stimulated the revival of interest in Bingham. The 1940 publication of [Albert] Christ-Janer [George Caleb Bingham: The Story of an Artist] was basically a popular book. It contained no catalogue raisonné of any kind. It was simply an extended study that included some letters that had been discovered, correspondence that he had had which wasn't available when the first book came out in 1917. That 1917 publication by Fern [H.] Rusk [George Caleb Bingham: The Missouri Artist]— Interestingly enough, Fern Rusk—or Fern Rusk Shapley—went on from her work at the University of Missouri on an M.A.level to get a Ph.D. and eventually move on to the National Gallery [of Art (Washington, D.C. )] as a curator of Renaissance art. So, you see, there was always somehow a connection. I knew Mrs. Shapley, but we never entered into great discussion as to what stimulated her particular interest in Bingham. I felt it was probably because he was a local artist and the material was around. She did a checklist, which I certainly used as my basis for my work when I first started. But getting back to New York, at about the time I returned to New York and decided, or just about decided, that this was something I should do or could do, from the standpoint of being able to do something with original works of art that were readily available— It was difficult at that time to travel. It still wasn't ideal to travel abroad at that time, and so I couldn't study original works of art abroad, which I would have done if that was possible. We're talking about 1943-44—the war was still on. The Japanese surrender didn't take place till September of 1945, and we're talking about an earlier period. I had to act quickly to move on with my Ph.D. dissertation. It was Lloyd Goodrich, who was highly regarded at that time as a major scholar and still is to this day, who did major work on Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer— It was particularly his work on Homer that had attracted my attention as being the first rather serious study on that artist that involved in-depth scholarship, the kind that I respected. The whole idea was that I would make the kind of demonstration I would have to make in the Renaissance field, only apply it to the American field, which hadn't really been done, complete with the catalogue raisonné. This would have been demanded by the Institute. They would not have accepted an American subject without some demonstration that it had the strength and it had the probability of publication to match the kind of work they were doing in the other fields. In fact, they tested me by having me give them a lecture before all the faculty and students that lasted for two and a half hours. That was the prior test I had to take to prove to them that this had some validity. I suppose it did, and they allowed me to go ahead with it. But I sought out Lloyd Goodrich for support. He was an incredibly generous man, and he not only supported the idea, but he offered to continue to advise me, and did over the years. He has recently died, and once again I was reminded of his generosity and kindness. But there were very few people of that kind specializing in the field who would make themselves available or who were available. Others had departed this earth before that. So with that, I decided to go ahead with it. It was a bold step, but I was fascinated by the subject. As I pointed out, it did have all of these interrelationships with my own experience and my own background, so I could apply that to the American field. The whole idea was to do that. Part of it was that ultimately I intended to teach, and hopefully to teach in the American field, which had not been done. There were no people who were specialists in the field who were teaching on a university level, and that was part of my thinking at that time. Even at that point I was thinking that if I could produce something with meaning and strength that it would serve as a model to the students I would teach. And indeed it has done that, because I directed the program at the University of Minnesota in American art, and when I came to California, it was specifically to teach the courses in American art and develop a program. So the idea was to go forward and translate the dissertation into book form. With the University of California [UC] Press having an office on this campus, that made the job easier, even though it took us something like seven years to get the thing published. It was a complete rewriting job, working with editors at the press, who were easy to work with and who were stimulated by the project themselves. But for the University of California Press, it too was an unusual enterprise, since it ended up being a two-volume affair. They supported the whole project, but I wanted to have the catalog as part of it, so I had to go out and find some support for that. I got it through the American Council of Learned Societies. And Dr. [Franklin D.] Murphy entered into the act too. He was very interested in the project.

GALM

In what way did he enter?

BLOCH

Well, he found some funding to help push the catalogue raisonné forward.

GALM

But not through the society. That was a separate—

BLOCH

That was separate. Oh, yes. And even for them, they said it was unusual for them to approve the publication of a catalogue raisonné. As you see, in the American field this was practically unknown. That might only find a precedent in 1930 or thereabouts, when a small catalogue raisonné of sorts was done on an artist like Robert Feke, as I recall. But there was very little in between. If you found there were books, they were more on a popular level. So it: was a bold undertaking, as I look back on it now, but there was distinct purpose in doing it. I would then have something as a model to show my students. This did work, because the evidence will show that my students have tried to match, at least in bulk, the effort I tried to do. They've used the catalog and they've used the text as a model for their own work, I feel—at least they've said so. But the project was interesting because— And I might say just a few words on that, because you wonder how I could remain stimulated by the same subject over many, many years. It is that there are many facets to the personality of Bingham as an artist. Not only the means that he used to self-train himself basically as an artist, which was the kind of pattern you would find among many artists who were evolving in the early decades of the nineteenth century— He certainly was typical and yet atypical, because he was a painter, but he also had a career as a politician, even at one time was considered to run for governor of Missouri. He became state treasurer and adjutant general of the state of Missouri. He had a fine legal mind. He was an interesting personality—not the sort of person that is just distinctly an artist and thus you follow just down one path. He managed to combine both careers throughout his life. But beyond that, from my standpoint, it opened up the whole picture of painting on the frontier at the time he started to paint. Other artists were coming to that part of the country—which was the first frontier—where he lived, in Franklin, Missouri. It was a central point to which pioneer families came from both Virginia and Kentucky. Some of the best-known families came to settle in Missouri at that particular time. It was the late 1820s. Bingham arrives when he's nine years old, so we're talking about 1820, '21, during that period. It was a rather critical period. So that you get a real picture of what was happening at that period. Plus the fact that other painters were coming through. My job was to separate Bingham from all the rest of those painters. What has happened through the years is that it has been my responsibility to identify Bingham, particularly as a portrait painter, and separate him from all the other portrait painters, who were not always his students but who were other people. Scarcely a day goes by that I don't get some correspondence from some family saying, "We believe our portrait was painted by Bingham." And then I have to tell them, "No, it wasn't. It's by someone else." I've gradually begun to associate other painters, some of them very, very provincial painters, who were moving from one county to another and painting portraits of the settlers. Bingham, it would seem, had first claim to some of the better-known settlers, and he'd go from town to town almost just a few years after they were settled and paint portraits of the founders of many of those towns. So there is a definite pattern. Bingham is thought of and admired most as a painter of narrative pictures, and people scarcely prefer to think of him as a portrait painter, but that was how he made the pot boil all the years of his life. Not only as a painter of local residents of the towns— And I'm not going to say he was necessarily selective, but somehow or other he was painting major figures. It was almost part of a kind of history of the frontier, not only of the sights and scenes of the frontier life as he saw it, but also the personalities who actually existed in those towns. So you gradually build a total history, a pictorial history, that has yet to really be exhibited that way. But then you get to the other side of it and deal with all the rest of these sometimes anonymous painters who were also on the scene and fulfilling the needs of the pioneers and other settlers, who were anxious to have themselves portrayed in these days before photography. And I'm still doing it, because it's a never-ending kind of task and continues to be very fascinating, because the pieces begin to come together of even the unknown personalities, anonymous personalities. You begin to match their styles and begin to trace their itineraries as they moved through Missouri, which could be done throughout the country but hasn't really been done in any way. There's so much more to be said about it, because we're talking about forty years of activity. It was interesting that at one point I decided to write to President Harry [S] Truman, whose wife [Bess Wallace Truman]'s family owned a piece of property on which Bingham once had a studio. It was with that in mind that I wrote to him when he was president. He wrote me a letter on December 16, 1947, from the White House, in which he was replying to a letter I had written on 9 December—it was just one week afterward—in which he goes through in some detail about various people he knew in Kansas City and Independence who might be able to help me. He lists all of their names, tells me where they live, and suggests that I write to them. And he says, "I know nothing about the situation myself, because my family lived in southwestern Jackson County from 1840 until the present time, and our residence in Independence only dated from 1890." But that was the beginning of a correspondence I had with President Truman until I met him, and that's a kind of fascinating story and gives you a kind of picture of what sort of man this was. Remember that in 1947 he was dealing with some problems in Korea and elsewhere. This was a difficult period. I always felt that someday I would like to meet him and find out just what conditions persuaded him to write me a personal letter, because it could only be a personal letter because of the content of the material. Well, we actually didn't meet until 1961—to be precise, on 28 April, 1961—when he was already retired and living in Independence and spending his office hours at the [Harry S Truman] Library in Independence. He always had said to me earlier, "You know, anytime you're in the vicinity, do call me," but I never suspected that he really meant it. But I was in Kansas City to visit an exhibition on Bingham which the Kansas City [William Rockhill] Nelson Gallery [of Art] was putting on at the time, and I had some research to do. It was a quick trip, and I didn't really have time to make any prior arrangements. But I decided one morning I would call up the library and inquire as to whether President Truman was in town or whether he would have any time to meet me. Now, mind you, it was just prior to that I tried to see the head of a local historical society, and they told me that the director couldn't see me unless I made an appointment three weeks in advance, you see. So I was really taking a very daring step I realize today. But I called up, and his secretary got on, Rose Conway. She said, "Oh, just a moment," and she went, evidently to speak to President Truman. (We're speaking about like nine o'clock in the morning. ) She came back and she said, "Can you be here in half an hour?" [laughter] And I of course raced over. Well, within that period, I feel to this very day that he prepared himself to meet me. He came out from his office and we sat outside for fully twenty, twenty-five minutes talking about a whole variety of things. Firstly, I wanted to thank him and to try to find out just how he came about to write me this letter. And he said, as if it had happened the day before, "Well, I always went down to the White House mailroom in the morning to select a few letters I wanted to answer in particular, and yours was one of them." Very, very direct statement. And then we proceeded to talk about a variety of things. [John F.] Kennedy was president at that time. He began to talk about the protection of the White House collections. Through the years, you see, presidents had the privilege of not only remodeling, which they could each do for their own quarters, but could do a lot more. Many of them had full control as to the disposition of White House furnishings. It was Mrs. [Jacqueline Bouvier] Kennedy who put an end to all of that. But I remember distinctly, he said, "I tried very hard to get back some of the furnishings that President [Chester A.] Arthur—" And he said, "That was the only thing he ever did. [laughter] He sold out the White House furnishings." He said, "But I found I couldn't do it. The prices now on those pieces of furniture are beyond our ability to capture them. I think Mrs. Kennedy is doing a wonderful job in making certain that this sort of thing won't happen anymore and that the furnishings remain intact. Some presidents were actually giving away plates and that sort of thing as souvenirs, and this can't happen anymore." Then of course he proceeded to tell me about his experiences. Because always, as we all knew, he was interested in American history, and he was an avid reader of American history. He said one of the reasons he was interested in my book was that it related to Missouri history, and he continued to remark that he would be very supportive of that, because the book was still under discussion through the press. He proceeded to even write letters saying that he supported the work and would even provide a letter that they could use and publish to show that he was supporting it. But he told me to what lengths he went to get information, let's say on Andrew Jackson, and would call up the historical society and talk to some lady. But he pretended he was not the president of the United States, and he would then use some sort of mimicry— he was a great mimic—putting on a sort of southern lady's voice to get something done. It was an incredible performance. Then he took me on a tour and pointed out the portrait of Andrew Jackson by Thomas Sully. I believe there was a copy of that in the reconstructed library—as you know, they reconstructed a kind of Oval Office for him. As he took me on the tour he explained various things, and then we ended up finally in his office, where he philosophized upon how one gets a job done in the White House, which I think has been quoted by other people. Then finally, as a last gesture, he opened his drawer and he took out the gold seal of the United States and pressed it into my hand and said, "You know, of course, we can take this away with us." It was a Cartier, very beautiful thing. It was truly memorable, and one could not forget him in a hurry, or ever. As a matter of fact, I've never quite forgotten that day. It wasn't just the graciousness but the sense of sincerity and true interest in my work, which he followed up from that point on. I knew I could count on him if I needed any support. Dr. Murphy knew him very well, and I showed him these letters I'd received from him and he said, "Yes, I know Harry and how one can deal with him and how he means what he says when he says he will do something."

GALM

Had you done a sketch of him prior to that time?

BLOCH

Yes, as a matter of fact. I do have a drawing I did of him, but I didn't bring that up at our meeting. I didn't want to confuse the issue. We were talking about other things. But it certainly was that kind of support that encouraged me to go on. Lloyd Goodrich, President Truman, Franklin Murphy, all of those things really helped, because it was not a simple decision to abandon a well- established field and to go into an area which really hadn't been explored from the standpoint I was dealing with. It was strictly art historical. The book is ponderous in the sense that it deals with it on a very technical level, during which I made a number of what I feel were discoveries as to the methodology used by artists in developing their talent. I kept it strictly on the basis of the evolution of an artist. I did not get into the whole political picture, which present school of art historians tend to emphasize. Even though I felt it was important, I didn't want to confuse the issue. I wanted to keep it strictly in the line of an art historical analysis. It received many good reviews, I believe, and was fairly enthusiastically received as perhaps the most advanced consideration of the work of an American artist, and particularly of Bingham, that had been done up to that time.

GALM

Who would you say gave the most significant or glowing review of it?

BLOCH

Well, there were reviews in our papers by people. Let's see. [leafing through papers] There were reviews done in our papers here, but throughout the country. Alfred [V.] Frankenstein. As I go through this rather quickly. Most newspapers and magazines throughout the country reviewed it. It was rather extensively reviewed and, as I say, for the most part rather favorably received, and eventually received a special award, the Western Heritage Award of the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and Western Heritage Center in Oklahoma, as the outstanding western art book of 1967. Both the press and I received a trophy as an award, and I think that was the first time the Western Heritage Center had awarded a book an award. It was treated, of course, as a western book because of the [subject] and as part of western history. I myself was more concerned about it as a production in the field of art history, but even at that stage, it was a bit early for established institutions of art history to accept an American subject wholeheartedly. I think we made a point then, and from that point on, I think we've had more graduate students moving into the field. I certainly have tried to do my part in that. It was a pioneering effort to develop a course program on a graduate level, as well as an undergraduate level, in any depth, and I feel I did make a contribution to that. Some of my students have gone on to do that, and there have been a few other people, although in most cases you find that the art historians have been few and far between who teach American art history on a specialized level.

GALM

Were any of the European art historians interested in the American art scene?

BLOCH

Well, among my teachers there were some who felt this was rather strange. I think some of them treated American art as a native art—as one of my colleagues once put it, "in line with Hungarian art" or something of the sort. I had to deal with that. I was brought here to teach that by a man who was head of our department, Gibson [A.] Danes, who was an American art historian himself, but being an administrator, didn't really have time to teach the courses and remained pretty much the administrator. He brought me in to produce the program here, and that was the beginning of it. I taught that all through the years until I left the university in 1981, and they are now trying to fill that slot. But the European art historians, those that really had sufficient breadth and interest beyond their own fields, were interested. Dr. [Walter F.] Friedlaender, who was one of my teachers, I remember being distinctly interested in the possibilities of what I was doing. He came up to me at the time I gave that two-and-a-half-hour lecture and even asked some rather pointed questions. The European art historian would be interested from the standpoint of American artists who studied in Europe. With Friedlaender, his interest was particularly in the fact that Bingham had gone to Düsseldorf, which was a great center in Germany for artists, not only from America but elsewhere. Many, many American artists went. They would first have gone to England or Italy and eventually to Germany, Düsseldorf, and finally to Munich and Berlin. When Bingham went to Düsseldorf in 1856, there was a great deal of precedent. There were a number of Americans already there, typically because Emanuel Leutze, who had many American connections and regarded himself as an American artist, welcomed young Americans to this art center. It was a wonderful place in which to work. Remember we had nothing like that in America. We had one or two art schools in the East, but you can't speak about an art center in America in those days—you had to go to Europe. They were beginning to go to Paris already in the early 1850s, and Bingham had first thought he would go to Paris. Then he found it much easier to get along in Germany, and with Leutze being there, that even made it more hospitable. What the Americans needed was the hospitable climate in which to work. So this would have interested my teachers, who knew something about Düsseldorf and the great centers in Germany, because most of these art historians were Germans. Friedlaender persisted in that. I remember that he even came out of retirement to attend my Ph.D. oral and said, "I remember ten years ago, twelve years ago when you gave a talk. Tell me what you have done about this area since I spoke to you about it."

GALM

Are there any areas of Bingham's life that you're still pursuing? Mystery areas or areas that you feel still need more pursuing?

BLOCH

I think in line with the wider interest in American art history moving into political and social lines and dealing with such questions as patronage— These are areas of investigation that are attracting attention today and which I have begun to deal with myself. In the last book I've done, the introduction deals with such questions as patronage in Bingham's time. There's a very serious question as to just how artists did make a living and how they had to seek support for their various projects. This sort of thing I've dealt with in some detail, as well as the basic personality of the artist and how his political life affected his painting. How it's reflected in his painting is important, without dealing with any kind of symbolistic notions which seem to have attracted the attention of some historians today. No, my feeling is that we're dealing— And this is what I intend to investigate more, because as the pictures begin to turn up and some unknown and unfilled areas of his life begin to flesh out, as happened fairly recently, I'm able to now put together my general impression that Bingham was, after all, a narrative painter who was telling, to a large extent, his own experiences, retelling his own experiences as a child on the frontier. And occasionally a document will appear, or as I say another picture, which enables me to fill out that story.

GALM

Are there still letters coming forward?

BLOCH

Very rarely. I think the main collection was the collection that was first published in 1940, but which I dealt with. Well, they were actually published by the Missouri Historical Review in the 1937-39 period. That was followed by the publication that Christ-Janer did, which I've already mentioned, in 1940, in which he used those letters for the first time. But those letters, some 110 of them, are filled with information written to his closest friend that give you a clear impression of Bingham's life, his personal life, his feelings about religion, his worry that he and his friend might not be in the next life unless his friend embraces the church properly, his feeling about his family, his feeling about political events of his time. Very little, as a matter of fact, that deals with art, since his friend was a supporter but not really an aesthete in the same way. He might occasionally discuss that he's working on some work of art or another. But those letters reflect the other side of Bingham's life, his reaction to all the political events of this time and of his friend, who, after all, was a senator, a United States senator. I'm speaking about Major [James S.] Rollins. So those letters, of course, are the critical ones. Very few letters— Occasionally one turns up, but that is fairly rare these days.

GALM

The two books that were published by the University of Missouri Press [The Drawings of George Caleb Bingham, With a Catalogue Raisonné and The Paintings of George Caleb Bingham: A Catalogue Raisonné], had you approached the UC Press on those, or was that just a completely separate project with Missouri?

BLOCH

You mean how I came about to go to the University of California Press?

GALM

No, I'm talking about the University of Missouri publications. Had you approached our press on those first?

BLOCH

Yes. When the University of California Press edition ran out, I did go to them and inquire as to whether they wanted to do a revised edition bringing the catalog up to date. I certainly went to them. They at first were interested and then said no, I think giving chiefly the reason that this wasn't something they generally did. I've found that out as rather typical. It was a rare occasion for the University of California Press to reissue a previous publication, despite the fact that it was a very successful one, most successful for them, because they received not only that one impressive award but others as well. So they freed me from any responsibility to them. I felt that the first volume would still stand on its own, but the catalogue raisonné needed to be expanded. It was in a sense a kind of extended checklist, as far as I was concerned. There were at least a hundred pictures that I had discovered in the meantime, and there were what I considered errors of various kinds, misattributions that through no fault of mine were included in it. I wanted to change all of that because I was the only one really around who could do that, and the materials should be published. The University of Missouri Press was quite excited about doing it, particularly since Bingham is an important personality. They were busily doing a series on artists who had Missouri connections, so they welcomed the opportunity to do that and planned actually to do more with me. What we did prior to that time was to do the book on the drawings; that was the first publication we did, in 1975. I had not been able to deal with the drawings in any detail for the California Press publication because the [Saint Louis] Mercantile Library [Association], the organization that owned the drawings or had possession of them since Bingham's time, had made an agreement with the University of Oklahoma Press, which had published John [F.] McDermott's book [George Caleb Bingham, River Portraitist], to hold those drawings as their publication in his book. He did a checklist at that time, and they would release none of them. So that we were in a position where we could scarcely touch on the drawings in my publication, even though I did have an agreement. They lost the paper and lost the letter of agreement, and the librarian had changed and I think was no longer alive. So Oklahoma [Press] was adamant about maintaining that agreement [the agreement made at the time of McDermott's book] and not even giving permission to reproduce even a few of the drawings. It was a most unfortunate affair. But the change in the administration of the library and the fact that that agreement was over by that time allowed them to give me free rein to publish the drawings as I wanted to. Again, it's a kind of catalogue raisonné of the drawings, which wasn't the way Oklahoma published.

GALM

One thing, in comparing the UC Press book with the Missouri Press book on the paintings, there seemed to be quite a contrast in the color reproduction. Which is actually the better reproduction?

BLOCH

Well, I must confess that I wasn't happy with either. But the University of California Press colorplates were, I think, closer to the originals in the sense that they were done in this country, where contrast could be made with the originals to some extent. Color is never, never perfect, because this would mean that you really have the paintings at hand to make the real contrast. The University of Missouri Press sent their plates to Japan, and so they vary considerably from the originals. But again I must say that nowhere are you going to find really great reproduction in color where you can't make close examination. Now, when we did the drawings, those of course were in black and white, and we tried to reproduce them at almost the same scale as the original. That's why it's a supersized book. There was close attention to making comparison between the plates and the original drawings, and even that was difficult. I don't think the editor was totally satisfied with the end result. But color is a far more difficult process, especially when you're dealing with paintings of that dimension.

GALM

But the Missouri book seems to be a handsome book.

BLOCH

It's a handsome book, yes, but I think most people realize that when you're dealing with color, you get an impression—you don't get an absolute registration. When I hear people talking about reproductions in Time magazine of the Sistine Chapel, for instance, I'm rather amused that they use those as any means of judgment of what is happening these days, because color reproduction has nothing to do with the originals, only the vaguest relationship. We live in a color society now—everybody wants color plates.

GALM

Okay. I think unless you have anything to add on that, I think we'll conclude on Bingham.

BLOCH

Yes. What I may do up ahead I can't say. I think I've more or less said the last word on that subject for a while.

1.16. TAPE NUMBER: VIII, SIDE TWO MAY 1, 1987

GALM

Professor Bloch, one other subject that I'd like to ask you to talk about today is your participation with the Virginia Steele Scott Foundation. How did that come about? Your connection.

BLOCH

Well, it came about quite without any pressure on my part. I was deeply involved here at the university at that time and scarcely knew anything about the Virginia Steele Scott Foundation. As a matter of fact, I'd only found out about it perhaps the same spring of the year in which I was appointed when I was at a dinner party and discussion came up about the Virginia Steele Scott Foundation. The other part was when a student came to me, a former student of mine who was related to Mrs. Scott, one of her sisters, and asked whether I'd be interested in seeing the Virginia Steele Scott Foundation collection, which was housed in Mrs. Scott's home, in her gallery. She had built a gallery adjoining her home on Oak Knoll [Terrace] in Pasadena. I said of course I would be interested in seeing it, but it was really not open to the public at all. In fact, they could not open it to the public because it was a zoned area, and that became the big problem. Mrs. Scott had somehow overlooked when she built her gallery that in that particular area her neighbors strongly resisted any attempt to have any kind of public access to that area. That became the big problem that we had to face ourselves, as to whether we would stay where we were and deal with the issue or not. But that was, of course, after Mrs. Scott had died. I didn't know Mrs. Scott, and by the time I was approached she had died.

GALM

Did you know of her, even at that point?

BLOCH

No, I really didn't know about her, strangely enough. One of my former students, who was working at the National Gallery, [Edgar] John Bullard [III], who is now the director of the New Orleans Museum [of Art], did come to know her, and she came to talk to him from time to time for advice. But I knew nothing about that. Pasadena was just another world. I knew Robert [R.] Wark for many, many years. He was a friend of mine. We arrived in California in the same period and were friends almost from the beginning and have known each other ever since. So I really didn't know anything about it. But anyhow, I didn't get access to that collection at that time. They denied my coming at that time, because they were naturally rather nervous about having visitors come, and so it was a restricted kind of situation. But when I was approached by the president of the Virginia Steele Scott Foundation in my office at UCLA to inquire as to my interest in joining the board, that was really the first time I was in direct contact with any of those people. That was followed subsequently by a visit from the treasurer of the foundation. Both of them asked me rather formally whether I would allow my name to be nominated to join the board as vice president for art. Now, I didn't know what the situation was, nor was I informed as to just where Mr. Millard Sheets was.

GALM

Who was the president of the foundation?

BLOCH

Charles Newton was still the president. I was invited to come out there to see the collection. I don't remember the exact chronology. I think after the first visit from Mr. Newton I was invited to come out and see the collection. I did come out, and I met Millard Sheets, whom I had known briefly before that time, and we went through the collection. I think the purpose of that was to get my professional opinion about the collection. It seemed that they were asking for professional opinions from a variety of people who were noted in the field, [asking people] like Lloyd Goodrich and John [I. H.] Baur and one or two other people to give some impression about the collection. You must realize that Mrs. Scott was a dying woman for some years. Even while she was putting up her own gallery, she was far from well and very frail. When she formed her foundation, as I learned, this was really almost a last- minute affair with her. She turned to her friends, like Charles Newton, Millard Sheets, Terry [Margaret T.] Finnegan, who was her companion, Vivian [K.] Nichols, who was her secretary, and one or two other people, like her lawyer, to form this foundation to take care of the funds which would be left once she was gone. She was herself a collector, and there are one or two publications done in the years— I think there was one that was done while she was still alive, I think in Pittsburgh. But the later ones that you're familiar with reflect her own collecting interests, which were very varied. She was interested, for the most part, on a serious collecting level as time went on. She was addicted to art—it really was an addiction. And once she inherited her money, she went at this with a great deal of verve and excitement. She loved to travel, and in her travels she found things. She loved to travel to Europe. At one point she even wanted to buy a palace in Venice. She even brought a gondola back with her. Her devotion to art—in fact, she was married to an artist, Jonathan Scott, for some years—was all-encompassing. In fact, I guess it helped her through her periods of illness. She would travel all around gathering material, but she began to learn, beginning really from scratch, from buying the works of contemporary artists on the local scene, whom she really wanted to support. Once she had money she wanted to support some artists. Then she would concentrate on the works of a single artist, like Jacob Epstein. She came to know his wife [Kathleen Garman Epstein], and she bought many of his sculptures. It was a huge collection of him. [Paul] Umlauf was another sculptor she liked. She would buy these California artists. Some artists came to her themselves with offers to buy. Millard Sheets was a great friend, so she bought his works, both his tapestries as well as his paintings. He was a friend, as I say, as well. She was being advised by Ruth Hatfield of Dalzell Hatfield Gallery in the Ambassador Hotel, who helped lead her to into various areas of collecting, all European. There was very little American in that collection, one or two things—except for the contemporary. I think her real love, as her collecting taste grew, was in artists like [Joan] Miró, [Paul] Klee, [André] Derain, [Marc] Chagall, some of the German expressionists. Some of those she was led to by Mrs. Hatfield; others she began to discover pretty much on her own. She began to buy some major works of art toward the end of her life, and I think her tastes would have gone into buying major European works of art. It was not really American, except for that aspect I mentioned. But she had accumulated so much material that she felt it necessary to build her own gallery—literally hundreds of works. Plus the works of her husband, who had in the meantime disappeared, leaving his works of art behind. So she had to deal with this. But when she died, there was no real focus in the collection. It was Millard Sheets who proposed to the foundation that the one thing they could do that she would probably have appreciated was to develop that kind of focus. Millard suggested American art in a more comprehensive way. Now, her material was left where it was in the gallery on exhibition at the time I came there. Millard had assembled over seventy works of art, beginning with Benjamin West and [John Singleton] Copley and moving on as late as 1975. It was a vast area of concentration. He had assembled in something like a two-and-a-half-year period some seventy works of art, which is quite extraordinary. So that when I came, I had the view of that collection, which he had assembled with great pride, and the other areas of Virginia's own collection which was all over the gallery itself. At the time I came there, I had no idea what my position would be, except I would be an adviser on art, and I assumed I would be working with Millard Sheets. But when I came on the scene, Millard was gone, and I was in a sense appointed to occupy his place. I'd been asked to appraise the collection, as I told you earlier. I was rather cautious about that, because I knew how dedicated Millard was to that collection and the effort he had put into it and that much of this was based on a very personal selection. I did feel that the quality was uneven. Beyond that, there was a question of scale. If it was to be a museum collection, it was not even. By even, I mean not really well balanced. There were questions like that that occurred to me, but I did not speak of that at that time. Once I was on the spot and was asked to actually take the whole program in hand and decide what to do about Mrs. Scott's collection, what to do about the refinement of the collection Millard had put together, I had a major task on my hand. The main consideration was where this collection would go eventually. Several members of the board wanted to fight it out, fight the zoning system, and to try to keep the collection housed in Mrs. Scott's gallery, which was a very beautiful and well-designed gallery adjoining the house. Terry Finnegan and Vivian Nichols and her family lived in the house and were acting as caretakers and were responsible for the upkeep of the house and the upkeep of the collection. There were rooms for a curator. There was a curator's quarters actually in the house. The point that was being made to me was that if I would come over there this would be made available. Should we then proceed to try to get a revocation of the zoning problem which had been haunting them ever since Mrs. Scott died? The other part was to investigate the possibility, which they were already doing before I came, of placing the collection in some other museum in the community or some university. They had already approached the [Los Angeles] County Museum [of Art], simply inviting them to come and see the collection and accept a proposal. None of these things were fixed. These were all simply feelers to see what they should be doing; nothing was decided at all. About the time I came, they presented me with a proposal they had received from the County, having had a visitation from the director and curators and so on, as to the possibilities of a gallery being set up at the County Museum with the collection. Now, from what I gathered, Millard Sheets was adamant in insisting that the collection he had put together be maintained with no deacquisition at all. He was very resistant to any change being made in what he had done, and I think this was probably one of the problems that the board was facing in dealing with Millard Sheets.

GALM

Was he forced out?

BLOCH

[pause] My feeling is that he was. My definite impression is that he was, and that when I was approached it was with the idea of—because there were only, I think, five board members—bringing my name into the picture and thereby forcing his resignation. Had I known that, I would not have participated at all. I had no idea that ray name was being used for this. There was some disagreement and some personality problems, plus the fact that, as I say, he was adamant in keeping his collection together as he saw it. As a matter of fact, in dealing with the County Museum, their immediate agreement that they submitted indicated that deacquisition would be the first move, with a committee already appointed by them, naming that committee to deal with this problem, which Millard never would have agreed to. So I think all of this was part of it. There were probably other problems that I didn't know about at the time.

GALM

What was the general level of art expertise of the other board members?

BLOCH

There was no expertise. They knew what they liked, but they really didn't know a great deal. That was another one of the problems, I assume, at this point, that Millard simply assumed that they didn't know anything and that he was the, quote, "expert," who would tell them and recommend, usually submitting color transparencies and simply saying, "This is what I have selected" and asking for their approval. My feeling is that this did not settle well with some members of the board, who felt that the collection was being formed in too much of a hurry and that there was not enough exploration of the market as to what was then available, because that was still a good period in which to buy in the American field. I hasten to add that Millard had brought together some remarkable pictures. At least one-third of that collection included some remarkable pictures which you couldn't buy today at all. So he did have access, but a greater investigation of the market was certainly indicated, and he probably could have done even better in some areas. What he did get, as I say, in some quarters was really quite extraordinary. But he obviously didn't consider the board as suitable judges of the works of art he was bringing together, that it was really something he knew about and that was it. The difference between Millard and myself was that, as a teacher, I believed in teaching. I promised that board that anything that 1 recommended for future purchase they would see in the original and that we would discuss that painting and I would prepare in advance documentation and reasoning as to why I would recommend such a painting for the collection. That seemed to work very well, and I will say that in the years I was there, there was a wonderful reciprocal feeling and learning. They really enjoyed what they were seeing, their tastes grew and their understanding grew, and they were interested in learning about American art and how it affected the collection. They were all dedicated, as friends of Mrs. Scott, to creating something that would represent her. Although I didn't know Mrs. Scott personally, through at least Terry Finnegan and Vivian Nichols, I really came to know her very well. I read her journals, some of her letters. She wrote about art, having studied journalism at Yale [University]. She was evidently quite an extraordinary lady. So I learned and they learned, and we had a wonderful time together as a board. I enjoyed every moment of it. But the job was enormous. First of all, because Mrs. Scott had formed her own collection, Millard had left that alone. He didn't touch any of it. It was a difficult area, a sensitive area to get involved in, but we simply couldn't deal with that vast holding. And that also included the nucleus. It seemed logical to me almost from the beginning that there was only one institution we really could go to, and that was the [Henry E.] Huntington [Library and Art Gallery]. Mrs. Scott had her own connections with the Huntington. She had left them some furniture in her will when she died and may have given them some material before that. She was very Pasadena oriented, and so was her family. Their original house is part of the Caltech [California Instititute of Technology] campus now. There were strong Pasadena connections, and it seemed logical that we would approach the Huntington with a proposal to place the collection there. Of course we had no way of knowing how this would be dealt with. Because the Huntington, as you know, is an established institution. Its collections, its library, are all endowed by Henry Huntington, and all of that whole estate is Henry Huntington oriented. There was no other name associated with it. Now, our proposal involved building another gallery. If we couldn't remain where we were— And that seemed logical that that wouldn't happen. It just wasn't practical at all to fight this down the line. Besides, to try to maintain that as a public exhibition gallery, it would again be way out, you see, and away from the center of things. Whereas at the Huntington you had the library? we could support a library. My thought was we could develop an area for archival interests, with the Archives of American Art [Smithsonian Institution] being very much in the forefront of my mind. It needed a home in Southern California, which we talked about for years. It all seemed to fit quite well into that scholarly environment, which was ready-made. The only question was would the Huntington welcome the building of a gallery which would be named the Virginia Steele Scott Gallery on its grounds. That was unprecedented. It also would have a completely different system of lending. As you know, nothing left by Henry Huntington in his will can move, can be lent. None of the paintings in the main gallery are ever lent, no matter how important the exhibition. Nothing can leave the premises. Our situation implied that a lending policy would be possible. Because as you know to really get reciprocal support from another institution you have to lend, and then they will lend. And we needed that kind of flexibility. I think that was implied, although not laid down at that particular moment. As it turned out, the Huntington came through with that notion themselves. Robert Wark, who knew me for many, many years and, as it turned out, had nominated me to the Scott Foundation when the question of Millard Sheets's continuance came up, felt very comfortable with me being there because of my knowledge of the American field, which was not his particular field of expertise. The fact that indeed I might even think of coming over as curator, these were ideas that came to his mind and which helped him to support the notion of going to his trustees to form the Virginia Steele Scott Gallery and to bring the collection over there. But getting back to the collection itself, it was my job to persuade the board to deaccession most of Mrs. Scott's holdings. With the Huntington in mind, not even Mrs. Scott's rather good collection of twentieth-century European pictures, including some of the names I mentioned, would have had a home. It turns out that Mr. Huntington's will indicated that while his collecting was chiefly in British painting and associated materials, drawings, prints, books, and so on, that he was always hopeful that there would be an equal interest in American art. He had supported people like [Edward S.] Curtis, the photographer, and people like that. He was certainly not unaware of the values of American art, but he had worked with [Joseph] Duveen, and so he was pretty much steeped in the English tradition, which was typical of great collections of that time in the twenties. There were no real American collectors of any distinction at that time. But that was already provided for, something I didn't know. So in other words, the pieces were beginning to fall in place. With that in mind as the ultimate solution, even though we hadn't really formulated it at that particular time when I came, the idea was to start providing funds from the sale of Mrs. Scott's holdings, trying only to keep intact those things that we could somehow put together and present to another institution as a unit, which is what we did with Laguna [Beach Museum of Art]. We presented them with some fifty paintings by California painters, some of the best pictures we had, so that there would be a home for at least part of her collection. The rest we carefully documented in slides and other records and then proceeded to dispose of them. Because it's always my thought that this dissolution of a collection should not be so complete that there's no record of it, so we carefully produced a record that would last. And while that was being done, everything photographed—these were on slides or recorded in other ways—we then decided to sell those materials, many of which you've seen in some of the loan collections that were made immediately after Mrs. Scott died. In the meantime, my problem was also to refine the collection formed by Millard Sheets.

GALM

Pardon me. Were those sold in any complete way, or have those been going out individually?

BLOCH

No, no. There were some individual sales of some major pictures.

GALM

In other words, there wasn't Virginia Scott Steele—

BLOCH

There was a sale, yes, at Christie's [Fine Art Auctioneers] of a large part of her collection. That collection included some of the American pictures, based on my refinement of the collection. We must have sold about forty paintings. I can provide you with those figures at another time. There was a sale through Butterfield and Butterfield [Auctioneers and Appraisers] that was held on the estate of some of the lesser materials. But some of the major things, chiefly those from the refinement of the collection, went through Christie's. Some works were sold, as I told you, individually, and others through a large- scale auction, Butterfield and Butterfield.

GALM

And the major gift went to Laguna Beach Museum of Art.

BLOCH

We made a gift to Laguna Beach of the California pictures, which did form a kind of unit. You must recall that apart from the modern collection she was forming, there was no real unifying quality to the collection. It was very eclectic. It was based on growing tastes and a taste that revealed an excitement for art with a capital A. So the American collection begun by Millard Sheets was the only unit that had a sense of chronology, a sense of direction. To Millard's credit is the fact that he must have thought that this was the way to go, and it was, and the ideal way to go. Because at that time you certainly couldn't form a European collection. Then where would it go? There were some superb things, but they would have no home at the Huntington. Once we brought the Huntington into the picture, they told us that none of these European pictures, without exception, would fit into their collections. They really don't move into the twentieth century, except in photography. So that had to happen. I will say for the board that even though this was painful, particularly for the close friends of Mrs. Scott, that they went along with it. Once we had a sense of where we were going, they quickly agreed that we would do it this way. And it was painful for me too, because I knew what it meant. But we went ahead with it. It was also my problem to make certain that the basic quality of what Millard had organized remained intact, because I always had the greatest respect for Millard as a painter and as an individual, even though we didn't know each other very, very well. I would like to think that we did indeed maintain the quality materials he had brought together. I mean, the picture which is on the cover of the Huntington catalog, the [Mary] Cassatt [Breakfast in Bed], was by far the most important picture in the collection, and that he had acquired. Those were the days, by the mid- seventies, that you could still buy major works of art in the American field for a fair price. Today you can't buy any painting for less than a million dollars, and we didn't have that kind of budget to deal with. It was substantial at the time, but we still couldn't have built the collection of some fifty-two, fifty-three pictures I was able to bring together today. What we were looking for were paintings that were highly representative of the artists we were assembling. First of all, the idea was to simplify the spread of time. I selected the paintings which were major in the collection as a guidepost, beginning with the Benjamin West [Saul Prophesying] and ending with Edward Hopper [The Long Day] of 1935. That was the guidepost, what was major in the collection within that period. And include them. Not simply cut it off at 1920 and have to dispose of a major painting like Edward Hopper. It doesn't make sense at all. So essentially what was there provided the guidepost. It's essentially pretty much what the County Museum has in its own American collection. I think they begin about that period and end that period, and then the next department takes over the contemporary. We did not move into the contemporary area. Abstract painting is not exactly for the Huntington.

GALM

So how many pieces or works did you select?

BLOCH

Well, I can't give you the exact figures at this point. I can do that another time.

GALM

Generally though.

BLOCH

I must have bought more than twenty paintings.

GALM

So the total collection then—

BLOCH

Is in the fifties, yes.

GALM

The agreement with the Huntington was that there would be approximately fifty American paintings.

BLOCH

Yes. It actually went over that. Even since I left the foundation, we've added at least one other painting, since they still consult with me. The agreement with the Huntington does not provide that they have to keep that collection. Remember, when I left there, I indicated quite clearly that the job was not yet complete, that there were gaps in the collection that needed to be filled, but that that would take many, many years to find exactly the right painting. By that time—this was 1983—we no longer had the kind of funds, because the prices had gone sky- high, and the budget no longer called for that. But the idea was that the few areas that I felt still could be slimmed down from Millard's original collection— Where we might have more than one picture representing an artist, it was still possible. They're not restricted to keeping everything, but they know full well what they've got and thus far have only come to me as one of their consultants to deaccession one painting from the Millard Sheets group and another painting I had kept that Mrs. Scott had bought in the American field which they felt they didn't want to hold onto.

GALM

You say that you left in 1983. What were the circumstances?

BLOCH

It was a decision on my own. I had felt that my job was pretty much completed in the refining of the collection. It was a first phase, but a major phase. The agreement was to go over to the Huntington. After a great deal of discussion I decided that I could not move over to the Huntington. I didn't want a nine-to-five job again. I was just trying to recover from the stresses of my previous experience. I was retiring from the Grunwald Center [for the Graphic Arts] within the same period. I was only recovering from the stresses that occasioned my resignation from the art department in 1981, and I wanted to have some freedom to do my own work. Of course they were willing to work out any sort of agreement—that I would work two or three times a week. But I felt that the distances were too great and that that would involve a move, which would have involved my mother [Rose von Auspitz Bloch] and myself. I decided that that wasn't I wanted to do.

GALM

How much time were you giving them during your active phase?

BLOCH

Well, I was giving a lot of time to it, because there was a considerable amount to do. Even though we met perhaps once a month, most of my work was done from my desk at home. And I worked closely with Vivian Nichols, in particular, who really manned the office at the gallery, so there were meetings in between. I was traveling for them, seeking material, spending an enormous amount of time. Remember, I was doing this along with the stresses of the university, which were still going on, because I was teaching full-time, running the Grunwald Center, and then took on the Scott Foundation, which was a joy, but at the same time there was a lot of work to be done. I would find even my sleeping hours taken up, thinking about what needed to be done and so on. It was very enjoyable, a kind of diversion from what I was doing, but at the same time it was work, took a lot of work. But I threw myself into it wholeheartedly, and I felt that by 1983 we had reached a point where we knew where we were going. I was certainly involved in the planning for the new gallery, the bringing together of various architects who were suggested to do the job. Even though the Huntington knew exactly what it wanted, I was one of those people who was brought in to assist them in this. The idea was even if I was to be there to hire another person to be on the spot on a day-to-day basis as an associate curator or assistant curator. It didn't seem to me that this was necessarily what I needed to do. I would prefer to simply act as a private consultant to them and to be available to them, which is what I've done. As a matter of fact, at this point we're now planning to do a series of exhibitions based on my own collecting of American drawings. This has only been happening in recent weeks. So I do maintain a close relationship with them, but the idea of a full-scale commitment I didn't think was something I needed to do at this stage in my life.

GALM

Did they then bring on a full-time curator?

BLOCH

They have a full-time assistant curator.

GALM

Who is that?

BLOCH

That's Susan Danly, who I think does a very satisfactory job, more than satisfactory. Enthusiastic and aggressive young woman, who has a Ph.D. in American studies and is interested in photography, in which they have a considerable collection. She handles the teaching program they have there, and I think she's also involved with Caltech, where there is a course in the field. She likes to teach and has been involved in that and is learning a great deal about the field.

GALM

Did they replace you on the board with another art expert?

BLOCH

No. Bob Wark came aboard as a member, so he represents the Huntington and, to a certain extent, art matters, but when it comes to American art, he more or less turns to me. But as I pointed out to you, they're really not buying actively. They don't have the funds anymore to do this. What they simply do now is provide a certain amount of money to buy drawings or prints, which is what Susan is doing. But in terms of painting, they really will have to deaccession those pictures. They for instance have a Copley which needs to be deaccessioned. We were trying to do that when I was there, the one that Millard had bought. We in the meantime bought an absolutely superlative painting, so they—

GALM

Is that the Sarah Jackson that you bought?

BLOCH

Sarah Jackson I bought, yes, which is an absolutely major picture. And they have another painting of lesser importance which they can deaccession. So the job will be to try to raise funds that way, or in the hope that they will get gifts as time goes on. But it's difficult to foresee whether they will be able to really fill the major gaps, and I knew that when I left. Because by that time the field was closing.

GALM

In Millard Sheets's oral history, when he discusses the Scott Foundation and especially that early period—see, he's talking really about 1977, when the oral history was being given—he mentions that a major decision then was to actually use capital of the foundation to make purchases.

BLOCH

That's true. This is what they were doing.

GALM

He felt that it was so important to buy then.

BLOCH

That's right. Well, I'm sure he realized that. But he may not have realized how really critical it was. Nobody could tell what would happen. The Rembrandt Peale portrait of Titian [Ramsay] Peale, which the National Gallery bought for something like $5,000,000, was a painting I knew about. It was from the Woolworth collection, and I had inquired over and over again as to whether that painting was available. We were thinking at that time about half a million. We never paid anything more than— I think the Copley was $650,000. That was about the top price we were able to pay. And we bid in on the estate at that time—we had access. It wasn't an auction picture. We had to seize on opportunity: opportunity is the key to the whole question of acquisition on that level. It's the contacts you make with the galleries. I had good connections that I had maintained for many, many years. These were people who were friends of mine, and so that always helps. I think with Millard, he made friends with fewer galleries and began to concentrate much more on dealing with one gallery, rather than the whole field. That reduces your possibilities. You have to deal with the competitors, and you have to reach out for opportunity whenever it comes your way. I think some opportunity was probably lost where really, I'm afraid, one could have done quite well.

1.17. TAPE NUMBER: IX, SIDE ONE MAY 8, 1987

GALM

Professor Bloch, last time we did discuss somewhat the history of the Virginia Steele Scott Foundation and the collection's ultimate home at the [Henry E.] Huntington Library [and Art Gallery]. But since last time you've gone through records and also talked with a board member [Charles Newton] and have gotten more details on transactions that occurred. One of the things that we had talked about last time off tape was that in Millard Sheets's oral history, he indicated that Virginia Steele Scott had agreed in principle, before her death, to the building of an American collection of painting. Actually, that agreement was before any board meeting occurred, but you seem to have information on that aspect of it.

BLOCH

Yes. I think first one should, in terms of chronology, realize that Virginia Steele Scott died in January 1975. She was not well, and for some time I think it was known that she had a terminal illness, but it still was very unexpected. Since they really hadn't even had a meeting of the foundation as such, although it was established by her in February of 1974— There were meetings, of course, which she attended, but the meeting of the foundation as an entity, in a sense, in which Millard Sheets played a role and so on, really didn't occur till after her death. That first meeting of any consequence was held in February of 1975, February 5, to be exact. The discussion that we were having as to Virginia's intention occurs at that February 5 meeting, at which Sheets expressed the wishes of Mrs. Scott, who, quote, "hoped that the foundation would be of service to educational institutions such as Caltech [California Institute of Technology] and UCLA," which I don't think one finds many other places. I don't have any indication, apart from his [Sheets's] own statements, that Virginia went into any greater detail. As a matter of fact, she didn't want to lay on any direction, as she called it, for the foundation. She wanted them to have their own direction. But it was Millard who discussed with her that— I have some references here to that in a letter that Millard Sheets addressed to her brother and his wife, the Richard Steeles, on December 3, 1975, in which he referred to two personal meetings he had with Virginia before her death. He says in this that [reading] "based upon my reports to the first board meeting the following week after her death and notes that had been taken by Mrs. Nichols based on her dis¬cussions with Virginia after my meetings with Virginia—" In other words, he's referring to notes made by Mrs. Nichols, who was her secretary, Vivian Nichols, who also became a member of the board, but who has died in recent months, so I could not discuss this with her. He said, "I could assure the board that Virginia was enthusiastic about the various uses of the galleries we had discussed and the direction that future collections should take"—that direction being "with emphasis upon the great names in American painting and with paramount concern for highest quality in each painting." Those are based, as he said, upon notes that Vivian had taken, not his personal involvement. His own meetings, he indicated, said, quote, "at first she said she wanted the board to take full responsibility without any direction from her." And he said, "I finally convinced her that this freedom was very wrong, as I was the only member on her board—" etc., etc. Meaning who had any knowledge of collections and works of art and so on. At this particular moment, Vivian has died, and Terry [Margaret T.] Finnegan, who was my other close contact, has also been deceased since that time. Henry [J.] Tanner, who took care of books and other accounting responsibilities, in a sense almost treasurer— Although Vivian was in name treasurer, he eventually handled all of the responsibilities. He is in the financial department of Caltech. He, of course, I could have contacted, but I thought it was best to contact Charles Newton, who has been president of the board from the beginning and whom I know quite well. I spoke to him over the phone about a week ago, and he said it was his "impression," quote, that Virginia had approved, in principle, Millard's idea of developing an American collection. But he wasn't aware of any extant document or memo on the subject. Indeed, none of this has turned up anywhere as far as I know. He said the board went along with Sheets's proposal during the foundation's early meetings on an assumption or impression and nothing more, which seems rather interesting, since nowhere was there any demand for a specific document stating Virginia's intention. Now, I know from my discussions with Vivian and Terry and others that Virginia was, as they put it, "addicted" to collecting, and her own collecting sprees were very well known. Mostly buying from local artists at the beginning, trying to help out artists, which I think I mentioned last time. It was only afterward that she began to become rather intensely interested in collecting on a serious level, and in that direction she went toward European painting such as [Georges] Rouault, [Joan] Miró. In fact, she went to Spain to a birthday party in honor of Miró. It was that sort of thing. And she bought Henry Moore, largely through the recommendation of Henry [J.] Seldis. So her direction was toward early twentieth-century painting. Those directions were becoming very clearly evident in her work, and she bought some fairly important things at that time. As far as I know, she had bought only two or three serious American pictures. She had bought one [George] Inness [Hudson River Valley] which turned out not to be right and which I had to deal with when I got there.

GALM

Right in what sense?

BLOCH

It was a false attribution. Then there was another painting she bought, a really good [Childe] Hassam [Promenade at Sunset, Paris], which unfortunately Millard Sheets questioned, and that painting I only came across after it had been dispersed during his time. He got more money than she had paid for it, but it was a very important picture, which was then for sale at many hundred times what she had paid for it. But when we were looking for an important picture, it wasn't there anymore, and he had bought two others of lesser importance. That, however, is another story. But what I could gather was that Millard became deeply involved in building a collection of American pictures and bought heavily, chiefly in the year 1976. He took full responsibility for the acquisition of the basic collection, traveling to New York and submitting his recommendations to the board for approval, which followed very rapidly and without any question as to the intention of the original patron.

GALM

The early intention of I guess both Millard Sheets and of the board, was it with the idea that there would be an American collection of paintings and still keeping the Virginia Steele Scott personal collection intact?

BLOCH

I think none of that had really been decided.

GALM

What do you think her wishes were?

BLOCH

Well, from what I can gather, Virginia had bought so heavily that she really had no storage, certainly not in her home. She decided somewhere along the line to build her own gallery. I'm sure that she eventually thought that it would be something the public might enjoy, but at the beginning it was really a place where she could entertain her friends. The gallery was put up without any concern for the opinion of her neighbors, for instance, and you would have to get involved with that. There would have to be a zoning or usage permit from the city of Pasadena in that congested area, where there were at least eight neighbors with large estates who would be involved in the traffic problem that could ensue. Now, she didn't consult with them at all. I don't think that was deliberate. I think she was a very independent kind of person. She decided she wanted to build a gallery with a— There was a viewing room downstairs where she could have films, a little motion picture projection area. She had bought Kenneth Clark's film—you remember the one that was on television ["Civilisation"]. All of this, I think, was an idea of entertaining her friends. She was a very hospitable kind of person. When she traveled, she took a kind of entourage with her and paid their way and enjoyed having people around her. I think basically she was lonely, but she was very outgoing in that sense. All the things that she bought she enjoyed. She went out of her way to get some of this material. Then I think the idea was to use the gallery as a setting. It was a beautifully designed gallery. Thornton Ladd was the architect, whom she personally selected. She went about this, even though she wasn't well, and supervised the whole thing. I knew the gallery very well. It was very beautiful—beautifully designed, beautifully installed. Although the quality of paintings left much to be desired, they were things that she loved. And certainly the jewel part of it was the formation of her own collection. There was storage, plenty of room for all of this, and she really wanted to hire a curator who would come in and manage these affairs for her. I think she began to interview some people before she died with this in view. There was a little apartment set up for a single curator; it was obviously not for a family. What I thought was rather charming and amusing is that it was a little apartment with a bedroom, an office, and a little kitchen and bath. Mrs. Scott herself was four seven, and she designed everything to her own scale, so that if you went to the bathroom or the kitchen, you really didn't know where the switches were—they were all somewhat farther down. You simply had to get used to that. Everything had been thought out, in other words, and her own scale played a role in this. It was a very personal thing. And there was an underground passage leading to her own house. There was an elevator that went down to the basement, and there was access to her own house. It was to be a personal thing. My feeling all along—and I don't think it has been questioned—was that this was not to really be so much public. She really wanted her friends to enjoy it. It is possible that she thought eventually with a curator there that people could come at invitation, and this was in fact what Millard Sheets was thinking about as time went on, that there would be tours. His first thought was to hire not so much a curator as somebody they called a director. He went into some detail with the board as to exactly what kind of person this would be, and that in itself was rather interesting, to see the description of the kind of individual they would be looking for. At the very beginning, this was what was being discussed. It wasn't Millard Sheets running the gallery; it was to hire somebody to come in and take care of this business. Of course, from the beginning there were certainly problems that evolved. Now, perhaps it's interesting to just go into this in a little bit of detail, since I took the time out to do it. I said, first, there would be an individual who would be appointed by the board to act as director of the gallery and oversee tours and operation. That was to be some continuity of what Virginia had in mind, without Virginia herself being the hostess in this connection. And it was Millard who said at the beginning that if the foundation is to be a vital entity, additions to the collections should be made, and in connection therewith an acceptance committee should be appointed to pass on gifts and bequests. He insisted that the future of the foundation, and in particular the gallery, should be vital and active. There was considerable discussion [of the] possibility that it would go public, that there would be a zoning problem facing the foundation. A plan of operation would be required by the city of Pasadena to obtain the proper zoning, and the support of the residents [would be] necessary to obtain that kind of support—particularly the residents of the eight homes adjoining the gallery. In the subsequent meeting they were concerned about the naming of the gallery, and at first it was called the Virginia Steele Scott Memorial Gallery. At that next meeting Charles Newton was named president and Sheets was made vice president. First of all, I think I should say that in December of 1974, the board of directors included Virginia Scott herself as president; Vivian Nichols, her secretary; Margaret Finnegan, who was her companion; Charles Newton; and Walter Hilker, Jr., who I really think was the financial adviser, or at least his name appears in those early days. Finally, the bylaws were amended to involve six directors. Millard Sheets was selected that [sixth] member in December of 1974, but he wasn't in the original group which had been established in February of 1974. In the meeting of February 19, 1975, when they renamed the gallery, Newton was named president and Sheets vice president. Now, when I came aboard, I was made vice president for art, which I assume was what he was there for, to be concerned with art matters, since he was the only one who had any idea what Virginia was about, and certainly much of his connection with Virginia had to do with art. She collected Millard Sheets's work, too, in some depth, so there was considerable involvement at that time. The directors of the foundation were named in March: Newton, Sheets, Hilker, Finnegan, and Nichols. It then remained as five after Virginia died, and that was maintained for a long period. Certainly when I came there, there were still the five members, the five directors.

GALM

Does there still exist a vice presidency?

BLOCH

Well, I was never really replaced after I left, so there is no vice president. I think at the present moment, since Vivian has died, they have not replaced her either, nor Finnegan. Of course, we afterward, at the suggestion of our legal counsel, increased the board to seven, but they haven't kept that number at the moment. At the moment, it's Charles Newton as president. There's Blake [R.] Nevius, Robert [R.] Wark—since the later agreement included an exchange that someone from the Huntington would come over to the board. At the same time, the Huntington would name a member of the [Scott Foundation] board to serve on the [Huntington] board of overseers, which has become Charles Newton. And Tanner, of course, is still on the board. That's about where it is now. I think they're considering some additions, and there's been some discussion about that. I'm just going by the chronology here. Sheets was delegated to formulate plans for the management of the gallery, and interestingly enough, the neighbors were invited to formulate plans, to meet with the board at a meeting on April 9, 1975. I thought it amusing that it was a cocktail party to which they were invited. The report finally, on April 23, was that all but two of the neighbors attended this cocktail party and that, quote, [reading] "everyone seemed to be very enthusiastic, and the meeting was a good one, with almost everyone signing their approval." I think the cocktails certainly helped matters. There were two neighbors who did not appear. It was a very bitter kind of problem, because these neighbors were adamant about having any kind of public use of the gallery. In the first place, they had not been consulted by Mrs. Scott about the gallery itself. She just went ahead and built. it. But my point, as I've felt all along, was not that she was really reaching out to annoy the neighbors. This was to be on her property, on this acre and a half she owned, and it was to be for her own private use, not to create a traffic problem in this cul-de-sac in which they all lived. Now, of course, there was to be a problem if they were to go public if they were to do anything. However, when they discussed this zoning permission they were told [there] wasn't a requirement for that but what was called a special usage permit. This was what they had to get involved in. And I can say, going a little bit ahead of the game, that when this happened, when they did have the meeting and the neighbors were invited to participate, the usage permit was denied. It was still being discussed when I came: should they reapply? Some members felt yes, but legal counsel suggested that this would be fatal and that nothing would come of it. So the question was, should they remain where they are? Should they sell the property? Should they open a new gallery somewhere else? One of Sheets's professions was an architect. [The idea] was that he would design a new gallery somewhere else. There was no question at that time that the somewhere else would be at the Huntington. The Huntington was very much in the picture all along as one of the organizations deeply interested in knowing where the collection would go. That opening came fairly early, and there was considerable communication with the Huntington on a whole variety of subjects. But as I will point out, the Huntington was not to be the only institution that was being approached with regard to the collection, the future of the gallery, and so on. When this usage permit was denied and the question was should they go back for further hearing, it was thought that perhaps it would be futile to do this. We're talking about in March of 1975. By June of 1975, Sheets was discussing in some depth the search for a curator, which he was asked to do. Now, he wasn't called a director anymore. He was called a curator. I thought the proposal itself was rather interesting. What they were looking for at the beginning was one of two things: a fairly young man in his middle to late thirties with a rich background in art, administrative experience, and scholarly interest in doing research or a retired man, top man, who had come from the East to work with our libraries, as an incentive for research and that sort of thing. I don't believe that they actually actively searched for a curator, although that was Sheets's directive. It seems that about that time Sheets himself began coming up with a plan for acquisitions of American artists, works by American artists dating from about 1875 to 1915. He began at that time to name the particular artists he was thinking about and even at that time recommended that what they were looking for was quality, not quantity—a term they repeatedly discussed on that level. Which was fine. I think it's absolutely the way it should have gone. Meantime, they were busily involved with the property owners and the notice of a further hearing about that hearing that I mentioned on the usage, which was June 5. There was an extension, and the hearing was slated for July 3. In the meeting in July it was quite evident that the original application had failed, and they were concerned with viable alternatives for future operations. Sheets was all for refiling for a new use permit. He felt that that would create a holding period, if they could get that for at least four or five years, before the foundation would, as he felt, outgrow the facility, based on the collection that they would be forming. Certainly the directors themselves were shocked about the idea of abandoning the gallery at any time, because there was sentiment involved on the part of at least the ladies, who [had worked] closely with Mrs. Scott. Sheets felt that they would outgrow the gallery and it would be a natural thing for them to move to a more public place to properly exhibit the art collections, which certainly made a great deal of sense. Certainly when I came I realized that you were closed in. The neighbors held very firmly about not going ahead with this. A couple of the neighbors really never forgave Mrs. Scott for what she did, and they were all for tearing down the gallery or whatever to simply rid the community of this blight.

GALM

How did the design fit in with the other estates?

BLOCH

Oh, it was fine. It was in no way a bother. There was a great deal of foliage.

GALM

So it wasn't highly visible.

BLOCH

No, no. It was a very attractive modern building with a great deal of dignity, a great deal of quality—very handsome. It was much nicer than the house. The house was deteriorating at the time I saw it and it needed constant care. But the gardens, it fitted well into the gardens.

GALM

So they couldn't object from an aesthetic point?

BLOCH

No, they weren't objecting from an aesthetic standpoint. They were objecting to the fact that their privacy would be invaded, that people would come in quantity. There was a parking space, but not enough for anything more than, let's say, the members of the board who would meet there, which is where we met, right in front of the gallery. There wasn't in the neighborhood any place for parking of any number of people. Added to what she would have had to do if she had been alive and went ahead even with her own plan, if she was going to have as much as, let's say, twenty-five people there, she might have to get permission from the neighbors each time—at least inform them in advance—that she was going to have a party that night. That occurs in many places, but when we're talking about a public display, we're talking about numbers of people. The Huntington itself has faced problems with zoning, or rather use permit, over and over again. As they enlarged their parking area, they had to go through the city of Pasadena too, and have to tread very carefully on the toes of these people. Even the Huntington, with all of its clout, has to. Even in terms of making any addition to the property in terms of a building. People feel very concerned that it follow the particular design of the buildings there. I went all through that at the time that I was involved in the building at the Huntington. In July 1975 Sheets came prepared with a list of fifty-two painters, covering the 150 years of American painting, which he said he would be interested in searching for our collection purposes, as he referred to it. He said it would be a wonderful thing to put such a collection together and very much what Mrs. Scott would have wanted, and all the directors agreed with this approach.

GALM

I believe before you said 1875. Didn't you mean 1775?

BLOCH

No. He said 1875. No, the artists he listed were within that period. But he then extended it; he changed the whole thing. What he probably had to do was pretty much what I did, to prepare a list of the artists he thought would fit into this picture—which became a kind of guide for the directors of the foundation from which he could not deviate. That became afterwards something of a problem, since Millard, like anybody else who would act as a curator in forming a collection, might turn up a painting by an artist who happened not to be on that list. I think he made the mistake of emphasizing the names of three or four—at least four—major artists, and this kind of stuck in the mind of at least one member of the board, who constantly reminded him that those were the paintings they were looking for and that any deviation from this would not be not permitted. You must realize that the people on the board were not art people; Millard was the only person with any art background. And his natural enthusiasm would be, as he turned up pictures that might not be on the list, to bring it to their attention, perhaps assuming that as he was their guide, they would acquiesce immediately. This didn't always happen, and therein lies the rub, as it were, in terms of the whole picture. In August of the same year he asked for the privilege to look for these paintings, to go to New York for that purpose. At that time, Ruth Hatfield of the [Dalzell] Hatfield Gallery in Los Angeles, who had been a close friend of Mrs. Scott and knew Millard quite well (I think Hatfield Gallery was one of his first galleries in Los Angeles, if not the first), came up with suggestions for pictures and recommended three paintings, which they bought. So the first acquisitions were a painting by [George] Bellows [Portrait of Laura], a painting by [Robert] Henri [Orientale], and a painting by [Frederick Carl] Frieseke [Woman Seated in a Garden]. Now, these belong in that 1875 to 1915 period that Millard was first talking about, but remember that he already began to think of a broader kind of thing. What interests me is that the discussion about the director-curator seems to have disappeared in the meantime, with Millard more or less assuming the role of management of the gallery, in a sense acting as curator and going off and buying. There's no indication in the minutes that there was any discussion, or standoff discussion, about this business. He simply assumed, and I think they all did, that he was after all the expert and that he would guide them in this. And there was no question that this was the direction they were going to go.

GALM

I don't want to get you too far afield in your chronology, but you had mentioned the Hatfields. I was wondering just how important the Hatfields were in forming her collection and was she well served by them.

BLOCH

Well, Mrs. Scott, certainly at the beginning, was a novice in all of this. She—I did not know her, I must again add—had a great inquisitive interest in art. Her husband [Jonathan Scott], after all, was a painter—that was the one thing. She met him and they got married in England, and they traveled a lot. I think he helped to stimulate her further interest in art, and that was the one thing that they shared. And she encouraged him in his own work. But she would buy locally. She would travel around and find things and, as I say, ultimately began to develop her own taste buds. But at the beginning she depended rather heavily, I think, on Ruth Hatfield, who became a close friend. Whether it was Dalzell [Hatfield] and Ruth together— I really don't know how far back it went, but I think it went back pretty far. Probably to the time of Dalzell himself. When I was there, Ruth was still alive, but Ruth was no longer involved. Virginia was gone, and I think there was some bitterness on Ruth's part. In fact, I know there was, aimed particularly at Millard Sheets. I think she felt that he should have turned to her, and she was very critical of some of the acquisitions he had made since those initial three pictures. I think that was the end of it, that after that he went to New York and he consulted with dealers in New York and left Ruth behind. But Ruth used to visit with Mrs. Scott. I think she was responsible for some of the expressionist pictures that she bought, German expressionism. I think the [Alexei von] Jawlensky pictures that were there were recommendations of hers. Certainly she recommended certain print collections that she had formed, which included some Gabriele Muenter, for instance. There was a very lovely collection of rare woodcuts by Gabriele Muenter, which when the collection was to be sold, I managed to get UCLA through the Grunwald family to buy for the Grunwald Center [for the Graphic Arts]. So that collection is there. It moved in a variety of areas. I'm sure that the Hassam prints, which was an excellent collection, came by way of Ruth Hatfield. So there were some very good acquisitions made through Mrs. Hatfield's recommendation, Mrs. Scott began to develop her own ideas. As her funds began to come in more generously from the Steele estate, she traveled herself, traveled to Europe, and during the course of this was buying on her own. Many of the things that she was buying were things that she herself had selected without Mrs. Hatfield. The interest in tapestries, I think, came through Ruth Hatfield. I can almost pick out certain areas that were emphasized in this rather composite collection of materials that owed much to Ruth Hatfield. Now, Ruth was going to write her own book on the subject, and she was certainly going to speak about Mrs. Scott. I don't know what happened to that manuscript, if indeed there was one, but Mrs. Hatfield, as you know, died a few years ago, and all of that did not happen. I only had one or two meetings with Ruth Hatfield. She was rather bitter about Millard Sheets abandoning her in the course of the forming of the collection. I approached her because the George Inness painting which Mrs. Scott had bought, which was a highly questionable attribution, came through Ruth Hatfield's, and we wanted her to take it back. That question, plus the one about the Hassam, which also came from Ruth Hatfield directly to Mrs. Scott, were matters that Millard had discussed with her. All Ruth would say was that she would submit documentation to point to the authenticity of the paintings she had sold. All she could do on the Inness was to point up the provenance, gallery provenance chiefly, not much else, and that was a continuing argument that came my way and became my particular problem. On the Hassam, there was no question in my mind that the painting was fine. When I came to know the painting, it at that time was for sale by a gallery in New York, a major gallery. It was a fine painting, and I was shocked when I discovered that that had been the painting that had originally been part of the Scott collection. Certainly, as it came out, there was no question about its authenticity, even by the dealers who coveted the painting and finally were able to acquire it. But Mrs. Hatfield was rather cool to me. Particularly, I guess, because I was bringing in the Inness problem once again, but she also was rather leery of me because she still felt hurt about what had been going on. She certainly at least intimated to me that she would be perfectly willing to go out and find major pictures for us. What she was probably intimating at that time was that I didn't know what I was doing either, that Millard didn't know and therefore I was in the same category, and that she would get the pictures we would need for the collection. These are problems you generally have when you work with dealers that closely. It has never been my problem, because they know I know. So either we work as peers or we don't go at all, and this works much better that way.

GALM

Did she sort of see herself as having put the quality into that collection?

BLOCH

I think she felt that she had a clear line to Mrs. Scott as a friend, as an adviser, and that this should have continued and that she had first claim to that privilege. That is how I felt; that was my opinion of Ruth. After all, when I first knew her, she was quite an elderly lady and not in a position to be trifled with. And I didn't. When we met for lunch one day—I went with Terry—it was very pleasant. But most of my connection with that was to try to get her to help us resolve the problem on the Inness, which was becoming, I'm sorry to say, a rather painful subject in foundation discussions. I think we went too far in making so much of it, since its value wasn't all that great. But we didn't like to have all these little problems, and it was one of my jobs to resolve it, not realizing at the time that it really was a long-held problem that went back to Sheets and Hatfield. So I inherited something that wasn't so easy to deal with. I resolved it eventually, but that can be another story. Now, I think we're really coming already to 1976, and I think the next date I really have is April 1976. Nineteen seventy-six was to be a big year in terms of the formation of the collection, because it was in that year that Sheets really went full speed ahead in forming the collection. At this time there was absolutely no question that Millard was really the leader in this. The foundation willingly and with great encouragement allowed Millard to go ahead with plans for the collection and the building of the collection. In April 1976, the meeting held in April, Sheets was evidently somewhat in touch with the Huntington. He informed the Huntington of, quote, [reading] "the hope and desire of the foundation to build a great American collection of art within the next seven or eight years" of about 35 or 40 paintings with the advice and counsel of Sheets. Wark was already involved in it in the sense that the Huntington had expressed the view that this would be ideal, that from there we could build and that this number of works would attract scholars from all over the country. The idea was to build a jewel-like collection. Sheets was already consulting auction catalogs, particularly one held in April in which he pointed out paintings of interest to the collection. By that time he had made a list of about 125 paintings, and he said he would be interested in adding some 20 to the collection, based, I guess, on the auction. Well, he said 20 to the collection if and when such paintings became available. Several were to be auctioned at the Sotheby['s] auction. And again the board unanimously agreed that we're interested in quality, not quantity, and he was authorized to actively investigate the market and to undertake the buying of paintings.

1.18. TAPE NUMBER: IX, SIDE TWO MAY 8, 1987

GALM

Professor Bloch, you were talking about the Virginia Steele Scott Foundation and I guess the acquisition of American paintings by Millard Sheets.

BLOCH

Yes. What I have been giving you in a chronological fashion is information based on the minutes of the meetings which occurred before I got on the board, which wasn't for some time afterward. I think it's rather interesting in terms of what happened in this community and what has finally evolved to have the kind of information that I'm able to present to you from that source. I've already indicated the Huntington. There was some involvement already. In June of 1976, at the meeting of June 3, Newton introduced a letter from Jim [James] Thorpe, who was the director of the Huntington at that time, relating to the consideration of a relationship with the Huntington. Wark and Thorpe evidently had met with Sheets and, quote, "enjoyed conversations" along with him. In July, the meeting of July 20, 1976, Sheets submitted a report relative to his trip to New York in search of American paintings—that was during the week of June 13, prior to that—in which he reported that he'd visited major art galleries and had brought back about thirty-five transparencies of paintings then available for purchase. I might say at this particular point that Sheets was never, as far as I could gather, to present actual paintings. The board was confronted with transparencies only, which they obviously passed around and looked at and made decisions based on these transparencies. Sheets had certainly invited members of the board to meet him in New York to see some of these pictures and that sort of thing, and that occasionally happened, but for the most part major decisions were made on the basis of transparencies. This, I can say, from my standpoint and my opinion, was not the right way to go. Although I wasn't fully aware of how all this was happening, when I came aboard I had assured them from the beginning that I would not expect them to make decisions based on transparencies, because they are frequently very misleading. Besides, they give no sense of scale.

GALM

Had you made that decision not knowing how Millard Sheets had worked with them?

BLOCH

That was my modus operandi anyhow. I realized that the board was not equipped to deal with works of art in any depth at all and none of them had any real training. There was interest. Certainly the two women who knew Mrs. Scott well were drawn into the orbit of Mrs. Scott's fascination with works of art. But I think the most important thing that— I really shouldn't go into this at this point, but my feeling when I first saw the collection was that there was such vast difference in scale. I feel that that problem of scale, which is all-important to the formation of a public collection, was largely due to the fact that they were looking at transparencies—four-by-five [inch] transparencies for the most part—which gave them no idea.

GALM

They were all in scale.

BLOCH

They were all in the same scale. So if they were looking at a painting that was nine by twelve inches, it could have been just as well nine by twelve feet. They wouldn't have known the difference. I imagine some of them must have been rather shocked when those paintings finally arrived, but decisions had already been made, you see, and none of them would have admitted, hey, you know, this is a problem. That was certainly my first consideration, plus the fact that I've always insisted that students be confronted by original works of art in order to deal with it. That's from my days at the university. I felt that slides were absolutely impossible. They gave the students no sense of scale. I could show them a mural and a print, and they'll all look the same as far as that was concerned. So that was not something that was conditioned by anything that Millard had done. I'm just simply saying that had he brought the works of art to them, it would have inspired them to understand scale as well as to understand quality. All this discussion about quality over quantity means nothing if all you're doing is looking at slides or transparencies, because the colors are almost always wrong. So I'm just going that far afield to mention that, and in all the notices that I've had, he was bringing back transparencies. In July of 1976 there were thirty-five transparencies. He was then given a unanimous approval by the board to proceed with negotiations to purchase paintings that would add to the importance of the American collection. This had been initiated in November of 1975 with the acquisition of three pictures from Hatfield, which they could have seen and were probably brought to them. Sheets provided a list of paintings which he had finally decided on for purchase. This included twenty-one paintings from Kennedy [Galleries, Inc.], one painting from Hirschl and Adler [Galleries, Inc.], two paintings from Washburn Gallery, and six paintings from Davis and Long [Company] galleries. So in other words we're talking about thirty paintings, with a total cost of $1,945,000, which in 1976 was fairly substantial. These included a whole variety of paintings. Evidently these transparencies were also shown to Bob Wark, who indicated that he was, quote, [reading] "tremendously and favorably impressed with the collection" and said that "this mode of operation has many things to recommend it. Mr. Sheets himself is very well informed." And that "these paintings come from the major dealers and are known paintings." "You have nothing to fear" was the word that came from the Huntington. But what was added to it was the one thing that Millard evidently didn't take in seriously, in which it was said, "It's a good thing to have this mass of major paintings for trading later." Millard had some notion about trading if he had duplicates, but as time went on he had put in so much time and so much effort and so much of himself that he felt that the collection, if given to another institution, should be held in perpetuity, which is very difficult business to deal with a public institution, as you know.

GALM

Now, that comment about trading. Was that by Robert Wark?

BLOCH

That was a statement made by Bob Wark, but I'm quite certain that Millard had this in mind when he bought more than one painting by an artist, that it might be a good buy and could be used later on. I'm quite sure he was aware that the market was going to change and that anything he could get within this range would give him some trading material. But as I say, as time went on, he began to feel the collection taking shape and he became very concerned. I mean, he was hanging the collection in the gallery on his own—he wasn't even asking for help. He would be caught there late at night. He even had an apartment, not at the gallery, but had an apartment in the vicinity of the gallery so that he could be on hand. He worked very hard to put this together. It became an all-consuming personal responsibility for him about which he felt very, very dearly. Well, it was Wark who said all dealers are willing to take back paintings at the selling price or better, which would allow the foundation to refine the collection as you go along. That is Bob Wark's general philosophy anyhow: that a painting is never worth less than what you pay for it and that it's good trading material. It's also "money in the bank" is another term he has often used. I think in general he's been correct in this, that works of art of any quality are always valuable.

GALM

Did the board ever discuss individual prices of paintings?

BLOCH

Oh, I'm sure they did. I only know of one instance in the minutes in which there was some discussion about a painting and Millard went back to discuss the price and a reduction of the price. But the way you generally proceed in buying paintings is not to take the first price unless you really understand that there's no way to go. You either accept it or you discuss, as I always do, what the lowest price is, what's the best price that you can offer. Because the first price is not always the one. Some galleries, of course, are adamant. They place a price and that's it. You either go ahead with it or you don't.

GALM

I guess I was approaching it from the idea that here was a board that didn't have a great deal of expertise in the acquisition of paintings. How would they know what was a good price?

BLOCH

They wouldn't know. They wouldn't know. They did not go to check the auction markets. They did not check any of these things. They placed their trust fully in Millard, as they later did in me, to get them the best prices. And I'm sure Millard, as I did, worked for the best interests of the collection. Certainly the prices he got, as it turned out, were very good. I mean, he later reported that he was offered half a million shortly after he bought the [Mary] Cassatt [Breakfast in Bed] for $390,000, and he turned it down. Well, the painting is worth several million probably today, if you gauge the values of prices of this kind. I think he must have been aware of the fact that the market was beginning to move rather rapidly in the direction of American art, and a lot of the speeding up of the acquisition was probably to beat that moment. Although even then, I think buying thirty pictures at one swoop is a rather brave step to make. He bought eventually some seventy-three pictures in the time he was there, beginning at this period and ending in April of 1978. I bought only twenty paintings at most during the period I was there, from April '78 to the Fall of '83 I think it was. Of course, by that time, prices had gone up considerably, but we were talking still about quality as against quantity. But going on, I think it was rather interesting to note how questions of taste were evolved. The board, of course, was making decisions of what they liked or didn't like simply based on just their general feeling of the moment, which is generally where I have the students begin. You can say what you like, but then you jolly well better find out why you don't like it. It seems that two [Gilbert] Stuart portraits were available. One was a portrait of a man by Gilbert Stuart, and the other one was a portrait of a woman, a portrait of Mrs. Stow [Mrs. Edward Stow], which came from another gallery. It's interesting to see at the meetings how this generally worked. Sheets had shown the two paintings to Bob Wark because they were very much in the English style. Wark liked the portrait of the man and not so much the portrait of the woman. When it came to the meeting, it was Margaret Finnegan who liked the portrait of the woman. Vivian Nichols, who always sided with Sheets, said she liked the portrait of the man. They ended up buying both portraits, you see. As it so happened, the portrait of the man is really one of the drabbest of all the Gilbert Stuart's I have seen in a long time, and I wasted no time in trading that away. Nobody argued the point, nor did they bring this matter up. The Stow portrait is magnificent in so many ways because of the way Stuart used color, which wasn't very frequent with him. This was a portrait of somebody he knew very well, a personal friend, and it's an extremely interesting and very beautiful portrait which is still one of the highlights of that collection. So it shows you that even— But then Bob Wark doesn't claim to be an expert in the American field. It looked more like an English portrait, and thus he was attracted to it. But he would be the first to admit that, after all, he's not the expert in the field. They [the Huntington] have a portrait of George Washington of course, one of the Stuart portraits. They have two actually, one being far better than the other, which had been given to the Huntington. So this is the sort of thing that you could find, that Sheets certainly did from time to time consult with someone like Bob Wark and came up with these varying opinions. Sheets in September of '76— Well, in the meantime, he was recommending other purchases, I might add, throughout the year. At one point, and this was in August of that year, an opinion was expressed—I don't know from what direction it came—that it was "far more beneficial," is the quote, "to see the actual paintings than the transparencies." That's the first time that came up, but nothing seems to have really come of it except that Sheets would generally encourage them to come along to New York and see the pictures. There wasn't the business of shipping them. Of course, shipping thirty pictures would have been an incredible, costly undertaking. Even I did not recommend a shipment of pictures unless I was quite sure it was something that was worth seeing. I would not bother a gallery to do this unless I was quite sure this was something that would be meaningful. And they would see transparencies as well, so they could compare the original with the transparency. To me, this was all-important, along with the problem of scale that I've already mentioned to you. In any case, in September he was recommending other painters, thirty-five additional painters, to be included in the collection. He said this was done, quote, [reading] "after reviewing some of the most respected books on American painting and carefully studying artists most often included in great museum collections." He felt that within three to five years from that time, the basic collection would be just under a hundred pictures and felt that he would have to recommend some of the highest-priced pictures as they came on the market, which included people like [Thomas] Eakins, [Winslow] Homer, Cassatt, [John Singer] Sargent, [Thomas] Cole, [Frederic E.] Church, [William J.] Glackens, [Ralph] Earl, and [George Caleb] Bingham. (I might add that at no point was I mentioned as somebody they would consult on the Bingham problem. Well, that's neither here nor there. ) He estimated that his goal could be reached for about $1,564,000. That's in addition to what he'd already spent—an estimated total of $4,560,000 for a collection of a hundred paintings. At that particular meeting in September, he submitted six more pictures. There was some discussion at that point of having experts to review the collection then formed. Wark was consulted as to the matter of the experts, and he recommended Lloyd Goodrich, E. [Edgar] P. Richardson, and John [I. H.] Baur as the experts. Once again, the Huntington was discussed in terms of the ultimate repository of the collection.

GALM

Now, who presented that idea, do you know? Of getting the evaluation of experts.

BLOCH

Well, I really don't know where this started. I have a feeling that it started with Bob Wark. I've not discussed it with him, but I will, [in order] to correct my statement. It would have been natural for someone to come up with the idea that they shouldn't just go along with what they were doing on a kind of local level, but to bring in experts who might be able to come up with a real statement as to where they were going. So letters from experts were solicited right after that meeting. Sheets had no reason to feel that this wasn't the way to go. He was very proud of what he had done. There were thirty-six paintings at Kennedy's which could be visited and seen. Not some of the paintings which had already been shipped, but the paintings that were at Kennedy's, probably purchased from Kennedy's. They would have to be the paintings purchased from Kennedy's. Kennedy's would not have opened their doors to paintings by other dealers, so one must assume that the other paintings were at the gallery and that there was a list submitted. I have copies of the letters that ultimately came through.

GALM

So it wasn't really a challenge to his expertise.

BLOCH

No. I can find out what this was all about. There was probably some uneasiness with not having brought in other people to look at it. I might add, at no point was I, at that point, invited to come through. Richardson, Baur, and Goodrich were the senior experts in the field, and they lived in the New York area. Richardson, by that time, was acting as adviser to the Rockefellers and had been the former director of the Detroit Institute [of Arts], one of the founders of the Archives of American Art [Smithsonian Institution], had written extensively on American art, was a man of great reputation. Certainly Lloyd Goodrich, as former director of the Whitney [Museum of American Art (New York City)], and Baur, who was his assistant and a man also published widely in the field, but particularly knowledgeable in early twentieth-century art, were the people that should have been approached at that time. The letters that came through were dated variously between September 14 and September 20 to October 9. Richardson viewed the thirty-six paintings and called the collection, quote, "a broad and solid foundation." There were actually fifty-three paintings in the collection by August 31, with a cost of $2,700,000, if you want that kind of intimate detail. Baur wrote a letter on September 14, also having visited Kennedy's, and said, quote, "The quality of virtually all the pictures is uniformly high and a substantial number exceptional." He was the only one to express some disappointment. His disappointment was in the [John Frederick] Peto [A Full Shelf] and the Hassam [Paris Street Scene]. Actually, the Peto is a rather major picture. But he said, "Deserving to rank unquestionably as masterpieces." And he named the [John Singleton] Copley portrait of Samuel Savage, which is a pretty drab picture; the [Charles Willson] Peale Mrs. Frisbee, which is just the ugliest painting I've ever seen in my life; the portraits by [Samuel F. B.] Morse, which were not right. But the [Eastman] Johnson, [Winslow] Homer [Montagnais Indians], [Fitz Hugh] Lane, Henri are okay. The [Charles W.] Hawthorne was another dud as far as I was concerned—not a really great painting. So it's curious to know. Goodrich, on October 9, wrote about his visit to Kennedy's. He called the collection "excellent," naming in particular the Homer watercolor—there was no painting by Homer—the Benjamin West [Saul Prophesying], [Elihu] Vedder, and a [Andrew] Wyeth watercolor, which I subsequently dispersed because of the dating and the fact that it didn't fit into the span of the collection as we gradually brought it closer into focus. I'm not criticizing the experts, but they were really put into a difficult position. They were called to a gallery with which some of them had important connections. The idea of them casting aspersions on the collection at that point would have been awkward. When I was finally called in, I too was rather cautious. I made some notes to myself, which I will be glad to introduce to this tape, but at that time, in the meeting, they more or less quoted me as saying everything was wonderful. And indeed I credited—and still to this day would credit—Sheets as doing an enormous job in bringing together that many pictures in so short a period. My question is why was the rush? What was the great rush? Did it have to do with the changing market? Did it have to do simply with the curatorial enthusiasm of bringing together a collection within a short period? None of these I can particularly answer, but if you're talking about quality over quantity, you have to proceed slowly.

GALM

Were these paintings part of any large collection that suddenly came onto the market?

BLOCH

No, no. There's a constant flow of pictures on the market. And certainly at Kennedy's he could see a vast number of pictures, many by artists who were part of the Kennedy stable at that time, like [Jack] Levine, Ben Shahn, [Charles] Burchfield. These were all areas in which he made purchases which I, after all, in many cases dispersed afterward, again because they tended to go— Not 150 years. They went from the eighteenth century to 1974, and I felt that was too wide a spread. After he began thinking about 1875 to 1915, he was wise to spread it. If we're thinking about the Huntington, it was certainly my impression from the beginning that there had to be an emphasis on the earlier period. And he rightly went into that by buying the Benjamin West, which is a very important painting which you couldn't possibly duplicate today, a painting of that quality and subject matter. But you see, reliance on experts is not always a simple matter. They are frequently not in a position to put into so many words all their opinions, and after all, some of their eyes are just as variable as those of other people. Nobody could possibly gather the condition from some of the statements that were made regarding individual pictures. It wasn't until, let's say, I was there on the board— I invited Victor [D. j Spark, who's a well-known dealer and appraiser and a man with a very fast tongue, very deliberate opinions about pictures, who simply went right down the line and pointed out that certain pictures were not all they should be and so on and so forth. He helped me immensely in getting across the message that certain changes had to be made. He did that out of friendship to me, but not at my direction. He simply came to appraise the collection and did this very generously. It was very helpful. But it was obvious, of course, that the board went along completely with this and may have had some thoughts, possibly based on advice from the Huntington— Because at that time a merger with the Huntington was very much in the picture as to what would happen up ahead. By the time I got there, I was convinced that was the only way to go, because certainly the other possibilities wouldn't work at all. (And I'll be happy to go into that at another time. ) The Steele family had strong connections in Pasadena and with Caltech. To me, the Huntington was the only viable way to go, and I felt that although— And some of the other possibilities I've already mentioned a minute ago. They just wouldn't have worked quite the same way. Certainly if they wanted to keep some control of the integrity of the collection then being formed— Which I was just as much concerned about as they, but with the realization that there would have to be some changes. But I wanted to do that for the benefit of the foundation. I didn't want them to turn the collection over, let's say, to the [Los Angeles] County Museum [of Art], which had proposed taking the collection and immediately forming a deacquisition committee. It was incredible. Sheets was certainly feeling very, very keenly about the integrity of the collection, and I could understand what he was talking about, although I knew you couldn't go along completely with that, no matter which museum you were approaching. No museum will accept a collection that cannot be refined in any way. Now, at the 30 October meeting, Sheets continued to present transparencies, which included some interesting pictures, including, in fact, the Cassatt Breakfast in Bed, which was probably the major picture, and the famous [William Merritt] Chase of the Tenth Street studio [The Inner Studio, Tenth Street]. Some of the paintings were in transparencies. There were even a couple of paintings for which there was no transparency, but by that time Terry Finnegan and Vivian Nichols had been to New York and had seen some of the pictures with Sheets and were able to report affirmatively about some of those pictures which were recommended. At about this time, Henry Tanner, who represented the finances of the committee— The original financial member was gone, and Tanner was appointed. Tanner did not know Mrs. Scott, but he's a very able man. He recommended at that time, I think— And this again is based on my feeling of the matter, based on some impressions I got later on that they were bringing together and spending a lot of money in a hurry. Too many pictures were being bought, and something should happen. Anyhow, Tanner recommended that there be a halt in acquisition at this time, saying that the endowment funds were dropping and that we are on dangerous ground if we permit the endowment to drop below $5 million. Now, remember, they were drawing on capital funds, along with interest. So they really were, from a practical standpoint, on dangerous ground. I remember discussing this with Dr. [Franklin D.] Murphy, who asked me how they were proceeding, and he was rather shocked to learn that they had been using capital funds, since they had to be thinking about endowment funds and a lot of other things up ahead, and not strictly on the collection.

GALM

Do you have any sense of what the original foundation total was? It seemed to me I had a figure of $10 million, but—

BLOCH

No, it was more than that. It was more than that. I mean, if you consider the property and all of that, it came to much more, the value of the estate. I forget what they were operating at. I could easily find that figure. But he's saying at that time that the endowment was dropping below $5 million, because we must realize that he had spent a considerable amount of money by that time.

GALM

In the Millard Sheets oral history, I think he talked about $14 million at the time of the establishment of the foundation.

BLOCH

Could be, yes.

GALM

But I think that was without the property.

BLOCH

Yes. I was thinking of something closer to $20 million, which probably included the property. But there was investment, of course—there was stock and that sort of thing. There was money coming from the Steeles themselves, their own foundation, moneys left by the mother for instance, some of which they still get each year only through the interest. They were getting moneys that way. My discussion with them involved the sale of some works of art from the basic collection, those which I felt were not adding to the collection in terms of scale, in terms of quality, as well as in the scope which Sheets had recommended, which by that time reached from the very beginning, from the eighteenth century on to 1974. It was too great a spread. I suggested, as I already have mentioned, that we select the best paintings to create the perimeters of the collection. We stopped at 1930 with Edward Hopper [The Long Leg], which is a major painting, but we began in the eighteenth century, and ultimately would go back to 1740-something with the painting I finally bought, the earliest painting we bought. With Millard, the Copley was certainly the earliest painting he bought, dating from the 1760s. It was a very good period—it was the Boston period—but it was not a very good painting. What I eventually bought was a major painting within the same period. That painting that he had acquired is still there, a very difficult painting to trade off or to sell, even though it has value, for condition reasons as well as in the look of the painting.

GALM

So how long did that halt in acquisition—?

BLOCH

Well, that was to last six months I gathered. Actually, it was something that Millard I don't think particularly enjoyed, because it put a halt to acquisition at a moment when he felt there was some impetus. And I know what he's talking about. That is, you get the dealers interested, get them to work with you and to bring pictures to your attention, and if suddenly you stop buying, there is a kind of halt that can sometimes be almost fatal, as demands and paintings are brought to other people's attention. Once they've got their attention, you're likely to get first refusal to a major picture, and that's very important. So I think he resented that. Whether that had to do with the fact that he thought this was deliberate or whether there was some dissatisfaction or whether personality problems were beginning to arise, I really can't answer all of that. Millard's a very strong man with very positive opinions. I think—again, this is my opinion—that the one little question "Wouldn't it be more beneficial if we could see the paintings?" may have played a role. People get very bored with transparencies, as well as the fact that he was more or less letting them know that he knew what he was doing and that he was the final word on the subject. By that time he certainly was in the forefront of building that collection: there was no one else. And having the approval of the experts was certainly added encouragement. So that when he was finally told that we stop at this point, you can imagine that this was not something that he looked at with great happiness. That was right after getting the experts' opinions. I think we can understand why the chronology is interesting at this particular point. We come to 1977 in January, when Charles Newton recommended that the foundation employ a noted expert, or experts, of Mr. Sheets's choosing to search out paintings for Mr. Sheets's consideration. That bothers me a little bit in terms of what may have been happening in the board. That would have been putting another party, or parties, into the picture, so that Sheets himself would not have the primary leeway to select and bring the pictures.

GALM

But yet of Mr. Sheets's selection.

BLOCH

Well, he would select the experts, but they would seek out the paintings, you see. That's the point, see. He would then bring the paintings to the board for final consideration for purchase. Newton suggested that the experts look over our collection, look over the country's availability, and then name the artists which they think will add to the importance of the collection. You see a little problem developing there. Newton strongly suggested that Sheets talk to noted scholars about an actual counseling service for the last major painting needed to complete the collection. Sheets stated he had no objection to discussing any purchase we might consider with anyone or all three of the men he had previously consulted for professional opinions. However, in his opinion, it is pointless to do this after discussing it. Recommendation [had already been] made for purchase, and we would not buy it, you see. He's saying that if the foundation's not in a position to purchase any painting for six months, then we should temporarily put aside purchasing all together. You see, he's still referring back to the meeting of the previous fall in which he was told they should really cease buying. Tanner did this from time to time. That was his job, to point out that we were spending too much and we should halt, that we were on dangerous ground. It was not, as far as my experience was concerned, anything to become disturbed about, but I can imagine that this problem of personality between Newton and Sheets was gradually beginning to boil and that this idea of bringing the experts in to recommend pictures which Sheets would then bring to the attention of the board was not something Millard wanted to get involved in.

GALM

I'm not sure that I understand Newton's background. Who is he?

BLOCH

First of all, he was a close friend of Mrs. Scott. He frequently acted as her escort at various affairs after her husband died. He was a close friend. He traveled with her, was part of that entourage. They'd go to Europe and so on and so forth. He had been associated with Caltech for many years. He taught there—English I think—but he became associated with Dr. [Robert A.] Millikan, head of Caltech, as an adviser. He was involved rather closely in various matters on an administrative level and had an administrative post, as well, with Caltech when Millikan was president. He traveled with Millikan to Washington on various jobs—I knew at least of one [trip]. He was involved in building programs and so on. But he eventually was retired from that, and although he maintained an office at Caltech and still does to this day, it was entirely something he decided to do on his own. This [the Scott Foundation] became the project in which he became very much concerned. He felt he was really representing Virginia Scott and her wishes in carrying forth a plan for the use of Virginia's estate.

GALM

Is he a contemporary of Virginia Scott?

BLOCH

I would say yes. Virginia died in January '75. She was about seventy then; he's now eighty. I think she may have been a couple of years older than he. He was born in 1907.

GALM

She was born in 1905.

BLOCH

But they were roughly contemporaries, and she turned to him for advice and support. This was a friendship. But in terms of art, he hasn't any basic knowledge apart from the fact that he has a small collection of some works of art that he and his wife [Nancy Jane Kennedy Newton] collected. That was about it. But he's a very strong personality with his own firm opinions about how things should be run, and as president of the foundation, he felt pretty strongly about his position and his responsibility. Sheets, of course, went on. He wanted to point out for the record that the experts that had been consulted had given very positive, enthusiastic opinions of the first fifty paintings and that, in his opinion, [reading] "It's not necessary to ask their advice as to what's needed to round out the collection, because it's fundamental that we should have an Eakins, an Earl, a Sargent, a Homer, and so on." He said there were two principles involved. "One is the quality of the art, and the other is the quality of the mind of the collectors." "Reasonable that both should be respected"—something along that line. "It was unanimously agreed by the board that if any institution is willing to accept our collection as a gift, it should remain so in perpetuity." That was already the point that was going to be the sticking point, and I think that was the point that was constantly brought up when I was there was that certainly you can't expect any institution to take it. Sheets became very protective of what he had done, that it had been approved by the experts and therefore should remain intact. I cannot believe he wanted to keep all the second pictures in the collection. I think there was some idea that there would be trading, but he wanted to make those decisions and not call in the experts each time, and I can understand that. Now, I'm jumping ahead a bit. By July of 1977, I could see from reading the minutes that the clash between the two men was reaching a height. It came on a rather minor matter, but it broke out into the minutes of the meeting in ways that had been formerly more or less kept quiescent. I thought it was kind of funny—from this standpoint. It certainly wasn't considered funny at the time. Sheets was reporting at that meeting on the availability of a painting by John Quidor as one of the rarest American artists, which is true. By this time he had already bought a David [Gilmore] Blythe, which comes into the same category of artists who were kind of illustrators and who caricatured American narrative, stories, and so on. Both fairly similar. I was very pleased to note that there was an important David Blythe painting in the collection, a very well known one, and wondered myself at that time how he managed to get that across when he was dealing with a collection of only the big, big names. But somehow that had gotten through and at a price of $150,000, which today is absolutely nothing. But for some reason this started a discussion at the meeting which seemed not to have a favorable ending. Newton stated that he had never heard the name before and that it was not on his list. Sheets said that he had mentioned it, although it was not one of the great four that he'd been looking for and kept referring to: Eakins, Sargent, Homer, and Bingham. Newton said it was not in the minutes and that he would prefer to use the money for the ones that had already been named and was in favor of a couple of pictures that were then possibly available of Eakins and Sargent. But Sheets insisted that Quidor is one of the top men, and he doesn't care whether the board decides to get it or not—

1.19. TAPE NUMBER: X, SIDE ONE MAY 22, 1987

GALM

When we last spoke, Professor Bloch, two weeks ago, you were recounting an incident that had occurred at the July 1977 board meeting of the Virginia Steele Scott Foundation which you felt was sort of a clarion-clear indication of clash between Charles Newton and Millard Sheets over his [Sheets's] authority to recommend paintings for purchase. The painting in question was a painting by John Quidor that was available, and Mr. Newton was not in favor of the purchase. How did that resolve itself?

BLOCH

Well, I suppose I should really follow through instead of leaving the audience in suspense. It's sort of agony without ecstasy. There followed considerable discussion by various members of the board as to the big four that they were talking about. One member, Mr. [Henry J.] Tanner, said that after the four major ones were acquired and as money became available and pictures available, they could be purchased in some kind of ranking order. But Newton kept insisting that he wanted to remain with the four, quote, "big-league" names and insisted that the Quidor didn't appear on that original list and therefore could not be considered.

GALM

Just for the record, here are those four: [Thomas] Eakins, [John Singer] Sargent, [George Caleb] Bingham—

BLOCH

We're talking about Eakins, Sargent, Bingham, and [Winslow] Homer, right. Sheets tried to defend his stand and said that it has always been his contention that the collection needs the four painters named, but that as far as he's concerned, it doesn't mean that only, quote, "big- league" painters are the only ones that should be considered. But we must realize that he had somehow been fenced in by this list that he had submitted, which, incidentally, I was asked to do too, ultimately. They needed that as a kind of guidepost to come to the defense of the board. I mean, they really weren't familiar with the whole history of American art. Of course Newton was the kind who would really concern himself. Once it was set, he wanted to continue in that direction. It was like a plan. So this continued to be discussed. Then finally the thing did reach a kind of crescendo in which Newton reminded Sheets that he'd said he didn't care if he bought the Quidor or not. Because it was at that time, I believe I mentioned, that they had said that they had ceased buying. It's my impression at this point that it was a kind of agreement behind the scenes that Sheets would not be given additional money to buy, that they were going to create a period in which no acquisitions were made. Because big chunks of purchase had been made. The idea was that they felt it was moving too quickly; the pace was too fast. That was one of the problems, you see. And then finally Sheets said he doesn't care and he's very unhappy and feels he's wasting his time, and finally concluded by saying that he just won't quit and turn it over to Mr. Newton, because, as far as the art collection is concerned, he frankly feels that Newton couldn't do a good job. So that was the clue: the two personalities were clashing. As I said, Newton's a very positive man, and he felt that this was the way to take a stand with Mr. Sheets. And that was that. We're talking about July 1977. I'm trying to move ahead in all of this and really deal not with other matters but with acquisition, which I think is particularly interesting when you realize you are dealing with a board that was not knowledgeable. They only had one person on the board to guide them, and that was becoming a problem. That was the reason why other experts were being brought in. The board was becoming a little bit concerned about the rapid pace of acquisition and whether they were moving in the right direction.

GALM

Could I ask, how strong was Millard Sheets's expertise in American art?

BLOCH

Well, I think he would have been the first to admit that he was not an expert nor a scholar. If you remember, when I've read some of the statements he made, he said he was reading the books and becoming acquainted. But he was not— And I think that was the big mistake. That would be the mistake of anybody forming a collection, so it's not specifically aimed at Mr. Sheets but at anybody, even if the person's an expert in his own field. The experts who were consulted certainly gave some very strange impressions of what they had seen, which included some pictures that weren't right [had incorrect attributions]. So "expertise" should be in quotation marks when you talk about this sort of thing. I think, as we will see in a minute, Sheets began to feel that perhaps he should have some additional help, but I think he came closer to his own downfall in the sense that he really wasn't aware of who the experts were, outside of the three names that would come immediately to mind. He certainly wasn't familiar with biographical publications and people that he could reach and speak to quite readily, so he wasn't reaching out for individuals. He didn't know anybody, it would seem, in this community. Certainly when he met me, he had me quite confused with another Maurice Bloch, who was by that time dead. It's that kind of thing. He really wasn't on firm ground. But I will once again reiterate my feeling that he didn't set himself up as an expert. He was very enthusiastic. It was a wonderful opportunity. He was dedicated to doing something in memory of Mrs. [Virginia Steele] Scott, who was a friend, and he felt this was the one way he could go that would stimulate his interest. He gave a lot of his time and energy to this, as I told you. The whole idea was that they were going to hire a director or curator who would be knowledgeable, and he even outlined the kind of person it should be. But that never happened. Why, I don't know. Before one knew it, he was running the show himself and going out and buying chunks of material.

GALM

You mentioned that he—

BLOCH

He was familiar with the general concept of American art, who the artists were and so on.

GALM

You mentioned that he chose to, perhaps, deal with one gallery or—?

BLOCH

Yes.

GALM

What gallery was that?

BLOCH

Well, he bought most of his pictures through Kennedy's [Kennedy Galleries, Inc.]. I think he felt comfortable with those people. He was, I think, ill at ease with most of the other dealers, whereas the head of Kennedy's is a businessman and more down-to-earth than most others. That may have been the reason. I really don't know. Except that he did buy some from other dealers, and many of them, of course, wanted their foot in the door. Whenever they understand that there's a lot of money to be spent, all the dealers move in for the kill. The one dealer he might have really worked with, a very scholarly dealer from Hirschl and Adler [Galleries Inc.]— He bought one picture and the two of them were immediately— I say hostile to one another but— Didn't like one another. It was a matter of how comfortable he felt. Kennedy's knew all about Millard Sheets as an artist and admired him, and that helped immeasurably, from what I gather, later on. There are all kinds of things that form this sort of thing. I mean, when I took over, it was a fairly simple matter, because I knew all of those people from the time I was a student. I knew most of those people, and others were friends of mine. So it was very easy for me to spread over the field and get their sage advice. Since they respected my judgment, they knew they couldn't sell me anything and really made everything available to me and advised me. There was always that kind of control. But if somebody is not a known expert, he's on very insecure and unsure ground in dealing with these high-pressure salesmen. Anyhow, going on to February of 1978—I have minutes of meetings—I think is again indicative of Sheets's problem. Remember I said he presented nothing but transparencies? At this particular time, he presented a transparency of one of Bingham's well-known pictures, at least in subject matter, a picture called Lighter Relieving a Steamboat Aground, which I knew full well about. I didn't know about the Scott Foundation, of course, at that time. But Sheets presented the transparency and expressed his excitement at being able to present this painting to the board for consideration, priced at $500,000. In those days, it was quite a sum of money. It came from another dealer, not from Kennedy's, and he said it was negotiable. I seem to remember that I received a call from Bob [Robert R.] Wark within that period—I don't know the exact date, but it certainly must have been within that time— asking me about this painting, that it was being offered to the Scott Foundation. Was I aware of the painting? I said, "Yes, I know it very well. It's a painting which is in very bad condition, much stripped down and almost all of the life is gone out of it." At one time it was so worked over that it was almost a caricature of the original, that I had since found a daguerreotype made at the time, so one knew what it looked like originally, a painting of 1846, '47. I certainly wouldn't recommend it for purchase because of its condition. I had no idea, really, what was going on. I should say I am not at all completely sure whether that was being offered or whether he gave me those details. But he asked me about the painting, and I have to assume that this is what was going on. When the March meeting came along, Sheets again brought up the matter of this painting. He at this time withdrew his recommendation of the painting, due to the condition (so it may be that my information reached him through an indirect source), but he said he would continue to search for an important Bingham of the highest quality. I must say that at no time during this period had Millard Sheets been in touch with me on the subject. At that time he did recommend, however, the bidding at auction for an absolutely major Alfred Maurer. They had a small one in their own collection, but this one which was coming up, I agree, was a major, major picture. Later on, when the picture was sold and after I was on board—because they didn't get it—I tried to get the painting myself. At that particular meeting, too, a painting that belonged to Mrs. Scott, who had very few American pictures of this area, based on that list that we're talking about— Mrs. Scott had a great many paintings by California artists, as I mentioned. But she had bought a painting by Childe Hassam [Promenade at Sunset], which for some reason was being questioned, possibly by Sheets himself. So he was encouraged to take the painting to New York for expert opinion. He took it to a gallery that ostensibly had some expertise in the area, and they assured him finally that the painting was authentic, but offered to sell it for the foundation. He consigned it to that dealer at $70,000, and it was sold. Mrs. Scott had paid considerably less. Just as a postscript to all of that, I wasn't aware of all this when I came aboard. The painting was dispersed by that time, and there were two other Hassams in the collection, rather poor paintings I thought. Among the other things I was looking for in New York when I finally went was a really good Hassam. In a very curious way, a photograph was turned over to me of a picture I thought was really splendid. It turned out it was this painting, which was then for sale for $250,000. I only found out when I presented the photograph to the foundation. They said, "Well, it's our painting." So this only gives you a further glimpse of the importance of consultation, of experts' opinions. It's so easy to make a misstep in both acquisition and deacquisition. In defense of Mr. Sheets, I should say this is not something one must hold against him. Museums do this all the time. (And I won't mention the museum, but it's not too far away from us. ) Everything depends on one curator's expertise against another curator's expertise, and most often they don't care to consult with other people. So this is the sort of thing which is kind of everyday, unfortunately.

GALM

What was the title of that painting that—?

BLOCH

Promenade at Sunset.

GALM

Was it being offered by a different gallery at the higher price?

BLOCH

Yes. Oh, yes. I think what had happened is that one dealer sold it to another dealer. In fact, I saw it at Hirschl and Adler when I was going through their stock. This little painting was brought out and I said, "Well, that's a beautiful painting, absolutely." But he didn't know where it had come from, because very often that kind of provenance is not brought into the picture. At a meeting on March 29—which is within the same month, you know, like two weeks later—Sheets made an interesting proposal, and that was that the membership on the board be increased from five to seven members. He said, "As a board we need additional qualified members in both art and legal matters." It is perhaps at that time that he was beginning to think that he would be on more sure ground—this is my impression—in terms of acquisition, in terms of other things, if he had some support on the board. And this is true, absolutely.

GALM

How was he getting along with Tanner?

BLOCH

Well, Mr. Tanner is a man who's involved with financial matters. He has no special interest in this field, and he's the first to admit it. He's a very gentle and gracious man who doesn't like to make big waves, and it's my impression that he would go along with the majority opinion.

GALM

So there wouldn't be a clash of personalities?

BLOCH

Oh, no, not really. He's a very fair man who probably would observe the way things are going or not going and make his judgment accordingly. I don't think he can be compelled to make any other decision but that. He's a very fair person. The two ladies [Margaret T. "Terry" Finnegan and Vivian K. Nichols] had their own problems between them, but were very concerned about Mrs. Scott's image. It was always the memorial to Mrs. Scott that concerned them. Both of them at that time were very concerned about keeping intact everything Mrs. Scott had done, which I think Sheets was trying to do in some way. He was trying to bring the two collections together. The American collection was downstairs, and her collection was upstairs. There was a definite attempt on his part to bring the two collections together, which I felt from the beginning was an impossibility. But certainly Vivian Nichols and Terry Finnegan were anxious to do what they could to preserve that themselves. Because at least Terry was very much on the inside of Mrs. Scott's activities in this field and knew exactly what she was doing and very supportive and loved everything that was going on. And one can understand that. But I think Sheets was beginning to realize, as I say, that he needed some support, and he suggested that a committee be appointed as a search and nominating committee for the new board members and also act as a nominating committee for the board members for the coming year. April was the annual meeting at which we nominated the officers which had to be nominated each year. On the meeting of April 5, which was that meeting, Sheets's amendment on the increased board membership was presented in the form of a resolution. It was defeated three to two. One can almost figure out how that went: the two were obviously the two ladies, and the other three— I'm not sure. Newton then reported to the board on a memo of April 4, the day before. He said, [reading] "At present, our foundation has two chief problems. The first is the question of which major museum we should affiliate with. The second is the question of how to improve the quality of our present collection of American paintings and to acquire more." Now, these are actually his words. He said, "In considering these questions, we must realize that we do not have on our board or in our employ anyone with specific qualifications as a scholar in American art." Then he proceeded to list the qualified men in the field, each one described—who was leading, who was second. Lloyd Goodrich headed the list; Jules [D.] Prown was on the list, Jules Prown of Yale [University]; John Wilmerding; Michael Quick from the [Los Angeles] County Museum [of Art]; and finally myself, whom he described as "clearly the most distinguished scholar in the field in this part of the country." It was certain by that time that I had met with Mr. Newton, and I think Mr. Tanner as well by that time. He said, "All are of national reputation." He said, "Of them all, it appears to me that Dr. Bloch is the best qualified for our board. He is the senior scholar in American art on the West Coast; he is nearby? he has seen and is interested in our collection; and in addition to his own expertise, he has a wide range of acquaintance among other scholars in American art and can draw on their knowledge when needed. I have therefore nominated Dr. Bloch as a director on our board, and I hope that the members, realizing how much we need someone of his qualifications, will elect him." Newton nominated me, seconded by Tanner, who, as I said, had already met me. And I was elected three to two to serve as vice president for art, which was Sheets's job. You can see that the idea of increasing the board was defeated, which is what Sheets felt would have— He would have still remained a board member.

GALM

Are you surprised at that vote on your nomination, that it would still be divided that way?

BLOCH

Well, I know who the ones were, I think— Terry Finnegan was induced to vote in my favor, because she had expressed some reservations about Sheets's ability and the fact that he had been buying so many paintings. That's at least what I learned. But certainly there was Newton and certainly there was Tanner. So you've got your three right there. Well, this is something I really didn't know about. Of course Sheets immediately left the meeting, knowing that he had been eliminated. That's the point I really wanted to make. None of this was something I knew about at all. I had been approached by both those men and asked whether I would be interested in coming aboard, but there was no discussion made as to what the situation on the board was. Perhaps I should have asked, but I didn't know—I assumed that this was the way to go. I really didn't know the structure of the board or anything of the sort. I considered myself a consultant.

GALM

So this was a move to eliminate Sheets—

BLOCH

That's right.

GALM

—not to add you. To add you, but—

BLOCH

To add me, but to take his place. Had they allowed the increased board to occur, this wouldn't have happened. The only reason I gave this amount of detail was to show that there was a gradual abrasion of his relation¬ship to the board. The fact that his method of purchase, the amount that he had purchased, the large expense of funds all at once within a relatively brief period— He was in a rush to create a collection. It was enthusiasm. That's where the artist, as against the scholar, comes in. It's interesting from that standpoint. But he left himself wide open to this sort of thing. It wasn't just Newton, I feel, but there was some discussion among some members of the board as to whether there was wisdom in what was happening. I think Sheets recognized the problem, but a little too late. Some of the details certainly point to how this happened. But, as I say, it was not something I knew about in any detail. My first meeting with the board was on April 21, 1978, as a member of the board. At that time, there were seventy-three American paintings in the collection acquired by Millard Sheets. There was some discussion of the approaching auction at Sotheby's in Los Angeles at that meeting, in which Bingham's [The] Jolly Flatboatmen no. 2, as I call it, was coming up for sale—the first time since 1893 that the picture was available. The board immediately decided that since they had the Bingham expert on hand and this painting came, it was a wonderful coincidence, so let's go for it. They always wanted a Bingham, and he was on their main list, and so on and so forth. So the idea was to select someone to represent us at the forthcoming auction, and we made a kind of gala occasion of it in appointing someone to represent us. There was sort of this covert activity: I'd be there, but we would stay away from the representative so nobody at the auction would know what was going on, and this sort of thing. We had no idea what it would go to, but if you remember what was happening at that time, paintings were beginning to go very rapidly. And it sold at auction for $980,000, the highest price paid for an American picture up to that time. It came through a telephone bid from New York—Hirschl and Adler, actually. We didn't stand a chance; we weren't prepared for that kind of thing. So we lost out. We were ultimately offered the painting, of course, but by that time with the commission and the percentage over that price, it was well over a million, which, again, was a fantastic price. At the time, it was in all the papers. Eventually, it went to Daniel [J.] Terra—who was forming an American collection in the Chicago area—who finally got the price whittled down to $1,100,000, something like that. He received a considerable amount of publicity over that. The other thing I should say was that at that meeting, I was asked to draw up, again, a kind of list, to consider their own collection in some detail. I had already made my own notes when I first saw the collection, which they didn't know about, and which I could go into, but it perhaps is not necessary. Then I was to prepare a list which would indicate the paintings that should be kept in the collection, those things by artists I considered important for future acquisition, and to outline my general conception of how an American museum-type collection would be formed—evaluating what they had as against the direction they should then move. Which 1 did in considerable detail then and in meetings that followed. You can find that every one of the meetings included a considerable discussion of the quality of the collection, and the emphasis was always on quality. I must say that there was never any problem whatsoever. They became, every one of them, very good friends of mine. We had great meetings together. I promised them from the beginning that they would never be [asked], as long as I was there advising them, to acquire a painting they hadn't seen. Transparencies, as I pointed out earlier in our discussion here, involved a conception of scale which nobody could guess at. After all, this group was not familiar with all of these problems in terms of acquisition. They needed to learn. And they were very eager to learn; they were almost starved for this. And I was very anxious to create a certain excitement in their midst which would put me at ease and at the same time would make them feel more comfortable that they were really participating in this, not just from the standpoint of liking or disliking, but from the standpoint of actually learning as we went along. It became like a small class, which was exactly what I enjoyed particularly. There was never the question of my standing over them. We were all talking about this as people who I would ostensibly gather who knew what I was talking about and who were doing some homework on the subject. But I provided them with all the information they needed; the historical and aesthetic aspects of each picture were carefully gone into. Indeed, I can only say that this became a very profitable experience for me. I learned a great deal, and I felt that I was also passing on some valuable information and that we were all participants in a wonderful enterprise. And it worked out quite that way. Newton himself was, I think, much more at ease than he was with Sheets, who in some way had unfortunately—at least in those last months—made it quite clear that he had no respect for anybody's opinion, particularly Newton's. And he [Sheets] was concerned. He wanted to finish the collection. He was getting older and he wanted to do this job, and he was committed to it. But it just didn't work out that way.

GALM

Did you hear much criticism of Sheets in those early meetings?

BLOCH

No, no way. First of all, I wouldn't have allowed that. I mean, I didn't know at the time the circumstances, but at the same time I am— Even when I got to the point of deaccession, it was with a certain amount of concern for Millard Sheets's feelings, because he had wanted that collection— And that was another point of contention. He wanted that collection kept in perpetuity and complete, and the [Henry E.] Huntington [Library and Art Gallery], or any other institution, particularly a museum institution, wouldn't accept a collection that could not be refined. The County Museum went too far in more or less setting up a deaccession committee that implied that everything would be on the block. That Millard would not accept, so that was discarded immediately. But I wanted to deal with that delicate matter. From the beginning it was my concern. As I told my colleagues about the general approach to the collection on the part of Sheets (and I'll mention that in a moment), I wanted to preserve some of that quality that he had put into the collection as much as I could, while at the same time concerning myself with problems of scale and quality and major acquisition and all of that sort of fact that she was addicted to collecting. First of all, she had a California collection. Second, there was a European collection. And then there was a collection of prints and drawings. None of them were complete. Even the prints collection started out with a few old masters and then suddenly jumped to artists that she actually knew or were brought to her attention, like Gabriele Muenter, like Arthur Millier, whom she knew personally and had a huge collection of. Or Childe Hassam, where she'd bought a group of those. It was that kind of thing. Anyhow, I wanted to bring that to their attention, without offering any solution to it at that particular time. I did speak about the collection Millard Sheets had brought together, and I said that from the start the collection was interesting in the fact that it reflected the taste of an artist rather than that of strictly the art historian. Those are two different points of view most often. First of all, I spoke about the differences in the kinds of quality one finds in collecting. First, there's the museum affair, where you have to deal with the public. Then there's the taste of the private collector, who uses his own likes and dislikes. And of course the artist's eye in this particular case was interesting, to see where he goes. I pointed out that there were some very memorable pictures in the collection. This was something I had pointed out earlier, and I could go into that in great detail. But I said from the beginning that the major picture in the collection was the Mary Cassatt [Breakfast in Bed], for which they had certainly paid the highest price up to that point. I said that we could do better in the earlier period, that the [John Singleton] Copley was of a good period in his career, but it was not a major painting.

GALM

What Copley was that?

BLOCH

The portrait of Samuel Savage. A pair of pictures that—

GALM

I guess we went into that.

BLOCH

I didn't go into this point. The interesting part of that—and this is just another point—when you go into the business of acquisition of, let's say, a portrait, it's not just "Is it a great picture visually? How does it compare to other Copleys?" Which would be the museum's approach to it. You have to go farther into this. This was one of a pair of portraits of husband and wife. The histories of most of these pictures are known, of the sitters, for instance, and in going into it, I discovered that there was something very strange about the portrait of the wife. Well, I was able to conclude that she had died before the painting was finished, that Copley had to finish at least the hands either from another model or from memory. And this was the great weakness of that portrait. The portrait of the man may have been painted while he was in mourning, so he's wearing very dark clothes, a dark brown suit. He's sitting pensively at a table. It's not a painting that stands out, plus the fact that its condition wasn't good—all the things that I think a museum curator would have to know before buying the painting. These considerations are fairly important. I'm not saying they're always followed out by museums, but from my vantage point this was what I would have done. I was concerned that the painting was so dark and so dull and kind of mournful, and it turned out that I had good reason to consider that. The portrait by Charles Willson Peale of Mrs. Frisbee, Mrs. Peregrin Frisbee, was one of the ugliest ladies I'd ever seen in my life. Even though a great many of these colonial ladies were not particularly pretty and our early artists were very honest in their portrayals of their sitters, it was particularly uninspired, shall I say. I think Peale, who liked ladies, reacted more to the attractive ones. Most painters are like that. This one obviously had no appeal to him. There were a pair of [Thomas] Sullys, and I felt that we could do better, that we didn't need the pair. There were a pair of [Samuel F. B.] Morse portraits that I wasn't too happy with. I was to find out later, after investigation, that nobody would attribute the paintings to Morse, even though one of the people called upon to offer his impression of the collection singled out the Morse portraits as good ones. That shows you how expertise does vary in the field. And there were two Ammi Phillips portraits, and I felt we didn't need the two of them. I then submitted a list of a hundred painters, of which forty-five were represented in the collection. I suggested a cutoff date of 1930, because by that time, I had already estimated that I couldn't go back of 1930, because one of the great paintings in the collection was a painting by Edward Hopper [The Long Leg], an absolutely vital painting for any American collection, and it was a good picture to culminate the collection. I think it's perhaps a little later than 1930, within 1930-35. I noted that there were great gaps in midcentury, that artists like [John F.] Kensett, [Asher B.] Durand, [Thomas] Cole, [Albert] Bierstadt and [Frederic E.] Church were missing. Eakins was missing. There was only a Sargent watercolor and a Homer watercolor, but no major picture. But [I said] that they rarely turn up and that a wider search and more time was required, that we'd have to proceed slowly and with great concern as to what we were doing for this project, since there was at that time no major collection of any importance in the American field on the West Coast, museum or private. Without going further into that, this was the sort of analysis that was to be a continuing factor in my deliberations with the foundation. Again, the question of our moving together in one direction and in a unified fashion, with a full understanding of what we were aiming to do, always with the thought that we were moving in a direction where the collection would become a public collection. Therefore, quality, selection, all of these things were to be very important factors. You must remember that still at this time there was the concern that perhaps they could stay in the old gallery. I was already speaking about the development of a kind of institute where scholars could come in and work. The public wouldn't be that much involved, thus making the necessity for a use permit not necessary.

GALM

Seeing it as a study collection rather than as a—

BLOCH

Where only scholars would come. I was already talking about the Archives [of American Art (Smithsonian Institution)] joining us in the old gallery (this was before we were concerned about it). Because I felt that would bring the research aspect into it, the library and material available, and that if we stayed there, if that was at all possible, we would then at least be able to bring in some scholars. There would be a collection, but there would also be a library and that sort of thing to work with.

1.20. TAPE NUMBER: X, SIDE TWO MAY 22, 1987

GALM

Professor Bloch, we were talking about the Virginia Steele Scott Foundation and the period in which you are now on the board and the refinement, really, of the collection.

BLOCH

Well, with what I've said in mind as the parameters that I set to the board— Remember, none of this was based on any real knowledge of what had gone on before, except that it was in the back of my mind to preserve what I could of the important pictures acquired by Millard Sheets, of which there were a good number, and to keep something of the spirit of his involvement, which I'll go into in a little detail later on. The other part was then to begin to think in terms of what might become available. We had no way of knowing. In July of that year— Now, this was still very early. I had no intention of getting involved in acquisition that early. But in the summer of 1978, Proposition 13 passed. This didn't concern us; it concerned the County Museum in particular. Michael Quick, whom I came to know—and he certainly was well aware of the Scott Foundation, because he had hoped that the County Museum might be the ultimate repository—let me know that he was having problems in terms of an acquisition he wanted to make. [He said] that the museum had decided not to acquire anything, that Proposition 13 had caused them to stop and reflect, and they weren't buying anything. It was at precisely that time that he was offered a work by an artist who's very rare in American art, in terms of great pictures that might be available—Washington Allston, in the early period. He'd been offered a painting that belonged to the Vanderbilt family for many, many years. To be even more accurate, Count [László] Széchényi, who was a Vanderbilt, had owned this picture, and now the family wanted to dispose of it. The price was $125,000, which was my first time involved with money on that level, but today this would look like nothing. It was a painting called The Angel Releasing Saint Peter from Prison, a painting of 1812. It was really a sketch for a much larger painting, but, as such, very brilliantly stated. Complete sketch, not a sketch in the sense of a drawing. He invited me to come to see it. He said he had a brief time to consider it—it was on consignment to a gallery in Boston. He would like me to see it; he'd hate to see it leave the community. Since he couldn't acquire it, would I look into it? So I went down. Of course, the minute I saw it, I knew that this was something that would fit into our collection, because we owned a painting by Benjamin West [Saul Prophesying] of exactly the same year. As a matter of fact, the influence of West's painting, that particular painting we owned, which had been seen by Morse, and Allston worked with Morse— You know, you could practically observe these two men watching West at work on the painting. And Washington Allston, at least in the figure of Saint Peter, was inspired by an equal figure in the landscape in this big painting we owned. So I felt it was a key picture. I remember that there was no time even to have it shipped. We went in an open car and put it in the backseat and off we went across the freeway. I to this day can't believe that I ever did anything like that, but it was a rush. I presented it to the board, I guess eloquently, because they acquired it. So that was my first important acquisition, and it was a good one to start with. In August of that year, the August 18 meeting— I had previously invited Victor [D.] Spark, who's a dealer and appraiser in New York who I've known as a friend for many, many years, and who said he was coming to the West Coast. I asked him whether he would come and appraise our collection in terms of values. I'm talking about Mrs. Scott's collection, although he was looking at the American collection as well. Mr. Spark is a very open sort of individual with very decided opinions and a tremendous knowledge of American art in particular. The man was then in his eighties. He agreed to do this as a tribute to me without charging the appraiser's fee. He ultimately appraised some ninety-six of Mrs. Scott's pictures and gave them some idea of the values of those paintings in her collection. I could give them no equal—certainly not that kind of judgment. He then spoke at some length at the meeting about what he felt were the highlights of the American collection. He pointed out very clearly that he felt the Morse portraits were doubtful, which I already felt myself, that another painting was also doubtful by [George] Durrie, and the [George] Inness—which, of course, Mrs. Scott had owned— was certainly doubtful. And [he said] that the [James A. M.] Whistler was authentic, but not a very good picture. If we wanted a major Whistler in the collection, which would be the only one on the West Coast, it should be something that would compete with major pictures on the East Coast. He said there were some wonderful pictures here and that there were some of somewhat lesser quality. This was very helpful in terms of the kind of expertise we needed to help the foundation come to grips with the problems ahead, as well as to understand my approach and my insistence about consultation.

GALM

You've made several references to the Inness. What was the title of that? Do you recall? Or what the subject matter was?

BLOCH

I don't have it at hand. [Hudson River Valley] It was a landscape, as they all are. It was one that Mrs. Scott bought locally. As I mentioned, I don't think she really wanted to buy the painting, but she was sort of brought into buying it somehow, possibly because Mrs. [Ruth] Hatfield had recommended it and had been with her for many, many years, and so she bought it. I don't think she ever was thrilled with it, and I think there was some inquiry even in her lifetime about the picture. But I was never called in to give any opinion of it. It was in my opinion not a bad painting, but it was not by Inness. The painting had been sold by a gallery in New York [Newhouse Galleries, Inc.] many, many, many years ago as an Inness, and so that kind of stuck to it. But it was to become a kind of bone of contention after Spark's statement about it, in which he said, like I said, it's not a bad painting, but it's certainly not by Inness. I think it bore an Inness signature, but that doesn't help matters. So later on there was to be considerable discussion as to how to deaccession the painting, hopefully that Mrs. Hatfield would take it back, that we were unhappy with it. Her great friendship with Mrs. Scott was to be part of the picture, you know, that Mrs. Scott herself wasn't thrilled with the painting, and we would appreciate your taking it back. At first she said yes; then she said no. She insisted that the painting was correct and all of that sort of thing, although it didn't appear in any place in the catalogue raisonné that had been done some years ago, which everybody goes by. We spent a great deal of time talking about how to deal with this problem, even legally. I entered into it, and to go a little bit ahead of time, I eventually brought it to the attention of the people who originally had it some thirty or forty years ago, Newhouse Galleries in New York. What eventually happened was that they came up, quite by chance, with a very important painting by Inness—which had been controversial in its time because it was a painting nobody expected by Inness—which he exhibited at the National Academy [of Design] called Washing Day near Perugia, from his best period of 1873. Very large and impressive painting. I felt that that kind of painting— That had received a variety of critical reviews in its time as being atypical of the artist, and yet he himself presented it at the Academy. That kind of a painting which has a bit of controversy about it in terms of what the artist was trying to do is more interesting than the usual kind of commercial picture that the artist was turning out. Now, we had such a painting already in the collection that Sheets had bought, Massachusetts Landscape. Perfectly acceptable, but nothing that would clutch you to the heart and make you really come back to see. What we were looking for were memorable paintings. Well, the Newhouses presented that painting and very graciously—again, based on our friendship of many years—agreed to take the doubtful painting from Mrs. Scott, which they had owned many, many years earlier, plus the Massachusetts Landscape, to give us a trade-in (and it was a generous trade-in) and buy the other painting. Which is what we did, eventually. And to add to that, we finally found even the original oil sketch for that painting, so we had both. So from a display standpoint, from a learning standpoint in an educational type of collection, it all worked out very well. But we thrashed around over this problem for a long, long time. This is only to give you an instance of what goes into even a single acquisition. I just happened to come across a letter that I received from Charles Newton on August 24, which was shortly after Mr. Spark visited. It was from Charles Newton, and I'm just introducing this simply to point out that my work with the board, from the beginning, was a honeymoon that lasted quite a while—in fact, lasted until I decided to leave. He said, [reading] "Last week I saw what you had done with the foundation's American collection simply by grouping and arranging the paintings. I was enormously excited. As I thought about it, it seemed to me a shame that these paintings should be permanently shut off from public view, as they certainly would be if the foundation should become an exclusively research institution." He said he saw the Bingham film which someone had done, and on which I was a consultant. So he saw that. He said, "What I'm trying to work up in my mind is a scheme which would allow our foundation to make the best of both worlds, to be a superb research center as the Institute for Studies in American Art"—which was the title that I had brought to their attention quite early and kept on pushing for throughout the time I was there—"and at the same time be a jewel box of a museum in the best possible location. To have, in other words, a place in the mainstream of research in the history of American art and at the same time a place in the heart of one of the great American museums, with you as director of both." He was beginning to think of that. "This can be done by joining the Scott Foundation with the Huntington Library and Art Gallery." So, you see, this was making progress, moving in that direction. He said, "I have talked with Jim [James] Thorpe and Bob Wark. They are enthusiastic. To me, such an arrangement would be distinctly superior to living in a cul-de-sac surrounded by hostile neighbors, wasting our energies in intestine—" I don't think he meant that. Intestine? "Internecine" may have been, possibly—I'm not sure whether that's the right word. "—intestine strife of the sort that now harasses me, and wasting our resources at the rate of $250,000 a year, an amount expended mainly to pay taxes, gardeners, pool maintenance, and free rent. I have tried to summarize some of the considerations on the attached sheet. [I would] like to know your thoughts." He goes on to list the pros and cons for staying at Oak Knoll Terrace, which was Mrs. Scott's house, or moving to the Huntington, and made a very convincing plea for a move rather than staying where we were. My job was to look at it from both sides. It wasn't my decision at all. I was simply to advise, because the board was split. The idea was I would come to live there as the curator, which is not what I particularly wanted to do anyhow. But if we were to stay there, what could we do with that? And already I was suggesting that the Archives could have an office there. We had the space. The gallery itself was very handsome. To avoid the conflict with the neighbors, just to have a research center and to form the collection. His thought was that the collection should be more widely seen, and that we could have a research center of more significance if we moved over to the Huntington, which seemed to me, too, to be the logical move, rather than to try to deal with a museum with all their special problems.

GALM

Was there anyone who represented, so to speak, the neighbors? In other words, did you approach them with this new concept for use?

BLOCH

Well, the neighbors, I think, were— Your neighbors in Pasadena are a little different from your neighbors in other places. They form a tight unit on their own. Mrs. Scott had already irritated them by moving off on her own about the gallery without consulting them. Parking is limited in that cul-de-sac in which they were operating. It was all of that. But, as I think I told you, it wasn't Mrs. Scott's plan to create a public museum. She was creating this for her own interest, her own convenience, and to entertain her friends. But even that could have caused an ultimate problem, although she wouldn't have had the friends coming every day in the week. It would have been an occasional evening in which there would be valet parking, and there would be advance notice to the neighbors that something was happening. But you always have to live in those places, in Pasadena, in that particular environment, with your neighbors and their thoughts, and there were very strong opinions about this. As indeed there were, as I mentioned, even if the Huntington was to extend its parking place on their own grounds—there was a question of how many people should be admitted.

GALM

But do you know whether there was any effort to find out whether this idea would have—?

BLOCH

Well, I don't know about my idea. I don't know how far that went, although we certainly consulted with the man who represented and was advising the foundation. But the chance that the use permit once brought up again would pass this time was something we couldn't resolve very easily. It was doubtful. They did bring the neighbors in to see what was going on. Some of them showed up; some didn't. They plied them with cocktail parties, as I mentioned, and that sort of thing. So we were trying to seek other ways out of it. In any case, all I've read to you was the covering letter for a much larger document from Mr. Newton. Then in September of that year, I discussed the rehanging of the galleries, which I felt was necessary. Mrs. Scott's private collection on the upper floor was so haphazard as to be almost disagreeable. The job was to rehang them into some kind of unified arrangement downstairs, putting the prints together in one gallery, selecting the best of her paintings. There was storage, too, so we didn't have that problem. And then to hang the American collection upstairs to the best advantage possible. Then I again reiterated my statement that had become almost a repetition by this time. I said that it wasn't possible to form a collection of only masterpieces. Because I was constantly being told, you know, "Bloch is here, we should have 'Blochbusters. '" And that term— I said that an extremely high level can be reached by trading, interchanging, deaccessioning, and so on, and that it was possible for the foundation to form a collection of extremely high quality, but that it has to be cautiously done and cannot be accomplished overnight. [I said] that we may want to move into a second group of artists. See, my list I provided included a primary group of major artists and then a secondary group. And I said that we already had some representation of the secondary group and that there it was possible to find so-called masterpieces. [I said] "But we cannot give ourselves two years." I think Sheets was giving himself a limited time, and that's why he was rushing. Whether he was propelled into that or came to it on his own— But they were talking about something like two years. Hence the great rush to buy pictures. You cannot build a collection that way. It depends on availability, on opportunity, and this is the point I made to them. I said, "It's unrealistic. It's a gradual process. We have an excellent nucleus. We have a good beginning, and let's get on with it. " Then the idea of the Archives is already something I was formulating. I had mentioned it earlier, but in October of that year we had a luncheon date set up with William [E.] Woolfenden, who was the director of the Archives in Washington [D.C.], to meet with the board members. He was certainly enthusiastic about seeking a home for the Southern [California] branch of the archives. The Northern [California] branch had been already set—that's another history I can talk about. But I felt that if we were to have this institute, no matter where we would be, the Archives were essential, in that here was the opportunity to provide them with the space, to pay for the archive itself and get started. There was a plan to apply for the use permit from Pasadena—a report of September 29—a permit from the Pasadena planning commission. The report included the proposal I made to operate an Institute for Studies in American Art, which would admit only qualified scholars and not the public. That was when that came in. That proposal would not require a use permit, according to the advice we were getting, but it was essential—and that was part of the whole thing—to get the neighbors' support if the use permit was to be emphasized. In late October, the October 20 meeting, we entered into some discussion of the meeting with William Woolfenden and Paul [J.] Karlstrom, who was with the northern branch. [We discussed] the possibility of association with the Archives within the Scott gallery, providing them with office space. And then the board was invited to visit the office of the Archives in San Francisco so they could get some idea of how they operated there. Gilbert Kinney of the Washington office was to meet them there and they, in turn, would invite him to come to the gallery.

GALM

What was the advantage to the foundation of the association with the Archives?

BLOCH

That was all part of my plan for the institute. First of all, even if we didn't move in with the Huntington, the proximity to the Huntington Library— We could never hope to duplicate that library. We could build a small library, but that would be an adjunct to the Huntington, where scholars go anyhow. Although we were talking about the Huntington, there was no rapprochement at that time in any detail. We were talking about it, and I was saying almost from the beginning that this seemed to be a logical move, but there was certainly strong objection from the two ladies on the board. Their concern was to stay put. So I had to consider it from both sides. But the idea of the institute, no matter where it was, was foremost in my mind, the educational possibilities of having a collection. The Archives would be essential to that, and why have them somewhere else where scholars would have to move across the board? It would be great to have it all in one place, all within close proximity to other facilities.

GALM

At this point, was the American collection being opened to anyone for viewing?

BLOCH

No, we couldn't because of the use permit thing.

GALM

Well, you had mentioned the fact that it was being rehung or—

BLOCH

Well, that was for our benefit, as well as to show, and to get some idea of how it would look as a permanent collection. The upstairs gallery was very spacious and everything really fitted very well. It also enabled me to not only make my own judgments as far as deaccession was concerned, this business of scale and so on— We had an ideal gallery for this purpose. I must say that when I came, the paintings weren't hanging at all, the American pictures. They were hanging downstairs originally, but they had had some kind of a flood and all the paintings had to be removed. So they were all stored, stacked in another area, which disturbed me greatly. By the time I arrived, it had been straightened out, and so I moved the American pictures upstairs. I had Jack [B.] Carter working with me, my friend from UCLA, and we wanted to be able to show ourselves— For me, as well as to use as a teaching plan, to explain to the members how these things looked and to let them begin to formulate in their own mind how well these hung together or didn't hang well together. I didn't feel that Sheets's hanging was completely compelling. There had to be a certain amount of chronology in this to make it tell. The things that didn't fit did stand out rather strongly, and they were able to make many of their own judgments in this. So that when I came with the proposal, all they had to do was go outside and look. It was very, very helpful. So that was the reason for that. It was important to have a certain view of what we were doing. At that particular point, Victor Spark had offered us a painting I knew quite well in his collection by Frank [W.] Benson [Reflections]. He offered to work out a trade of the picture we had in our own collection, which was not first-rate. The one he had was first-rate, and we did work that out. I then proposed my first trip east, where I would discuss the deaccession of some of the pictures we definitely wanted to dispose of, such as the Whistler. But much more importantly, to explore the market, to make contacts with the many dealers I did know, and to make them apprised of what we were about. Which did come about at the beginning of November, so that by November 17, when we had the next meeting, I could report results of my trip, including those paintings that were available and where we might move. One of those was the last important John Sloan painting, called McSorley's Cats. Mrs. [Helen Farr] Sloan was an old friend of mine, and although that painting belonged to the Sloan— I guess it's a foundation, since all the proceeds go to that. It's really up to her as to whether a painting is released or not, and she was holding back on that picture. It came from that series of McSorley pictures that he had done and was a painting very, very well known, reproduced in many places. So I presented that. They were looking for a Sloan painting. They had one painting by the Eight group, by [George] Luks, but they had no Sloan. They didn't have [William J.] Glackens; they were looking for Glackens. They had [Maurice] Prendergast, they had [Robert] Henri, but they didn't have the whole group. And they didn't need to, necessarily. At the same time, at the same gallery I found a good early painting by William J. Glackens, which also included the original oil sketch he had made for it [Chateau Thierry]. So again this kind of documentary picture turned up. So I came back with those offers. I also drew to their attention that I had seen a wonderful Sully portrait [Mile. Adèle Sigoigne] that had been something I had known since I was a child. It had been in the great exposition at the Metropolitan [Museum of Art], and I had never forgotten it. A portrait of a woman with a grey hat and holding a harp, Madam Sigoigne. I didn't tell them that there was some question about Mrs. Sigoigne's "finishing school" and what was being finished there, but, nevertheless, it was a great painting. Sully's paintings were not terribly expensive. What we owned were a pair of portraits and I was not very keen about that double pair of portraits. I felt the case with Sully and the fact that these weren't terribly expensive— We could afford to take a chance on this painting, which hung in the Juilliard School and was a memorable painting. We're again using the term "memorable." And a painting by Durand, a very good landscape [Strawberrying]—these are things I presented to them. As I say, we noted at that point the sale of The Jolly Flatboatmen at auction, which we weren't able to capture, and what record prices were beginning to show in the market. I had originally said that we couldn't buy anything for less than $100,000. I was soon having to change that number over and over and over again in presenting pictures. In the case of these, however, the Glackens with the sketch was $90,000; the McSorley's Cats was $175,000, less 10 percent. These were still modest prices. You could not buy that Sloan today for anything like that. I'd hesitate to name a price at this point. And Durand's painting, known as Strawberrying, was $125,000. So these were still within the range of our possibility. In a December 5 meeting, I recommended the deaccession of twenty-nine paintings—soon to be numbered thirty—which I felt could be sold at auction or direct sale. Remember, we had to raise revenue if we were to buy these additional pictures. The resolution at that time was to purchase the Glackens and the Benson at least. I think the Sloan was already seriously considered, but we were moving slowly. We then decided in January of 1979 to agree on the thirty pictures from the list I had prepared to be sold at Christie's [Fine Art Auctioneers] auction, and by the March meeting, we had formally resolved to buy both the Sully and the McSorley's Cats. Remember that the sale at Christie's had already taken place, so money was already available. At the May 23 sale at Christie's, twenty-one pictures sold for $373,000, less an 8 percent commission. But certain pictures were not sold. I mean, they didn't reach the reserves, and so they were not. We didn't place in the sale certain other paintings which we felt we could deal with in other ways. Still, in the March meeting, however—and I had neglected to say this a minute ago—we were discussing a draft of a Huntington proposal. So, you see, this comes fairly early. It was at that time in the draft, the Huntington—being very cautious about committing itself— had changed the title of the Institute for Studies in American Art to, quote, "a study and research program," which fitted what they were already doing there. They have a research program, but not an institute. However, Bob Wark assured the board that, quote, [reading] "They really want an institute for studies in American art. The work will be just as conceived by Bloch, and it will, in fact, be named after the agreement has been made." I insisted that "institute" had much more meaning countrywide, whereas the term "program" denotes participation of others and so on. It doesn't have quite the stamp of importance that the center would have. Newton assured everybody that was not a problem: there would be an institute, and the Huntington was enthusiastic about it. They were ultimately to change that back again, in the final draft, to be specifically named institute. Anyhow, by April 20, the Huntington had reverted to the "institute" in the original proposal. We were discussing the deaccession of certain other things at that time. We were discussing the attribution of certain portraits, particularly the Morse portraits, and had a letter from the expert in the field, who said that they were certainly not by Morse. So we were moving farther ahead in determining what we had and didn't have. In June of that year we were discussing the Huntington proposal in some depth. Dr. Wark and Dr. Thorpe, the director of the Huntington at that time, met with us in discussing the Huntington's part. Both Newton and Finnegan recalled that Mrs. Scott always had a soft spot for the Huntington; she had in fact left some of her furniture to them in her will. She had always, as I said, expressed an interest and even said that this is where she'd want to be. So we were moving, as you see, toward that. I again went into this whole business about an educational program and a center. Once I get involved in something or get hooked on something, I never let go. I think you can see I'm rather tenacious about these things. [I said] that I was thinking of something that went beyond the collection as a memorial to Mrs. Scott. Because they were talking about a "memorial" gallery, and I didn't like that term in particular. I don't like something that's called "memorial." I think it should be a living kind of thing. The collection was part of that, but an educational program is a continuing performance. Then it was mentioned— And I have a quote here in which I pointed out that the American center was agreeable with them, with the Huntington, that is, and that I was pleased. The Archives people were waiting upon the Scott Foundation at that point to know where they would fit into the picture. There was continuing discussion back and forth, usually with Karlstrom, who represented the Smithsonian. In July of that year, in order to further the still present problem about Mrs. Scott's private collection— Remember, what we were deaccessioning at this point was the American collection. We still were moving rather gingerly and carefully around Mrs. Scott's holdings. The Huntington had already more or less said that they wouldn't be interested in much of that material. They were eventually to come out rather positively on this, especially the European stuff: the modern European went beyond their possibilities. This much, certainly, I knew. At the same time, in order to deal with this, to get a beginning going, I suggested that we make a gift of some of Mrs. Scott's California pictures to the Laguna Beach Museum of Art. I pointed out that so many of our museums, especially the small museums on the West Coast, do not have any firm direction of where they're going. Many of them were waiting upon the County Museum to find out which way they would go so that they would be able to move in a special direction. But you could never get the County to deal with this. They want to be everything, which is almost impossible in terms of acquisition. To a certain extent, they're facing that today, with the [J. Paul] Getty [Museum] now present and so on. You know, they can't all compete for the same material. But Laguna was home to Barbara Williams, who was a sister of Mrs. Scott and who is very active on the board of trustees of the Laguna museum. So we were having some discussion with Barbara and the museum as to their interest in this sort of thing.

GALM

Is she a relation to Nick [B.] Williams?

BLOCH

That's right. Her husband. So they liked this idea. I would make a preliminary selection, but in the long run, the Laguna would make their own selection, and that was to be one of the ongoing things. Before we would do anything about it, we would try to keep intact some of Mrs. Scott's own collection in the thought there would be a gallery, perhaps, in her name. As it has now turned out, it's really named in honor of Mrs. Scott's mother and father, the gallery [Harry and Grace Steele Gallery]. At about this time, I discussed the availability of Bingham's painting In a Quandary [or Mississippi Raftsmen at Cards], which was available at $800,000 plus a commission to Coe Kerr [Gallery, Inc.], who were willing to take $840,000 total. We eventually worked out a trade where we let them have an Andrew Wyeth watercolor, which of course was beyond our period. We made the first big acquisition with that painting, a painting that belonged to the bishop of New York [Paul Moore, Jr.], who had owned it since he was a boy. It was a painting that I knew from the very beginning of my own work, when it belonged to his mother [Fanny Hanna Moore], so it was a rather interesting project. It was a wonderful small painting, very, very typical of Bingham. Within the next few days after I had presented it, Newton sought out Wark's opinion, and Wark was to say that it was "one of the stellar pictures that will make the Scott's reputation, and Dr. Bloch should be congratulated." He was speaking for the Huntington when he was saying, "This is what we want." So, as you see, by this point the Huntington was very central to our plans up ahead.

GALM

So that Bingham remains in the collection?

BLOCH

Oh, yes.

GALM

Then did you also acquire another Bingham?

BLOCH

No.

GALM

So that is the Bingham.

BLOCH

The other Bingham was the one that Sheets had presented, which he withdrew. There were to be, later on, other possibilities, but they were very happy with this painting. It's cardplayers, and it's very typical.

GALM

Yes, I remember it by the cardplayer name.

BLOCH

Yes. Then in August we continued our discussion of the Laguna gift. It was presented that we had maybe a thousand pictures, according to one numbered appraisal. Spark had appraised ninety-six pictures in the collection, mostly the European pictures, at over a million, and figured out there were about twenty major pictures in the collection. There was discussion about the new gallery at the Huntington. One of the other things that Sheets had presented was that if they couldn't stay in the old building—the Thornton Ladd building on the estate—that he was proposing that they build another building somewhere else. He didn't say necessarily on a campus, although certainly he was involved in all of that. I have the impression that there was even in the back of the board's mind the possibility of operating a building somewhere else, privately on a piece of land they might acquire, which is what many collectors do. And Sheets, being an architect, this stimulated his idea of perhaps bringing that into focus. But now the idea was the Huntington, quite clearly. I think all the board members, even though there was some qualification, at least by the girls, about this— But the commitment was, you know, if we have a gallery at the Huntington, which was a brand-new idea for the Huntington, too, what it should be called. They were talking about a memorial gallery, the idea that some of her personal collection would be there to represent her. Newton, I think, believed at that time, as I did, that very probably that collection could not go out there, and so he said that the building itself would be the memorial—trying to drift away from that. I, at the same time, was trying to think of what material from Mrs. Scott's collection could join the American collection. Since she had a lot of sculpture- and I'm thinking about the Huntington's possibilities of exhibiting, whether in that gallery or in their galleries— I began to select certain pieces of sculpture that could be reserved for that collection. At the same time, also in order to further Mrs. Scott's memory— I myself was very much drawn into that spell and concern which the girls felt about preserving her memory in a variety of ways—if it couldn't be with her own collection, through other things. Certainly the gallery would be named after her, but there were other things that- She was a very dedicated person, especially community- wise. So I proposed a medal that would be designed in her honor and that could be used in connection with presentations, awards, special occasions, or whatever.

1.21. TAPE NUMBER: XI, SIDE ONE MAY 29, 1987

GALM

Professor Bloch, last time when we concluded the tape, you were beginning to speak about the Virginia Steele Scott Medal that you had proposed that would be used in connection with presentations and awards and special occasions. How did you go about deciding on who was to design this medal?

BLOCH

Well, I did a certain amount of investigation after the board indicated their interest in this sort of thing. One of the other alternate suggestions was a painting to be made of Mrs. [Virginia Steele] Scott. Interestingly enough, Mrs. Scott was not very keen on having herself portrayed in paint—not even photographed. So the only things we really had that showed her in life were little paintings done by Jonathan Scott, her husband. One was a profile portrait, and the other one showed her sitting in the garden. Very nice little paintings. But the idea of having some strange artist come in and do a formal portrait seemed to me a little bit too far removed from the person herself. The one way to do it that she might have indeed liked would be a medal that could be conferred on people in various connections connected with the [Virginia Steele Scott] Foundation. They could be for special occasions, they could be for the work done for the foundation, or whatever. But I had to think in terms of its use for the future, not just as a presentation by the foundation (a foundation which might ultimately be dissolved), but which could be passed on to the [Henry E.] Huntington [Library and Art Gallery] or some other organization and thus used for scholarship awards or whatever. So that's the way I presented it. At the time I had done my investigation, I inquired through the Smithsonian [Institution], for instance, as to the kind of medals they use for presentation. The medals they have are usually given to people who make a generous donation to the Smithsonian. And the one I had seen was the [John Singleton] Copley Medal, which had been done by Leonard Baskin, who is probably the foremost medal designer today—creative and an artist who is represented in the collection that Millard Sheets had formed. I thought this really made a great deal of sense. When I presented it, they unanimously approved it and asked me to go forward with the design. At first, the design was to have had a portrait of Mrs. Scott, if indeed we could get such a thing made, based on one of the portraits done by Jonathan Scott which was very charming. It showed her with a hat that looked for all the world like a kind of ideal Pisanello- type medal. But I didn't want to interfere too much with Baskin—I simply submitted that to him. He said ultimately that he would probably do the lettering, too, on the reverse side, rather than hire somebody else, which is what happened with the Copley medal. So we decided on the wording, which was to be taken from the writings of Mrs. Scott. And the one that was decided on was as follows: "No person can own a great work of art. At most, they can only pay for the privilege of becoming its custodian during their lifetime." That was decided on to be part of it. The commission was done through Kennedy [Galleries, Inc.], his dealer. We went forward with it, and after some months Leonard Baskin submitted a photograph of a plaster model he had made. He generally works directly. There were no drawings when I inquired—there would be no preliminary drawings for this. He works directly in the plaster, draws, in a sense, into the plaster itself. So when that came, the board was not happy with it. But then you can't always be happy. After all, again, he was somewhat removed from the model; he was dealing with a photograph of a painting. So you're far removed from the subject. The other photographs of Virginia in formal shots, or her wedding portrait, which was also part of it, just didn't work at all. So I then came back with an idea for an allegorical design, which had some parallel to a design by [Giovanni Benedetto] Castiglione that I had seen which showed a figure who more or less represented the arts surrounded by instruments of the arts. This, in a sense, gave Baskin far more leeway as a creative artist. Evidently he liked that idea very much and came forward with a design which was not meant to represent Virginia herself but a kind of genius who's at the helm of a ship leading people on, showing the stimulus of the arts. And that was an ideal affair. He didn't make it into a circular medal or a square medal, but kind of an uneven framework. So it was really a jewel. When it came through, everybody was thrilled with it. By the time it was finished, we had already come close to the Huntington. The presentation and the approval took place in September 1979, but it wasn't for more than a year afterwards till all of this finally came to fruition. It was then really in the hands of the Huntington, with consultation of the board as to what kind of presentation and how to go forward with it. In essence, it became a Huntington responsibility. I'm happy to say that I was the first recipient of such a medal, so that was very gratifying.

GALM

Has it been awarded since then?

BLOCH

It was awarded to one other person. It was at the same time I was and this was to a lady whose name escapes me at the moment [Mrs. Willard E. Brown], who is a patron of the Huntington, and who actually paid, I believe it was $250,000, to finish the last remaining gallery of the Virginia Steele Scott Gallery. There was one gallery that was left unfinished, because there just wasn't enough funding to complete that as they would see fit, and they wanted to do that themselves. This is going to be, I think, for the western art gallery. So this gallery is in this lady's name. She's the kind of person that did— Rather low profile. But they did award her the medal.

GALM

I guess I'm curious. You made a reference to the writings of Virginia Scott. Are there many papers, Scott papers, personal papers?

BLOCH

Yes. Vivian [K. Nichols] inherited all of Virginia's personal effects, which included her diaries and journals. I should really say journals rather than diaries. Vivian was not anxious to turn those over to the Huntington, as they would have liked, and I have no idea what has happened since she passed away.

GALM

Okay.

BLOCH

Now, in October of 1979, we transferred forty-nine of the American pictures of the collection to the Huntington. I believe the transfer had to do with storage at this time. It was not a gift. There were questions about the security of the collection now that it was really a valuable collection. The girls couldn't be counted on to be there all the time, and besides it's not the responsibility that they should have necessarily had. And all the rest of it seemed rather complicated. To have a guard there all the time and that sort of thing is tremendously expensive. So the Huntington had a storage facility, and Bob [Robert R.] Wark very generously— especially since we were getting so close to them—offered to house the pictures. And it worked out very well. In a sense, this storage had within the— Not within an understanding, but there was already within this the sense that this would be transferred more or less permanently and would never come back to the gallery. Some paintings were left out of this transfer. These were intended for dispersal and were things that were in process. Those things didn't go over; those remained in the gallery. That included one of the [Gilbert] Stuarts, a [Charles Willson] Peale, a Morris Graves, [James A. M.] Whistler, one of the [Ammi] Phillips, [Childe] Hassam, and the [Samuel F. B.] Morse, all of which were in process at the time. There was no sense in moving them over. I must again emphasize the fact that one of my great concerns was to satisfy the board, and particularly the girls, with the understanding that we weren't going to get too far from, not a memorial, but some preservation of Virginia's memory. Now, if you remember, I said one of the things I did almost immediately was to have a slide collection made of everything she owned. A special case was acquired for that, so that at almost any time, any scholar—and I was again thinking of the Archives [of American Art (Smithsonian Institution)] and that kind of thing—would be able to get a clear view of what Virginia was about. Whether there was any pattern or not. It was still interesting, the many strands of interest in her collecting, showing her generosity, her concern, her personal interests, and so on. So that had been done, and that was satisfactory. We could go ahead and disperse much of that material, because it was impossible to find a home for that. The medal was the other thing. And then, I had discussed the possibility of giving one collection of paintings, a selection of the California pictures, to the Laguna Beach art museum [Laguna Beach Museum of Art]. I think I mentioned that her sister [Barbara Williams] was connected with that, and one other thing was to try to bring the sister back into the fold and get them interested. So we discussed that. We also indicated, after considerable discussion, that if we did give them the fifty paintings I had in mind (we would give them a chance to select, and there would be paintings and prints in this), that it wouldn't be given in perpetuity. It might be given on a twenty-five-year basis, or something of the sort, so that they could disperse some of them if they wanted to improve the collection. The whole idea was to give the Laguna Beach art museum a chance to maybe have a nucleus or a concentration in California painting. Then in November, the end of November, we did make a formal gift to the Laguna Beach Museum [of Art]. Tom [K.] Enman, the director, had come and made some further selection of things that he wanted and indicated the things he didn't at that time feel were suitable for the museum, but assured us that the future direction of the museum would be toward California art and would result from the gift. Now, ultimately, there was an exhibition. In January of 1980, at least at the meeting of January 11, we could announce that Huntington negotiations had been completed, that a million dollars would be turned over to the Huntington to order construction of the new building. I then indicated that the availability of the so-called blockbuster paintings was probably at an end. By this time the interest in American art had grown to such proportions as to make it extremely difficult to buy really absolutely major pictures, certainly not in any great quantity. Maybe once in a while, depending on opportunity. I noted the gaps in the collection, which included [Thomas] Cole, [Frederic Edwin] Church, [Albert] Bierstadt, and [Sanford Robinson] Gifford, and I said I will not recommend pictures simply to fill gaps in the collection, as one might in a stamp collection. [Charles] Newton, at that time, recommended a halt in the acquisition program, indicating that the building was the priority at this time, and I agreed. I agreed also to act as a consultant on the design for the Institute for Studies in American Art, which, as you know, I kept underlining at every turn. But this was already part of the agreement.

GALM

Was the [George Caleb] Bingham purchase [In a Quandary or Mississippi Raftsmen at Cards] the last "blockbuster" then purchased?

BLOCH

Oh, no. No, I wouldn't have even called the Bingham a particular "blockbuster." It was a major subject matter, the kind of subject matter that didn't turn up very frequently. But that was bought fairly early.

GALM

I see.

BLOCH

No, I think the last so-called blockbuster was the [John Singleton] Copley portrait of Sarah Jackson [Sarah Jackson]. That was a major acquisition, the kind of thing I had been looking for. We continued to disperse various pictures from the collection. The Hassam I mentioned was a portrait of Weir's daughter—that's Julian Alden Weir's daughter, a friend of his. This we sold to the Crocker Art Gallery through Vose Galleries of Boston [Inc.]. We worked this out on a commission basis. They were happy to have it, and we were happy to dispose of it. At that same meeting that I pointed that out, we— Actually, I see here that the resolution to award the medal commission to Baskin was made at that time. We had to agree that we would go ahead with it. I'm not quite certain at this point whether we were waiting for the final design. I think we had to agree earlier, so earlier we were discussing it. By this time we had received a design— we were certainly going forward with it. I'm just giving you a sense of chronology in this. It's not terribly important. At this time, we were discussing the appointment of new members to the foundation. That was based on the new arrangement within the foundation to enlarge the foundation. This was the time we recommended Blake [R.] Nevius to be approached for his interest in joining us.

GALM

This was at your recommendation specifically?

BLOCH

Well, I did. I recommended both Blake Nevius and Charles Speroni. It was then under discussion that they finally decided. I think it was Bob Wark who indicated his support of Nevius over—but this was done behind the scenes, not in a meeting—over Speroni at that time. There were discussions all along as to other people. There was always a great interest in Franklin [D.] Murphy, but then Franklin had many other things. I think he had been approached to be one of the overseers at the Huntington and had turned it down at one point, which rather irritated them in some way. But Franklin had many, many other irons in the fire: it wasn't possible for him to be everywhere, into everything. We discussed, also, this question of no longer blockbusters— But I used the term "memorable." "Blockbuster" was Newton's term; mine was "memorable" pictures for the collection. Thinking of the Huntington, the fact that whenever you think of the Huntington's picture collection you think of certain British pictures which are there. My hope was that with the agreement of the Huntington the gallery just across the way should have a few pictures which also could be considered memorable. There already was such a painting, the Mary Cassatt [Breakfast in Bed]. It's an unforgettable picture. My hope was that we could have a few such pictures. I considered the John Sloan [McSorley's Gats] such a painting. Then we had already had a sale. On the May 23 meeting, we could speak about the sale at Christie's [Fine Art Auctioneers] of May 13 or 15 of Virginia's European pictures, which netted us something like $988,000, after commission, which you have to pay the auction firm. So we had additional money in the acquisition fund. These all went back into acquisition funds. Hence, the discussion of what we would do and what we would be looking for up ahead. At the June meeting of 1980, the new directors were announced: Wark, Nevius, and Newton. The members: Bloch, Nichols, [Henry J.] Tanner and [Margaret T. "Terry"] Finnegan. I made a report relative to acquisitions. I noted at that particular time that I had added nine paintings since coming onto the board. The original collection was seventy-four. Twenty had been sold at the first auction; six paintings in the Huntington storage were intended for trade at the appropriate time. It may be that at that time we may have transferred other pictures which were not presented to the Huntington or to be presented. Again, we were discussing the Institute for Studies in American Art, which was to be an active program which would be provided by the foundation endowment to the Huntington. There would be an additional endowment for this purpose. I believe it was $3,000,000 but I would have to check that out. On September 12, we were still continuing our discussion of the Christie's auction of May 1980, that we had sent forty-four items to that sale, thirty-five were sold, and that the final total came to $969, 704. In the October meeting, we discussed the building program. We had selected three architects of the group we had interviewed: namely, Charles Moore, Tim [Thomas] Vreeland—both of UCLA—and Gray, the architect of Santa Barbara [Museum of Art].

GALM

Paul Gray?

BLOCH

Paul Gray. We then indicated that there would be another auction at Christie's, scheduled for October 12, which included, again, more of Virginia's things.

GALM

I'm curious how the building plans went ahead. Was the foundation solely responsible for selecting the architect, or was there a Huntington representative that worked with you to make that selection?

BLOCH

The selection of the designs was, in a sense, arranged between Bob Wark and myself. We interviewed all the architects, and in the end, it was agreed between us that these three architects would submit designs, for which they would be paid $10,000. We had interviewed a great many people, but we boiled it down to that. The foundation didn't interfere with this at all. I was meant to be their representative. Bob represented the Huntington. He was wearing, as he said, two hats at this point, which he would turn around depending on the responsibility of the time. This worked out very well. I had no objection to this. I was very anxious to see what Charles Moore would come up with. When the designs became available, the whole foundation was permitted to see them and make comments, as well as the overseers of the Huntington. It wasn't terribly formal. Newton was also an overseer. He too was wearing two hats. It was his tendency to always— As he would say, "I seem to hear," you see. He was very anxious to please the Huntington people, who had very definite impressions of what they were looking for. You must realize that this was a brand-new idea for the Huntington. They had never before allowed someone else's name or a building to be erected in somebody else's name in particular, supported by some other funds, to be placed on this sacred property. In fact, you must realize that the whole community does get involved in this kind of thing. The community takes a very active interest in what goes on at the Huntington, which to them is, again, kind of sacred ground. So they felt they had to please a lot of people and that the overseers in a sense represented the community. I think Paul Gray, from the start, was someone that Wark liked very much. He was by far the most flexible. They weren't too sure about Charles Moore. Nor were they really terribly concerned about having what I had hoped would be there, a building that would in itself be memorable by an architect whose name had substance. And I know there were members of the foundation board—at least the girls were—who were quite taken with Charles Moore's presentation, at least what we saw. I think the thing that made me step aside from all of that was the fact that Moore had so many important commissions going at that— He wanted very much to be there. It was for him a kind of mark of prestige that he would have liked to have, the idea of having a jewel of a building out there. It's not that it was daring. It was unusual in design, with a kind of terraced garden, and all this sort of— Rather charming. But he wasn't likely to be in charge all the time. He had other architects working for him and that did make me a little fearful. Whereas Paul Gray would be always there. He had done the additions at Santa Barbara, so he had the benefit of understanding a museum's requirements. Bob Wark was very concerned with the practicality of the design. That is, the internal design, that it should serve the practical needs of a small museum gallery. I understood this. At the same time, he [Gray] indicated a great flexibility, that he would create a design that would in no way stand out from the rest of the buildings, wouldn't upstage what was already there. Although the term wasn't used, I had a sense that that was it. At the meeting I attended where the overseers were looking at the models and designs, it was obvious that they liked the Paul Gray design even as it stood, which had some very charming aspects to it. I think he wanted to satisfy everybody. He's one of those people who, as an architect, wants to satisfy his patron and never take a stand on anything. At the first meeting—and I think this is kind of amusing—he presented the idea that he had looked at the mausoleum of the Huntingtons, which was designed by John Russell Pope, who, as you know, designed the National Gallery [of Art] in Washington [D.C.], which has a little dome that's really a mausoleum. He said, "This would make a great memorial to Mrs. Scott." I said, "On the contrary, we don't want a memorial. This is not to be a mausoleum. I don't want a repetition of that motif." [laughter] I think I clobbered that right there and then. So he created a more open design without that. I said, "Yes, the dome is fine. A kind of low dome, perhaps, of glass, that would be over the central part of the design." It was meant to be two wings. On one side would be the gallery; another side would be offices. And I could see that Bob was, as well as were the overseers, very comfortable with the fact that both men would work very closely together. Remember, beyond the design stage, I would not be there on a day-to-day basis. The only thing I could add at this particular time were the couple of little things that I felt should be there. I was frightened that there would be too much garden encroaching upon the building. Bob likes plant life. While certainly that's typical of what you expect at the Huntington, I wanted to make sure that it didn't meander all through the building and create a completely different aspect to it. So there were little things like that. There were no great problems. We were all in more or less total agreement once it was resolved that this would be a sort of stripped-down classical building, or Renaissance classical building, in keeping with what the Huntington galleries then represented. Tim Vreeland's design was much more Palladian or, rather, Vignolesque. Very, very monumental. I had to agree: it was really based on the handbooks of [Giacomo da] Vignola and would be far too dominating. If you remember, this was a particular time when there was a resurgence of interest in all of this, so it was an ideal moment for designs of this kind to come into play. But it had to be a building which did not attempt to dominate the field, that would blend, and it would seem to me that Paul Gray was the only one.

GALM

Had you specified to all three that there would be two wings? Or was that Paul Gray's solution?

BLOCH

Well, we indicated pretty much what we wanted, and he came up with this. It's a very simple, symmetrical solution, easy to understand and this is what we wanted. My concern was more with detail, as well as the housing of the Archives, that all of these places should be within the general plan, the impression of the institute. And a kind of a patio where people could cross over from Archives or from the library, or whatever, into the gallery and meet sort of in the center. Meantime, I went ahead with the various problems connected with deacquisition of things, both from Mrs. Scott's collection, as well as from Millard Sheets's. We had sold some of Virginia's things at auction at Christie's on October 21. (This is the November meeting. ) We had resolved to sell back to Kennedy's at least four of the paintings they had sold to Millard Sheets. As you recall, at the first auction we had separated some twenty paintings, which included some of the Kennedy affair. Their names appeared in the auction catalog, which I don't think was smiled upon in New York, at least not by Kennedy's. But there was no great problem. In December, since we had some money, I could go ahead with further acquisition. At that time we replaced the missing Hassam, which we had sold, with a Paris Street Scene [Childe Hassam], for which we paid $250,000. We bought a magnificent [Ralph] Earl portrait of Mrs. Boardman and her son [Mrs. Elijah Boardman and Her Son William] for $350,000. We bought the great [George] Inness Washing Day- near Perugia, which included as part of the trade the difficult picture that Mrs. Scott had purchased from Ruth Hatfield, and which had caused us a considerable amount of problem, plus one that we owned. So we got a monumental picture in exchange for it. Then we worked out a negotiation with Kennedy to trade the Stuart, the [Joshua] Shaw, the [Charles Webster] Hawthorne, and some cash, and bought a beautiful still life by [Severin] Roesen [Still-life with Flowers and Bird's Nest]. This was the kind of work that I was doing at that time. In January of 1981, we passed a resolution to give further funds over to the Huntington. This has to do with the building program. It was another $1,000,000 or so, which was all part of the original agreement, and it was announced then that the building designs were due on January 15, 1981. At the February meeting, it was announced that the committee had met and that the Paul Gray proposal was, quote, "the most cost-efficient building to build." Remember that we didn't have a great deal of money. We're talking about something like $2,500,000, I think, as the final estimate. He agreed to meet that— regardless of whatever changes in cost might occur, that that was where it stood. And at that time that was not a bad price at all for this. Gray was then told that he was to submit his final designs by March 24, 1981. Meantime, I continued to report on availability of pictures. This didn't mean necessarily that we were buying, but as an important picture would turn up, I would tell them about it. There was an important [George Henry] Durrie. We had sold a rather insignificant Durrie that was in the collection. He's not exactly a major artist, but a major painting did appear. I discussed the availability of a painting by Frederic Church and of a painting by Cole that the Metropolitan [Museum of Art] was considering deaccessioning from its collection, which could only be sold to an institution. That's a part of the Metropolitan's— Not policy, but it's built into their agreement with the— I think with the state, probably. By April we had Gray's revised designs. We were involved with Butterfield and Butterfield [Auctioners and Appraisers] to have a big auction right there at the estate in May of that year to get rid of many of the less important pictures of Mrs. Scott's. It was the idea to make it available to the community in a rather interesting garden auction. With the final designs available and approved, Gray was finally engaged as the architect for the building at the Huntington. This is at the April meeting of 1981. In June, with funds available, I acquired a painting attributed to Pieter Vanderlyn [Cornells Wynkoop], a rather wonderful provincial portrait which had never left the farmhouse in which it was placed at the time it was painted in 1743. That was, I considered, a major acquisition at the time. We had the results of the Butterfield auction, which even though we were dealing with minor materials, netted almost $250,000. I mention these figures simply to show that it was possible to still continue some acquisition based on that, despite the fact that we were very much involved with the building program. They had reduced our capital funds by the millions we were turning over to the Huntington.

GALM

Most of these purchases that you were making during that period, were they paintings that were being suggested to you by the gallery owners? Or were these things that you were becoming aware of through catalogs and such, that they were available?

BLOCH

You know, I never proceeded on the basis of catalogs. I had an ongoing arrangement with galleries to let me know when a, quote, "memorable" picture turned up. I used that term. I said, "Don't come to me with many other things. I'm not going to my people as an entertainer. We have other things to do. But if you will give me first refusal, I at least would like to present these ideas." I said, "They're interested, and at this point in our work together, there's an understanding of the size and shape of the collection we are reaching out for, a genuine understanding." I no longer had any problem in explaining things, because I would present the material. In the case of the Vanderlyn, it happened to come our way. It was recommended by a colleague of mine who was particularly interested in provincial pictures. I would never have known about it. It was in the hands of an antique dealer in Maine, and he actually came out west with the painting, so they actually saw it. We made the decision there and then. It was an irresistible kind of picture. As it turned out in my investigation, the picture actually was reproduced by [Winslow] Homer in one of his last illustrations, so he must have known the painting himself, down to the last detail. One of the last details was the fact that it was accompanied by a sword owned by Wynkoop, who was a soldier in the revolution. We didn't buy the sword at that time. We didn't even know it was available. Later on, we eventually bought the sword, too, that went with the painting. I always liked that kind of little tidbit to go with it. Since the sword itself was illustrated in the Homer woodcut, down to the last detail, it was irresistible. There, again, were further reports that I made of the sales to date. There were three Christie's sales between 1979 and 1980 and the Butterfield auction. All together, we had a rather substantial amount of funds available for acquisition. Now, we didn't just let that sit. I mean, we generally always had something that we were reaching for which became available. We were talking about opportunity, which is the most important key word to acquisition. If we ever—and we did on occasion—ask to have certain pictures reserved for us until such time as we could pay for it— But these were already decided on, because we knew these moneys were forthcoming. It was a matter of extension over two or three months, something like that, and that's how we bought things. In September of 1981, we purchased the Copley portrait of Sarah Jackson, which totaled $705,000. We're talking about $625,000 plus the commission to the dealers who handle the transaction with the estate—it came out of an estate. In this case, since you asked about this, this was opportunity. Stuart [P.] Feld called me to tell me that this painting might be available, that we'd have to bid for it against the closed bids of other people who were reaching for it. He estimated what that bid would have to be, and we said go ahead. I think we had an excellent buy on an absolutely major painting, which had been on exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts [Boston] for some years. After all, they have some seventy Copleys there. Many of their pictures are on long-term loan from families, but ultimately a family line dies out and something has to be sold. Now, if the Museum of Fine Arts doesn't buy it, it becomes available. In this case, here's a painting practically untouched, having been in the museum for some years as well, which was not something they needed, because after all, they have all the major Copleys that you can want in the Boston area. It was an excellent opportunity which we were able to do, so we resolved to purchase it. At that time we also purchased a painting by James Peale, which appealed to us because it showed a little girl with a doll [A Girl Holding a Doll]. It came from Newhouse's [Newhouse Galleries]. Then in March, again, of '82—we're now jumping ahead several months—we were still talking about certain deaccessions and putting things in auctions of minor pictures. In the April 23, 1982, meeting we purchased a small painting by Thomas Eakins, the portrait of Riter Fitzgerald [Riter Fitzgerald], which was arranged with Kennedy. It included a trade of that portrait of Mrs. Frisby by Charles Willson Peale [Mrs. Peregrine Frisby], which did not appeal to me and we were delighted to get rid of. So those transactions worked very well, the dealing with Kennedy to take back their things. They were very anxious that these things not get into the auction, as the first time. I mean, they felt they were burned. But there was no other way to go at that time. Here on in, because I always had good relationships with Kennedy's, I was able to work out trades when they would get a painting we really wanted. And this worked out very well.

1.22. TAPE NUMBER: XI, SIDE TWO MAY 29, 1987

GALM

Professor Bloch, you were talking about the Virginia Steele Scott Foundation and some of the transactions that occurred at various board meetings. I believe you were up to spring of 1982.

BLOCH

Yes. I only have one other entry for '82 that is of any importance to us here, and that is the May 1982 meeting in which we were discussing the Archives of American Art again. It seemed that there had been some rumor passed around that the Archives were dickering with the [Los Angeles] County Museum [of Art] about an office there. But we, on inquiry, were assured by Bill [William E.] Woolfenden, the director, that oh, no, their interest was certainly in the move to the Huntington. By that time we had already set aside the place in the building plans specifically for Archives. Not that they would have to do this, but it was very important that they know they had a place if they wanted it. After all, for me this was the kind of thing I was talking about since June of 1979, as to the importance of the Archives as part of the institute organization. All of the negotiations with the Archives is quite another situation. But it was always indicated that this is the way we would go, and there was considerable correspondence and discussion, meeting-wise, of the Archives, because the Archives would have a meeting down here or up north, depending on the situation. Generally, most of the members of the California branch of the Archives situated in San Francisco would meet in the southern part of the state, because most of the members came from this part of the country. The only thing I thought might be interesting— I have a complete list of all of Millard Sheets's acquisitions from 1975 to his departure. Generally these, as I look at my dates, went from 1975 through 1976, basically: all of these seventy-some-odd paintings took place within those two years. My acquisitions numbered some twenty pictures— my first acquisition in 1978 to my last acquisition in 1982, with the Riter Fitzgerald sketch of Thomas Eakins. And just for interest, certainly if one compared the costs slightly earlier with what was happening during the period I was there— In order to get these twenty pictures, which included, indeed, some major pictures, we expended a total of $4,123, 500, according to my figures here. So those were the costs, based on the trades that were less than those prices—it included the trades. That included paintings all the way from Bingham, [Washington] Allston, [Frank Weston] Benson, Copley, [Asher Brown] Durand, Eakins, Earl, [Robert] Feke, [William J.] Glackens, Hassam, Inness, [John Frederick] Kensett, James Peale, Severin Roesen, [John Singer] Sargent, [John] Smibert. Well, the Smibert, I must add, was something that I acquired— I was called in as a consultant. I think the agreement when I decided to resign from the foundation and decided also not to move over to the Huntington, which there was considerable negotiation over— But I did agree to act as a consultant. There were still dealers who would come to me with pictures, and in this case came to me with a John Smibert. I felt that this was important. I recommended it to them, and they acquired that painting—[which] I still considered within the group of pictures I had lent a hand in. [John] Sloan, [Thomas] Sully, and Pieter Vanderlyn.

GALM

Of your acquisitions, which one do you think you would rank as perhaps the most significant?

BLOCH

That's hard to say.

GALM

I know each has its own—

BLOCH

Each one has its importance to the collection. It's not a question of this is major-major, this is major, and so on and so forth. They all are pictures that have important qualities. As you remember, the Allston [The Angel Releasing Saint Peter from Prison] was the first one, and that I felt was important because it was a linkage with the Benjamin West. It actually enhanced the importance of the West. Part of the whole thinking, even from the beginning, was that if we were to have an institute, wherever, but particularly with the Huntington—which had been, as I say, discussed almost from the beginning—if students or scholars were to be involved, I didn't want them to move from their area of study and move over to the gallery to refresh themselves, as it were. It's wonderful to have all of this as part of a unit—something I always hoped the university would have, but we never had. But they do at the Fogg [Art Museum (Harvard University)] and they do at Princeton [University Art Museum] and they do at Yale [University Art Gallery], We just don't have anything like that in California, with the possible exception of Stanford [University Museum of Art], But there's no great distinguished collection there either, and certainly not at [University Art Museum, University of California] Berkeley. The students or really good scholars would be able to go and make these connections. There was an opportunity that was just a great opportunity that might never come our way again. It was just very chancy that that happened. Bingham certainly was a major artist that the foundation had been looking for. The fact that I was the scholar in the field gave me a corner on investigation. I knew what might be available and not available. This little painting [In a Quandary] had a lot to say for it and was available. So we bought it, not knowing whether there would be anything else. The Copley was something— Of course, again, we were talking about not just the kind of collection I'm speaking about, but the transition from the Huntington. It [Sarah Jackson] is the kind of painting that could have easily fitted into their gallery in quality. It was very much the kind of portrait that was based on a British tradition, before Copley went off on his own, based on observation of British pictures totally. This was a very transitional period for him and showed how he had, in a large sense, absorbed the English tradition and made it his own. Not based on prints, which was what the earlier pictures were, based on a British tradition in prints, but this showed a certain independence and a feeling for color. It had a lot to say for it and was a good painting. The Asher Durand [Strawberrying] and the Kensett [Rocky Landscape] were interesting as a pair—or let's say a pendant, one to the other—because they were painted within a year of one another. Both had been exhibited at the National Academy [of Design]. One was very typical of Durand. The painting of Kensett was interesting as almost a diploma piece. He didn't sign the painting, and for many years people thought it was Durand. Even though it was in the catalog as Kensett, for some reason people began to assume it was by Durand. But it wasn't. It was Kensett, in a sense, emulating Durand. It wasn't his typical picture of great beach scenes that he produced almost on a commercial level, but one which had extraordinary quality as a landscape. He just called it Landscape, but it had everything in it. It's a painting of great scale; it's one of the largest pictures in the collection. So those two, side by side, had something to say for one another. That was why that picture was selected. The Eight group was already represented in the collection. But we were missing people like Glackens; we were missing Sloan. Millard did not have access to Mrs. [Helen Farr] Sloan, that sort of thing. I did, and I was able to capture the last important subject painting by Sloan [McSorley's Cats] of a good period. The Glackens [Chateau Thierry] was fun, because it was one of his French pictures. The people in the picture included someone like Alfred Maurer, who was represented in the collection. It had a lot of the French, Renoiresque feeling that was typical of Glackens. And it came with the preliminary sketch. The same thing happened with the Inness [Washing Day near Perugia]. I think I've already mentioned the fact that the Inness attracted me because it was so atypical—it wasn't the kind of Inness you usually expect. It was a painting that was controversial when it was first exhibited at the Academy. It was one of his Italian pictures at a time when he probably had some, I won't say influence, but some contact with the Macchiaioli. So when I saw it, I literally flipped over the painting. It took me very little time to discover that the critics were very critical of the painting because it was unlike what Mr. Inness was doing at that particular time. But he was sending this from Italy. A picture with many figures in it—it was unusual for Inness. And it was of monumental scale. Ultimately we found the sketch for it, which had belonged to Inness's daughter and son-in-law. It was a family thing. That one did not have figures in it, but showed how he operated as a painter. That kind of thing is always important to scholars in the field. So we were able to put those together. Again, we were dealing with opportunity. Besides, we were very anxious to get rid of the "no-no" Inness and the other one, which was not very impressive. We were always trying to improve the quality. This, in a sense, is what Millard would have hoped to do in time. He was buying duplicates, if you want to call it that. He bought more than one [George] Bellows with the idea, probably, of trading off one for something else. I'm sure he was being advised: "Take advantage of the chance to get another painting." Two [Martin Johnson] Heades, you get: rid of one. And the same with Bellows, and so on. Of Sargent, all we had was a little watercolor that was rather boring. I determined that if we couldn't get a major watercolor, which we hoped to get eventually— Hopefully Venice, because that was Mrs. Scott's favorite city. The availability of the Charles Stuart Forbes portrait by Sargent was irresistible—an absolutely wonderful, quick, spontaneous painting made by Sargent. Not one of his rather formal portraits, which would have been equally suitable, considering the Huntington. But there were sufficient portraits of that kind around. This one had a great deal to say from the standpoint not only of scholarship, but artists. It had tremendous artistic appeal and had everything to say about what Sargent was about. So that was a lucky acquisition. The Sully portrait of Madame Sigoigne [Mile. Adèle Sigoigne] was, in a sense, like the Bingham—something that clutched at my heart. After all, I think I'm allowed a slightly personal interest here, because I'd known that picture ever since I was a kid. The painting was around in New York and on exhibition at the Metropolitan for some twenty years. And it, again, had everything to say about Sully. There was a still life in it, which is an aspect of Sully people don't often know. It was in the hat, of course, but there it was, and the musical instrument and so on. It was a wonderfully distinguished portrait by Sully and went very well with the other portrait that was already in the collection [Henry Paul Beck, Jr.], which was more formal. We did away with the wife, and got a girlfriend, you see, for Mr. Beck. These were the little things we used to laugh about at our meetings. The Vanderlyn was again an incredible acquisition of a major early portrait, 1743, that helped to round out, along with the Earl— I think I mentioned the Earl [Mrs. Elijah Boardman and Her Son William]. It's a full-length portrait with a woman and child, and the pendant to it was in the Metropolitan at the time. So again it was a major painting by a major artist that doesn't often turn up. We were offered others, but none of them matched this particular one. So all in all we were filling out— We were satisfying the needs to build a kind of a handbook collection. We knew we couldn't cover the entire waterfront and complete the job, certainly, in the time I had or within the funds we had. We were talking about a $3,000,000 endowment, but we were handing over $2,500,000 towards the building. We didn't have time to think about acquisition as a major aspect of our work. That remained for the future, in the hope that there would be gifts. But what we had formed would enable students to fill the gaps for themselves and to see some major pictures. It also would serve to attract the community on a more than satisfactory level. The Huntington could be very proud of what was there, in many ways, from the standpoint of quality, scale, all of the things we needed. I think it has worked that way for the people who use the gallery. As a matter of fact, the present curator [Susan Danly] says that she always is so gratified when she takes groups through the gallery that she's able, really, to almost treat the whole history of that period through the paintings that are there. That was one of the purposes.

GALM

Did you have anything to do with the installation of the collection in the new building?

BLOCH

No. That I felt was really Bob Wark's responsibility. He agreed to work with Jack [B.] Carter, whom I have great respect for. I was not called in to pass judgment on that, and there was no reason why I should. I wasn't on the curatorial staff. I was available for consultation if they wanted it, but Bob Wark had very definite ideas about what he wanted. About the arrangement, he did discuss the idea of whether I had any objection to the use of furniture with it. It's something they do in the other gallery. I said, "Absolutely not," so he arranged to borrow furniture that he didn't have. Since then they've acquired some other pieces on loan or some gifts to fill out these areas. You know, everybody has a different feeling about arrangement. I might have made some slight changes myself. But that is his baby. It is his responsibility, and I think it looks very handsome. As he is beginning to gain an appreciation of the collection— And that was again part of it. I felt it very important that since this was not Dr. Wark's particular area (he was going to turn a lot of that over to his assistant), I was available for consultation. I think he has adapted himself brilliantly to the affair. He has taken it to his heart. He's moved his own office into the building from the other building; he's there all the time? and he is very enthusiastic about the installation, about the pictures that are there. He's become accustomed to American art, to borrow something from [My] Fair Lady. He's become accustomed to the faces of American art, which is fine. I think he's made the transition which was so necessary. All I need to add to this is the fact that there came the point when I began to consider my particular role. There's considerable correspondence with Bob Wark throughout this period. It was not part of the agreement that I be employed. It was his strong feeling for a long time that I should have a curatorial role over there. I thought it all over and— This was a difficult period for me, in any case. I had resigned from UCLA in the fall of 1981. I really had undergone tremendous stress and was not well as a result of that and was trying to sort of get back my strength again. Working with the new program at the Huntington was wonderful for me. At that time I thought very seriously about moving over and knew that I' d have to resign from at least one position in order to do it. It was fairly simple for me to explain to the chancellor [Charles E. Young], who was concerned about this, that I did indeed have another possibility. But I had made no real decision. I was kept on at the Grunwald Center [for the Graphic Arts] for eighteen months while we went through a transition as to what the succession would be there. We had a transitional committee formed and I was serving on that, which became fairly stressful in itself. So my stresses weren't all over, and I won't go into that detail at this point. June 30, 1983, I was out of the Grunwald as well, but I still hadn't recouped my strength at all. I was over the bad period of stress, but I was still trying to recoup my strength and trying to decide what I wanted to do. I reviewed my situation and what was evolving at the Huntington. I can go into that in detail at another time, but there was going to be an assistant curator, in any case. I sort of felt that I could probably suit them and myself to better advantage by staying put in West L. A. rather than moving my home, lock, stock and barrel, over to the Huntington. The idea that I would go two, three times a week had occurred to me, and perhaps even stay out there. But it again was distance, and the stress of movement back and forth at the time didn't seem to work too well in my mind. I was thinking about myself and about my position there. I felt that the big job I had done was pretty much over and that I might be better off being an outside consultant, called in when needed. Basically, it was that. So I finally drafted a letter in September of 1983 in which I discussed all of this and thanked them for all that I was able to accomplish and the new friends and so on and so forth. I had not discussed this with Bob Wark, and he was, I think, somewhat shocked and disappointed. But nevertheless, we did get together and talked about this even afterward. By November of 1983, I had a letter from them, a formal letter, in which they said they wanted to express the sense of [what] the grave loss my departure [reading] "will mean for the day-to-day operation of the foundation and for the implementation of its program. Your contribution has been essential and vital, and your services are in the most literal sense irreplaceable. We will miss not only your expertise and your valuable contacts with the art community, but your humor and civility." So it was a tender time, but we continued to keep in contact with one another. And eventually in—what was it?—October of 1986, I was awarded the medal, the first presentation of the foundation medal. I mentioned that there was one other person—

GALM

Right, a woman.

BLOCH

—who had given the money. That was Mrs. Willard Brown. I have the name here. That was itself a difficult moment, since my mother [Rose von Auspitz Bloch] was in the hospital at the time. But it was very touching, and I appreciated it. We have maintained contact. At the moment we are even talking about exhibitions I will do with them up ahead.

GALM

Would this be an exhibition of your own drawing collection?

BLOCH

Yes, this would be material from my own American collection, which has been a hobby of mine over the years. Not the sort of thing that really ever interfered with the work I was doing, and is sort of the harvest of some forty years of expertise in a field that wasn't too well represented. Now it is again becoming widely recognized, but at the time I did it it was wide open. A certain amount of this material had been used for student purposes in specialized areas, because the collection moves in a variety of specialized areas. Some of the intent was to have original material available that the students could use no matter where I was. Because I had in a sense pioneered teaching in this field, in Missouri, in Minnesota, and eventually in Los Angeles. In those days you would come to a university and not even find slides that you could work with, much less original material, and it was always my concern that students should have access to original material one way or another. If it couldn't be in the immediate vicinity, at least material on paper, whether prints or drawings, is easy to transport, easy to be used. So we've always used materials of that kind, and very successfully. Certainly in the numerous exhibitions we've had out of the Grunwald, the seminars in many cases were based on certain aspects of my collecting interests which could easily be made available to them. But never has the collection been shown in any major way under my own name. GALM; It will, perhaps, at the Huntington.

BLOCH

Yes. This is what we're talking about at the present moment.

GALM

Okay. One other thing that I would like to ask you to expand upon today is your involvement with the Archives of American Art.

BLOCH

I think I mentioned in passing, or perhaps something you and I discussed privately—

GALM

I think it was something that we discussed privately, and that's why I'd like to get that on tape.

BLOCH

Yes. The Archives was something that had a much older history than the California side of it.

GALM

Nineteen fifty-four was the founding.

BLOCH

That's right. So I knew these things from the time I was in New York. At that time, I wasn't very actively involved with them, although my friends were, so I knew pretty much what was going on. As you know, it was practically started in the storerooms of the Detroit Institute [of Arts] by Edgar [P.] Richardson, the director of the Detroit Institute, and Lawrence [A.] Fleischman, who at that time was a collector in the Detroit area. Both of them were pioneers, in a sense, in feeling the need to bring together the documents of American art that were totally unappreciated, that were certainly, to a large amount, being destroyed. My own interest in this particular aspect of American art, apart from the Archives, had been something that had been going on for many, many years. Ever since I became interested in American art, from the time I came back from Missouri, I began to think, as I always have, whether it be drawings or whatever, of the documents, the letters, and other materials relative to the period in which I was interested. I think some of this may have evolved from the fact that for many, many years, George Caleb Bingham's original letters to his friend, Major [James Sidney] Rollins, had been lost. They were known to exist somewhere in the Rollins family. When [Fern H.] Rusk did her book, published in 1917, those letters had been lost. In 1940 they had turned up, whether in a pickle barrel or somewhere, they had turned up, and were deposited with the State Historical Society of Missouri. In late 1938 to 1939 they were published in the Missouri Historical Review, edited by Curtis Burnam Rollins, who was the son of Major Rollins and who actually knew Bingham as a child. One of his brothers was named George Bingham Rollins. This close friendship between Rollins and Bingham is widely known over the years. And this was the exchange, the only really complete file of letters known at that time, some 110 or 120 letters, which he [Curtis Burnam Rollins] carefully edited, based on his own knowledge. Well, when [Albert] Christ-Janer published his volume on Bingham in 1940 [George Caleb Bingham: The Story of an Artist], it was really, I think, largely because of the discovery of those letters, which he used in part, but certainly not in any great depth. I became aware of those—it was really very crucial to the work I was doing. It rather stimulated—the fact that here was an incredible archive that was literally at my disposal. In any work of the kind, particularly in the American field, people never thought, at least the dealers never thought, that American artists could write. They thought of them as unskilled professional provincials. When I first began to ask for this by going around to the various dealers inquiring about this kind of material, largely stimulated, as I said, by the work I was doing, and I wanted to move around in the field and to search out this material, they'd say, "Why are you interested in this?" So they were available for fifty cents and a dollar. That was about how they valued them, and they thought I was rather weird to be interested in this at all. When the Archives got started with the specific purpose of going after this kind of material, I was very excited. I didn't work with those people at the time, nor was I called in. My interests were usually rather private, and I didn't feel myself in a position to be active with the Archives at that time. I was simply observing what they were doing. At first, I was not totally impressed, except with the idea, and I had no idea how they were going to preserve these materials, which was another concern of mine. Were these just going to be buried in some basement somewhere or were they going to be used? My first bit of exploration, through my friends who had some connection with it, is that it didn't seem that students were going to have access to this right away. For a number of years access was somewhat limited, and that rather disturbed me. Were they simply going to gather this material and make it a private enterprise, or was this going to have public use? It was only after the Archives finally realized that they couldn't accomplish all of this—they were hiring people to do research in the libraries, the availability of early imprints on American art, catalogs, and such—that the project began to grow. And finally, Richardson and Fleischman (and I don't know the details of this) reached an agreement with the Smithsonian to take over the project. Now, you must realize that although the Smithsonian may have done this, it had to find its own funds and its own support. That has always been so. The positions of the people who directed the various offices were federal service jobs, but the government wasn't providing the funding. They had to really go out and find support in the private sector for all of their activity. That still goes on that way. There's no comparison to the Contra support [American-funded military insurgents in Nicaragua in the 1980s], [laughter] but it does involve a great deal of persuasion by people who frequently know nothing about this particular area. It's still a very precious area, and they don't have the money, to this very day, to go out and acquire manu¬scripts. I think the first collection of important manu¬scripts they acquired was a collection put together by an autograph dealer, which he sold to some private person. That included people like Smibert—extremely rare—on to other artists. Then gradually, when the thing was taken over by the Smithsonian and the various offices began to increase and scholarly people were employed to work with it, they actually began to scour the field and turn up the relatives of artists and encourage them to either give the material to the Smithsonian or allow them to put it on microfilm. And gradually, certainly in the days even before I left New York, they provided a directory, a published directory of what they intended to do. These offices had begun to evolve in Washington [D.C.] and New York, in particular, as I remember them. Since that time they have grown in substance and responsibility, and these offices are widely used by scholars today. So my respect for them certainly grew over the years. By the time I got here, the importance of the Archives having a western office was very much in my mind. Because after all, at that time I was the only scholar of any substance on the West Coast. [There was] no specialization. I was brought here for that purpose, but there was no material to work with, apart from the library I brought out to work with for myself and could make available to my students, or the drawings I've mentioned or the documents I had. I had seminars in which students would actually work from original documents. There's nothing like an original document to stimulate the imagination, and we had several seminars that dealt with this kind of material. So the idea of an office where this vast collection of original materials could be available in duplication was something I really felt on a personal level was important, but in terms of making the West Coast an equal center for American art was also in my mind. Remember, there were no real collections on the West Coast. Santa Barbara [Museum of Art] decided to form a collection of American art, and largely through the Mortons, they did start such a collec¬tion. That's the Morton gallery [Preston Morton Collection of American Art] that's still there. I did the first introduction to the handbook that they had. The Fisher [Art] Gallery at 'SC [University of Southern California] had a small American collection, but certainly there was nothing at UCLA of any consequence. Fred [Frederick S.] Wight was a representative of twentieth-century American art, but of the period in which I was interested, there was nothing. It was all brand-new to the students. All of the work that I had to do was, in a sense, pioneering. So when I, through Bill Woolfenden, was apprised of their idea about setting up a California office—and they weren't sure whether it would be north or south—I was very quick to be in contact with him and to make myself available to be of any help I could in this exploration. I'm sure there was material that I just couldn't put my hands on, but I do have a letter of January 1972 from Bill Woolfenden, in which he said, [reading] "We have great news for the new year: the Archives' West Coast office is really going to open after almost ten years of talk and frustration"—in which we were expressing both. This was where the [M. H.] de Young [Memorial] Museum [San Francisco] was going to provide space for our office. He speaks about the fact that they didn't have enough money to hire a full-time director or set up an active collecting program. Because part of the program is not just to have the microfilm archive and the card files here, but also to start collecting from the West Coast standpoint, because they did in the Middle West and in the East. And he says, "But the important thing is to get started and to make our own collections available to scholars on the West Coast." So we talked, both in person and in other ways, about the possibilities of where in a sense to set up. This was finally telling me that the de Young had offered them the possibility, but prior to that, we had personal discussions, as well as chats, about whether it was to be north or south. I think the original idea was to hope to be down here, as I would have liked, but I could promise them nothing. We couldn't do it here. There were other people putting in their own input as to what they thought. The County Museum wasn't prepared to do this, and the other ideas were not at all suitable and confusing. What he meant by frustration is that we were getting mixed signals in this community, as generally happens. And it was I who finally suggested to Bill Woolfenden, when he talked about the possibilities on the West Coast up north, that he take advantage of the fact that there was this office there and ready to go.

GALM

Now, were you acting with an official connection to the Archives? Or was it more as a leading scholar in American art?

BLOCH

Just as a leading scholar. I had no official connection with the Archives at that time. As soon as it was formed, I was—and have been ever since—a member of the committee here and actively involved with that. My assistant at that time was Paul [J.] Karlstrom, who was going to do his Ph.D. in the American field—he hadn't started out that way. I certainly felt very strongly that Paul was an ideal candidate. He had a good feeling for archival material and didn't really want to teach and wasn't quite certain about a museum career. I felt this might be just the answer to him, and I had proposed his name and encouraged him to apply. As it worked out, he finished his degree just about the time that this office was to open. The money did become available for a full- time director, and he took the job and has been at it ever since. We're talking about fifteen, sixteen years now.

GALM

So did the Southern California office then go into the gallery?

BLOCH

No, no. We're talking about 1972 when they started there. My promotion of the Southern California office, which had been lingering in my mind, began when I first got to the foundation and we began to talk about the future. You can find throughout the minutes of the meetings my discussion about the Archives and the planning for the institute to include the Archives. Certainly for the building program we were to provide space for this. And the foundation liked this whole idea. In fact, I think the fact that the Archives would be part of it lent a certain strength to the whole idea of the American art collection, to its home at the Huntington. The whole thing somehow seemed to fit rather snugly. I kept saying, "Something's got to go wrong. This is too good to be true." But there weren't any major hitches. We certainly were able to support it, to provide the cost of the microfilm materials. It was something like $70,000, the initial cost. That was no problem at all for the foundation—they went along with that completely. I think for the Huntington, it may have been a possible question. Here they had managed to overcome the great obstacle of having a foreign element on their ground, and now there would be another element that comes out of Washington over which they would have no control. As long as it was the foundation turning over all its responsibilities, certainly it was very clear that the controls, responsibility, would be the Huntington's and the curatorial element would come under their jurisdiction. If I think back, probably the only problem that they may have been talking about behind the scenes was that, in a sense, if I came over I would be a full director. Full curator, not director, because there's no director except the man on top. Everybody in charge of other collections are called curators. Bob Wark would have to recognize the fact that I was his peer. I don't think that was a great problem, but I could see it as something that could be a problem. Not for me, but I don't know—it might cause some confusions. I couldn't be brought on as an associate curator, but he was willing to resolve that. I don't see that as something that would have created a conflict for us. Maybe in the minds of some other people, but not for us. But the files I have on this simply indicate the general progress.

1.23. TAPE NUMBER: XII, SIDE ONE JUNE 12, 1987

GALM

Professor Bloch, there are just a couple of questions that I have about the establishment of the Southern California office of the Archives of American Art at the [Henry E.] Huntington Library [and Art Gallery] in the Virginia Steele Scott Gallery. The plan went ahead more or less smoothly, as you indicated, and then did the Archives office open there at the same time that the gallery opened?

BLOCH

You mean at the Huntington?

GALM

At the Huntington.

BLOCH

Yes. It never happened as we first thought. We weren't quite sure how quickly we would resolve our affiliation, let's say, with the Huntington. We had been discussing all along the possibility of establishing the satellite office, the Southern California Archives. At the beginning, if my records are correct, we were thinking that failing that, we would be prepared to establish that office at Virginia Steele Scott's home, in the gallery part of it, that is, on Oak Knoll [Terrace]. But our question, as it always was with the collection, was the question of public access. We were trying to establish just what kind of use would be required, how many students or scholars would wish to use it and so on. But while all of this was going on, I would say in 1978-79— Well, we were still discussing support for such a satellite office. We were certain it was going to happen; we were all agreed. We had resolved in our Archives advisory committee meetings that we were going to do this. I, meantime, was actively discussing this with the [Virginia Steele] Scott Foundation, and they were of course agreed. But in the meantime, the agreement with the Huntington did move forward. The whole thing was then moved over to the Huntington as a solution to it, where the question of public access wasn't any longer a problem.

GALM

So when it was first thought of as a Southern California office, it was with the foundation being in the former quarters?

BLOCH

We would provide the space for it. We had it. The gallery was adequate. It was always the question of access. Chances are if we wouldn't have had that problem, the gallery would have been kept. Although I would say that the solution ultimately to move over to the Huntington was the best one yet.

GALM

Has it functioned satisfactorily as an office in the Huntington?

BLOCH

Yes, I think it's moving satisfactorily. It's not, in my personal opinion, evolving at the pace we desired. By pace, I mean usage, and that is simply due to the fact that there aren't, at least in Southern California, any programs in American art history being taught at the universities. Mine was the only one of any substance. Naturally it was with UCLA in mind that I forged ahead, because my course was an extremely popular one, with its seminars and students who were coming in and the general course attendance, which was rarely less than ninety students. I had every reason to believe that through my energies and through the students', we would have a great deal of use and would stimulate the use. After all, the San Francisco branch could be readily used by [University of California] Berkeley and Stanford [University], where they do have something of a program. But the real program was here. With my departure six years ago from the department, I have not been replaced to date. They have had an occasional course being given; they have not filled the slot. So there's been a falling off of this, and I would blame the lack of serious usage chiefly on the fact that there isn't an energetic academic program going anywhere.

GALM

Okay. Well, I think we'll go ahead then today with the— Unless you have anything further on the Archives?

BLOCH

No. I would say that certainly my files have much more material relating to this, which will ultimately be available should anyone want to pursue this question. I think it's very important that the Archives have an office here, something we struggled for many, many years. And while it moves slowly now, once some of these problems are resolved, it will have extremely important use. I might just add to it that the Institute [for Studies in American Art] was established out there, of which the Archives was to be part. It wasn't all conditioned on UCLA or 'SC [University of Southern California], not completely. There was a lot of interest in American art among collectors, so chances are that will grow in dimension. And there's a very active program of gathering materials up and down the coast now, which precedes whether or not there are a great many people using it. We must realize the usage is never very great, if we notice the numbers. I hoped that it would grow. But the Huntington in its endowment from the Scott Foundation has funding to bring in visiting scholars, young scholars, hopefully. The program is now on its way, so having the Archives there is a very important aspect of that program. These are people who come and spend a month or six weeks or whatever in working in American art. It, to some vague extent, resembles what the [J. Paul] Getty [Center for the History of Art and the Humanities] does, but the Getty does nothing in American art. So this fills that gap very well. I'm just trying to emphasize and underline the fact, as it were, that we're not waiting for UCLA, that it will move rather richly forward as time goes on.

GALM

Does the Archives plan for a continuing proliferation of regional centers?

BLOCH

No, I think this is the last, from what I could gather, because they have to find local funding. The government certainly is tightening its belt on supporting affairs of this kind and demand that they go out. Most of their representatives of the various centers are responsible to go out and raise funds in the various communities. So it's rather doubtful. Now, they have the Midwest, and they have the East. I don't think there's one in the South, as yet—I'm not aware of one. And the two on the West Coast. I really think there are probably five centers in all. And then Washington, of course. [It's doubtful] that there will be any additions to this, in the near future anyhow.

GALM

Well, today we had talked previously about wanting to document on tape your recollections and your associations with New York dealers, gallery directors, and such. I'm not quite sure just how we should approach this, since it's really your recollections of these. You have made references to some connections with them over the years, starting off really maybe with those early ones growing up in New York. Maybe we could start back with those from that period then that you had continuing relationships with.

BLOCH

Yes, I think it has particular interest, particularly since we are speaking about a generation of booksellers, picture dealers, etc., who are really more or less gone. With the departure of someone like Lucien Goldschmidt, about which there's been considerable publicity in the press, I think people are beginning to realize that the generation that I knew, and that my peers came into contact with in the early days while we were students, is just disappearing. You find the communities, if they've moved, you have one here and one there across the country. But they're all going. They're all now in their— The youngest would be in the mid-seventies, and the eldest move on into their upper eighties. So we're dealing with people who are really retiring from the business and who are not really leaving a succession. It's a completely different generation, an interesting new generation, but not quite the same thing. Now, why I thought it was important is that my recollections go back to the days when I was a very young high school student and I was interested in art history on my own. I think in the beginning I wanted to be an archaeologist and read everything I could on Tutankhamen excavations. I said if I had the opportunity I would seek out an Egyptologist and I would devote myself to that. Of course, that's the romantic side of it. Because you must remember those were the days of S. S. Van Dine's The Scarab Murder Case and that sort of thing, the kind of intellectually inspired murder mysteries. Incidentally, S. S. Van Dine [pen name of Willard Huntington Wright], you know, was the brother of Stanton Macdonald-Wright. They were brothers. I didn't know it then; I didn't know I'd meet Stanton Macdonald-Wright later on in life. What happened was that I became very familiar with the scene. Rather than go out and kick a ball around, I would take my Saturdays— And there was a friend of mine who became intrigued with this idea that I had and wanted to learn something, and so we'd go to midtown. It was Fifty- seventh Street chiefly in those days. I was shy, but terribly interested, and he had a certain aggressiveness. I mean, he would go in and prepare the way so that I could get in for free and he could get in for free. Some of these galleries charged if they had an exhibition. It was a benefit kind of thing. But whatever it was, we did very well, and I did get in everywhere. Those people who let us in were intrigued by these youngsters and would show us things that they ordinarily wouldn't. I went to all the auctions, and I became interested in various things like English porcelain and that little manuscript one summer, and so on. It was a fascination that always remained. So my movement in art history came fairly early. I started taking whatever courses I could, finally, in high school, which were chiefly art appreciation, and we did scrapbooks and that sort of thing. And then on into the early college years, where again there was just an extension of art appreciation. But I did a lot of reading, and I continued to go around to the galleries and got to know some of the gallery people. Not intimately at that point. It was only after I was a graduate student that I rather supplemented my studies at the Institute [of Fine Arts (New York University)] with visitations to the gallery people, who now took me more seriously because I was a budding scholar, as it were. But for me, it was important not only to see the museums and look at collections— Which wasn't part of the curriculum. There was no insistence that you do this, but I felt that I learned a lot from these scholarly dealers who I had come to know early and who were still around and more than willing now to be helpful to me and to show me things, some of them operating from private galleries. It was, as far as I was concerned, far more interesting, far more important than even the digging through the books. I knew now what I was looking at. I could now talk on more equal terms with some of these dealers, who, in fact, sometimes sought me out for advice as to how to proceed in gathering information about a picture or whatever, so that it was a kind of exchange that began to happen. Not every student did this, incidentally. Many of them just preferred to work from books. But from the beginning, I felt that this brought me much more into focus. It gave a much greater dimension to what I needed to know. And the generation of dealers I spoke about were more than willing to be helpful. To them, it was also a kind of medium of exchange. And this continued to be all the while I lived in New York. Then after I came out here I became involved with the [Grunwald] Center [for the Graphic Arts]. I would go back on buying trips for the center. So I came to see these people and still maintain my communications with some of them. Some of them became very helpful in helping us develop our own collections. In fact, without that kind of friendship I had with them, I doubt that we could have made much headway. Because they were more than anxious to help play a role. Not from the profit making, because I knew the values too, and we had a limited budget. So it wasn't that. But you do need these contacts if you do anything like that. Just as when I stepped into the Scott Foundation, I again had very easy access to many of these people whom I had known for many, many years. While I was in New York and working with prints or out here working with prints, I naturally didn't see the painting dealers or others. This time, I once again had a chance to extend my friendships and deal with them on a business level as well, which was extremely helpful. It's an enriching kind of experience that I don't think many students take advantage of. I still inquire out here and find out how few of the teachers go to the bookshops or go to the printshops. Even the museum people are not that— Apart from making trips east, the people on the West Coast neglect many of the dealers, it seems to me. They want the trip out of it, I suppose. But there's a lot to learn from dealers here, too, who have been established for some time. But what we're really talking about is what was going on in the East through those years that I remember so well. As we began to talk about it, I became even more— Because there are marvelous stories that go with this, of course. I tried to list some of the people I remember so well from the early days, some who have long since gone out of business. Now, in a very general way when I was in those high school years—

GALM

These would be the 1930s?

BLOCH

Thirties, yes. We would go down to Fifty-seventh Street from my home, my friend and myself. The great galleries on Fifty-seventh Street were Knoedler's [M. Knoedler and Company, Inc.], Durand-Ruel [Galleries], and Wildenstein and Company [Inc.] a little further uptown. On Fifty-seventh Street you also had Newhouse Galleries [Inc.], you had John Levy [Galleries], you had the Gallery of P. Jackson Higgs. And then you had modern galleries which dealt with more contemporary works like Ferargil [Galleries], Valentine-Dudensing, J. B. Neumann. Pierre Matisse, I remember when he opened his gallery [Pierre Matisse Gallery] and had an exhibition. I was terribly intrigued. This was the son of Henri Matisse! So I had to dash over to that opening and get his autograph and that sort of thing. I think he was very puzzled to see these kids and wondered what they wanted. I remember on one occasion— This gallery wasn't on Fifty-seventh Street, it was somewhere else. I have searched my mind, and I can't remember exactly this gallery. It was, again, the typical kind of gallery of those days which had the heavy velvet walls. They were famous for the velvet walls. P. Jackson Higgs had the red velvet, and if you had an exhibition— I remember what he was showing was the Urbino Madonna of Raphael. That was in the middle of all this velvet, and there would be two great chairs, armchairs, sitting directly in front of it. You would pay a dollar admission. You were given a little pamphlet, and you could sit there in the silence and stare at this little painting. My friend, of course, got us in for nothing, and there these two kids sat looking at this painting. I still remember it very, very distinctly. This other one I remember also handled French pictures. Being kids with a lot of curiosity, we weren't just satisfied with seeing the pictures that were on exhibition, but we sort of wandered around. Now, these velvet walls frequently covered the doors of private offices, and one of them was somehow ajar. We looked in and saw an absolutely stunning early [Jean Baptiste Camille] Corot. By that time we knew what we were looking at. We would frequently stand just in the doorway of a gallery and look in. Very typically New Yorker, you see— not go all the way in, just look to see whether there was anything we wanted to see. If there was something we did, we'd angle toward that work. So we got to know even the quality of things, strangely enough. Well, we stormed into this office, you see, to look at this painting, whereupon the owner came out from somewhere behind the drapes, [laughter] I thought he was going to kill us. But I think he calmed down when he realized we weren't thieves, we just wanted to see the pictures. We went from pictures to other things. There was a lot of importation of Russian works of art that were still coming in, just like Armand Hammer imported some of the czar's treasures, the Easter eggs and so on. There were several galleries— I remember one called the Hermitage [Gallery]. There's another one that I've known very well in more recent years, A la Vieille Russie [Inc.], where you can see stunning works of craftsmanship. Well, those people would really take time out to show us these things. We weren't buyers in any way. As a matter of fact, if I may just pursue that, it was much later on that I came to know the people at A la Vieille Russie quite well. We would deal with questions that you could never get answered in the classroom. Such things as, you know, "How do you know that a work of art— let's say a piece of goldsmith work—is original?" I remember Mr. Grinberg, who was evidently the authority on gold snuffboxes, discussing this with me. I said, "How do you know?" And he said, "Well, it comes in the feel." Which is something you won't get in the classroom unless they pass works around, which to a certain extent happened at the Fogg [Art Museum (Harvard University)], but didn't happen in New York. I remember on one occasion he opened the drawer and brought out a little snuffbox in the shape of a crown, and he said, "Now, tell me, what do you think of this?" I remember looking at it. It had a classical frieze running around the lower part of the crown. I said, "Well, it's of classical inspiration, but it's more like [Bertel] Thorvaldsen than it is what it might purport to be—that is, early." He started to laugh. Finally, he said to me, "Well, you know what this is? This is a snuffbox which was made by the Russian craftsman living in Paris who had fabricated a crown which was sold to the Louvre as an original classical work of art." It was simply a put- together thing, but people really for a while believed it was fifth century. It was a famous fake, and it occurs in all the books on fakes. And no longer on view, you see." The question of fakes always rather inspires one. We were reading about [Alceo] Dossena, who did the famous fakes of the great sculptors of the Renaissance, of [Bernardo] Rossellino and Desiderio da Settignano and so on. These were all great craftsmen who emulated these people but really never hit it off. My work at the Institute had certainly to do with connoisseurship, through my teacher [Richard] Offner, who would take us to collections. We were intrigued by the workshop pieces, some of them actually signed by the artists themselves. But they were workshop pieces which frequently a great master would sign, so these are not really fakes. They aren't really totally by the artist's hand—it's a whole other history. But the real fakes were the things that intrigued us. You read a lot about that now. I think it was a little later on that the great expose of the famous terra-cotta Etruscan warriors at the Metropolitan [Museum of Art] came into view. There were some very funny stories that went with it, some of which I couldn't tell you here. I actually met the man [Paul B. Coremans] who exposed the fact that the Etruscan warriors were not what they purported to be. But those were works of art you grew up with. They were the most astonishing things a kid could visit if he went to the Metropolitan. All of these were things that you could learn by talking to the dealers, who were very willing to— After all, you must realize that their professional lives depended on this, so they had to know what we could play around with. We were certainly taught to recognize restoration. Even school pieces, works of art that were not certainly by the masters— I think my teachers were a little reluctant to talk about "fake," actually—not in the true sense of the word. And sometimes even they were taken in. When I visited, I remember, the home of one of the instructors at the Institute, the only thing he had hanging in his home was a reproduction of Christ at Emmaus, which was at that time attributed to Vermeer. It was only after the war that we discovered that these were really the works of Hans van Meegeren, and it was my good fortune to actually work with the man who uncovered that famous fraud. But these were things that we really didn't deal with in any depth. You really had to get to the dealers, who in a sense had responsibility, professional responsibility, to make certain that what they were selling was not fake. Not that some of them weren't fully— If they thought they had something that was right, they might get a signature put on it in an effort to sell it, because people still to this very day don't like to buy works of art that aren't signed, which leaves them open to all kinds of things. What I remembered in those days was— Because these dealers really opened their doors to me, I might come upon one of them actually working out a whole provenance for a painting. Because the way they were selling pictures— And this is the way Duveen [Brothers] worked, this is the way Knoedler's worked, and so on. In order to sell a picture, they had to prepare a dossier with letters from experts, as well as a whole list of previous owners. The longer the provenance, the happier the collector was. To this day, this works. So the temptation to create a provenance sometimes happened. As far as signature was concerned, it got to a point where I might enter one dealer's workshop and he'd say, "Look, I've just got this painting." When I was becoming recognized as somebody in the American field, I might say, "Well, it looks [like] it could be a work of Karl Wimar." And he'd say, "Wimar it is!" Out would come the brush, you see. Then, of course, you had the auctioneers, who really to this day don't have to assume responsibility for authenticity. I mean, they will simply, just to cover themselves, say this painting is signed. But there's always an asterisk to— And I think the term asterisk is interesting, because the word risk is involved. The risk becomes the purchaser's risk. If you really don't know and don't have expert advice, a signature might not always be— They can't assume and will not assume responsibility for authenticity. So it extends to that. It would be fun to go to these little— I won't say off-Broadway auction houses, but some of them were really theaters, because all of the auctioneers were hams. They would bring out a painting and look at it very sharply: "Now, what am I offered for this so-and-so painting?" Which might not be that at all. They didn't necessarily have to have catalogs, as we did see in those days from Parke-Bernet [Galleries, Inc.] and so on. But all of this was an amazing opening of eyes for a young person who was willing to absorb it. And if you could get the attention of some of the dealers or get to know them, you learned a great deal.

GALM

I know you've expressed how much of an influence this had on you in your future career. Did it also have any influence on your friend and his future life?

BLOCH

No. This was a high school friend who was a close friend. I had a couple of friends like this who, I think, were inspired by what I was doing to follow suit. I think in this fellow's case, I never knew really what happened to him. He really wanted to learn. As we went around, he would sort of follow behind me, and he began to pick up, too, and recognize things as we went from gallery to gallery. His eye became sharpened. After all, he was taking the same art appreciation courses I was, so it wasn't completely me. But I was so involved that I guess I kind of intrigued and stimulated his own interest. Now, these friends that I had over the years—some of them I knew from public school on to college—we had other interests. Like we were interested in the early movies, the history of the movies. We went to all the Museum of Modern Art's showings, which were done when they first started their archive. And then there was a course being offered at City College [of New York], given by the curator. The art of the motion picture seemed to us to be just as equally interesting as paintings and other works of art. But I just loved the auctions, in particular. Peruse the catalogs and— To me, it didn't make any difference what they were offering—I wanted to be there. It was the whole atmosphere that excited me. I would go to all the exhibitions. I can remember one time— This was later when I was in college. It was the time when Alfred [E.] Smith died and they had his estate at auction at Parke-Bernet. Now, this was just household goods, really, but we went down, and who was walking around but Greta Garbo, who went to all the antique shops. They all knew her. She never bought anything, but she'd make them go through a lot of trouble to get something out of the window and look at it, and—with the great big hat, you know—she would thank them very kindly and go on. She was always, as you know, a very private person. And I would see her on Fifty-seventh Street. (By that time, we were living on Fifty-seventh Street. ) I remember being with a friend—and I don't remember which friend this was—and there was Greta Garbo looking around at all these things. I said, "Just wait a minute. I'm going to speak loudly about something, and I bet we'll attract her attention." So I said, "Oh, look at this I Oh, look at this!" And no sooner had we moved away than Greta Garbo comes to see, you know. It was that sort of thing. Now, I should say—because I did, I think, mention this—that at the Institute it became one of my jobs as a student to help organize visits to the collections. I don't know if I mentioned that. I probably did.

GALM

Yes.

BLOCH

This ties in, to a certain extent, with this, because many of these pictures we went to see came from some of the galleries I knew very well. I knew the sources of some of these pictures. As in the case of Mrs. [Anna] Erickson, who was such a close friend, I knew where most of these pictures came from. The big collections—[Jules Semon] Bache (I'm speaking about New York), John D. Rockefeller, Jr., [Alfred W.] Erickson, the Carl [W.] Hamilton collection (and I'll mention that in a moment)— were things you could see. Apart from the fact that some of the great sales weren't minor things, like Alfred E. Smith, some of the great mansions were open to the public, because the estates were being sold off. [Cornelius] Vanderbilt, and I can, if I think hard enough, remember some other names too. So you could go and actually see what those mansions still looked like with the furnishings in place, great mansions of the nineties and early part of the— We're talking about the kind of McKim, Mead, and White mansions, the great, great houses of Fifth Avenue, which no longer exist. But you could still see them just the way they were organized. So those were the sales you really went to see and which remained very clear in your mind. Going to see those collections tied in, of course, with my knowledge of where some of those things came from, as well as where things were at the Metropolitan. Don't mind if my mind, as it remembers little things— I remember becoming friendly with John Levy, the old man John Levy of John Levy Galleries. There was a great deal of interest in English pictures that dates certainly from the twenties on and lasted well into the forties, as I recall. There was a big market for English pictures because those things were available and could be exported, and there were collectors forming all over the country. Henry [E.] Huntington was dealing directly with [Joseph] Duveen for some of the great English pictures like The Blue Boy and Pinkie, all of which you know very well, and those date from the twenties. But the interest in this continued, John Levy Galleries was certainly one of them. Howard Young, who was the uncle of Elizabeth Taylor, probably her granduncle, was involved on a very high level in English pictures. Some of these men were unreachable. I was speaking to one of my colleagues from the Huntington [Robert R. Wark] just the other day about his recollections. He said, "My recollections go back to 1956" when he began his position at the Huntington. But I said, "Well, mine go back further." He said, "Well, I had a brief, passing acquaintance with Howard Young." That's about all that most people got. Because he was sort of like a mogul in the pictures. So was Sir Joseph Duveen. You dealt mostly with their salesmen, the people who were on their staff. You didn't often have access to the great men. Like my colleague at the Huntington, Bob Wark, I had a brushing acquaintanceship with Howard Young and with the titular head of Knoedler's. Generally speaking, at Knoedler's you would be dealing with Bill [William F.] Davidson, whose son is still in the business. But John Levy was kind of approachable and loved to discuss things. I remember sitting at his feet one day while he was reminiscing about— Of course, he dealt strictly in English pictures. But he was reminiscing about one of his salesmen who was on a buying trip and had come back with four Gauguins. He said, "Well, I was about to fire him. He had spent $17,000 on these paintings, and what was I going to do with them? There was no market for these things." I afterwards discovered that one of those paintings— Of course, he was kidding about it by that time, because the interest in Gauguin had shifted. He was willing to make a big story about it. He said one of those paintings turned out to be the la Orana Maria, which is in the [Adolph] Lewisohn collection, now in the Metropolitan. One of the great masterpieces of Gauguin in America. But there was a time you couldn't sell those things. Even I remember a van Gogh exhibition that not a thing was sold. There was really very little interest in some of those. English pictures was the big thing. What some of those dealers would do— If there was a hot possible client making the rounds on Fifty-seventh Street, probably a Hoosier or something, the gallery men all knew about this, and they passed the word around to one another. And wherever he went first, the important painting went across the street, you see. Fifty-seventh Street was a little colony, and they all kept their eye on these things. They didn't always act in strong competition, because someone had to make the sale, so they collaborated to a point. All I remember about that was I became very friendly with a dealer named Max Safron, who had come out of Saint Louis. We came to know one another because by the mid- forties I was working on [George Caleb] Bingham, and he was helpful in telling me about his recollections of pictures by Bingham that came his way. He wasn't interested in them at all. He told me he threw one of them out the door— He just didn't want it. He was the expert on [Henry] Raeburn and was going to do a book on the subject and all of that sort of thing. He operated from a building between Madison [Avenue] and Park Avenue which had several floors, probably a made- over brownstone in some way. I believe it was 116 East [Fifty-seventh Street]. I'm not certain. I don't remember. He had one floor; Julius [H.] Weitzner, another dealer who dealt in old masters, had the floor below him; then over him eventually the Music Corporation of America had a gallery (the wife of Julie [Jules] Stein [Doris Stein] was interested in antiques); and on the top floor was Roger Vargnese, which was a beauty parlor. Well, this was the beauty parlor the duchess of Windsor went to, and it was not at all unusual for me to see the duchess waiting for her chauffeur to pick her up. I have a very definite recollection of her perfume and of her look, and so on. I was very careful not to make her uncomfortable while she waited at the elevator. At the beginning—this is just en passant—the duke used to wait for her, but since she spent nine hours up there, he became very impatient and sometimes got a little bit out of hand. She would tell him, "Why don't you go to the galleries or something like that?" So afterwards, he didn't come, but the car came for her. But Max was a fascinating individual and would tell me many stories about what went on with English pictures and how, in fact, they dealt with clients. It got to that point where I discovered something about that. He did most of his work operating out of New York, finally, rather than Saint Louis, selling English pictures to the Midwest collectors, chiefly in Indiana, where the Ball brothers [George A. and Edmund F.], for instance, were collectors. They were the people that dealt with the jars [Ball Brothers Company], and the two brothers were competitors to buy paintings. He said what he would do was drive up in a limousine—it was always the limousine—with the painting and hang it in the house so that they could see it. Of course the hope was that their visitors would become so accustomed to seeing it there that they very well finally had to buy it. This was the way some of those Midwest collections were built. That's why you will find that there may be a concentration, let's say, of English pictures in a certain community to this day. Many of these dealers, with their knowledge, created a certain sophistication that helped the museums themselves develop. There's a very good museum in Indianapolis [Indianapolis Museum of Art] where some very good English pictures found a home, chiefly through these collectors who became involved with collecting and helping to build a museum. The knowledgeable collector became a trustee of the museum and lent support to the development of those collections. So the dealers play a very important role in all of this, and these people were the counterparts of the great English dealers. Duveen had a wonderful gallery in New York which ultimately became the home of [Harry] Winston, the diamond dealer. In those days he had all the stone imported, I understand, from France, and it was meant to imitate one of the great buildings on the Place de la Concorde.

GALM

Were any galleries off limits to you, perhaps because of their grandeur or prominence?

BLOCH

Well, I would say as kids we had no qualms at all about going in if there was an exhibition, and it was through that that we saw some of the great exhibitions that were being shown. I think the great Renoir show—I forget what date that was—was so complete I never wanted to see another one in all my life. Of course the museums were doing shows too. But the galleries sometimes did some rather splendid things. You could see unusual things, and you sometimes can meet unusual people. It was at the galleries with this little friend of mine that we bumped—

1.24. TAPE NUMBER: XII, SIDE TWO JUNE 12, 1987

GALM

Professor Bloch, you were talking about running into interesting people at some of the gallery exhibitions, and I believe you had a particular person in mind.

BLOCH

Yes, I was speaking about the eccentric artist Louis [M.] Eilshemius, who lived on Fifty-seventh Street in an old brownstone house that had belonged to his family. He had been painting for many, many years without any recognition whatsoever. There was no recognition at all, and he'd become more and more strange as the years went by because of this lack of recognition. He considered himself one of the great artists of all time, which of course he wasn't. He was kind of a misfit I would say, a kind of a folk poet, as it were, although he had academic training and traveled widely. He traveled to Tahiti in the early days—probably the only American that went there, outside of maybe John La Farge, who traveled to the South Seas. But he was doing this on his own, perhaps in the 1890s, or somewhere along that line. So when we were going through a gallery one day, suddenly there was this old man practically spitting blood at what he was seeing on the walls and saying, "Phooey." We looked around, and he caught our eye. He thought he had an audience, and so he came over to us and started talking to these young people. This was not the same friend from the high school; this was an art friend. I was going to art school at the National Academy [of Design]. It was a natural for us to go to the more recent galleries to see what American artists were doing. I don't remember which exhibition this was, but it could have been anything. Eilshemius was— We had never met anybody quite like this. So we stood there agape, and he came over to us and said, "You really want to see great pictures, you come see me," and he gave us his address. He had little printed slips which told about his achievements—that he discovered moonlight in pictures and discovered this and that. He had written music and he had written poetry and he had done a great many, many things. He was a rich man's son and had been given a lot of leeway, but the result is he really never grew up. His mother took care of him, and when they went he continued to live in the house. His brother, as we found out, sort of took care of the finances. When he died, everything fell apart. So we were kind of intrigued, and we said, "Very well, we'll come see you." And this we did. It was an incredible visit into this house where he lived. I think by the time we did come to see him, however, he— This happened within a few months of our original meeting [with] him in the galleries. He was rediscovered and there were exhibitions taking place at various small galleries in New York. After all, he had two thousand works of art sitting in his studio gathering dust. It was Valentine[-Dudensing] Gallery and one or two others that began to exhibit his works, but he didn't enjoy this recognition very long. Some of the major collections starting buying his work, incidentally, the good South Seas pictures. He was hit by a taxicab and he was crippled. He would not accept medication of any kind, so he was in a wheelchair. When we went to see him, probably it was a result of what we read in the papers and [the fact that we] had gone to see his shows. We felt more encouraged to see him. I don't think we acted immediately? I think we were a little frightened of this guy. You had to ring the bell in the basement, and then the housekeeper would yell up the stairs, "Mr. Louis, you have company!" And he'd say, "Well, let them come up!" And so we'd go up. He was really very sweet—a little weird, but very sweet—and interested because we were students. Many interesting things happened because he had no money. This became public knowledge, even in the press, that he was being exploited by the dealers, who would sort of pay him in the dark. He couldn't get around, so he couldn't see what was happening. He didn't have any real manager. There were people who came to his door to buy pictures from him which he did for ten dollars, fifteen dollars, whatever it was. We were there one day when some woman, a very aggressive lady, was trying to buy something from him. All of this is very, very fascinating in detail, but I shouldn't linger over it. But we came to like him and to come to know him. I visited him after that a couple of times. I think he died in 1941. He got pneumonia and they dragged him off to the hospital and there he died. Then his so-called friends came out of the woodwork and attended his funeral and so on. But it was a very sad picture for this to happen in the middle of all this activity in art, for this man to wither away this way. But that's only one little story. I mean, I want to get back to just mentioning a few people. One of the dealers I came to know very well, and who still remains one of my close friends, who's now ninety years old, is Victor [D.] Spark. He did not operate from a gallery on the street, but actually had a gallery, when I knew him, out of his home, and still operates that way from his apartment on Park Avenue, on appointment kind of thing. I was introduced to him by another friend, and so I became a frequent visitor. Not only just because I liked Victor and Ina Spark so well—and they were good friends— but because I could see all kinds of things there. His interests ranged all the way from paintings to bronze and furniture, and he knew equally about all of them. A very, very scholarly dealer [who] to this day, visits the galleries to refresh his memory constantly. He says, "You never get enough of seeing and refreshing your mind by looking." It was that kind of an experience, because things that you would see there you wouldn't ordinarily see elsewhere. Sometimes I could put the pieces together of things that were deaccessioned from museums, and so on. I began to have a claim to the history of paintings largely through the experience I had there. And frequently, he'd bring out a picture and, as he gradually got to know me and to think a little more of my ability, would seek my opinion. When I speak about picture galleries, it wasn't just the picture galleries which were the main sources of this kind of thing, but you came to know the bookmen. They also dealt in pictures and illustrated books and so on and became sort of local havens for me whenever I had a few hours to spend. I will jump from what I was saying to give you one instance of that. I'll give you more than one instance. There was [Erhard] Weyhe's bookstore, which was a combination of gallery and bookstore. Old Mr. Weyhe was an extremely interesting man, one of the few booksellers to make a million dollars in the field and have an estate in Nova Scotia and all of that. He became very open with me. We had an exchange on finding unusual books. He would make the rounds of all the bookstores in New York—at that time there were a great many interesting antiquarian bookstores—and we'd sometimes compare notes. He'd bring out a book that he had found and say, "I've been looking for this book for thirty years." I'd say, "Well, you know, I saw another copy of that just the other day. It was on the third shelf of so-and-so bookstore." He'd look, smile, and say, "This was it, you see." That kind of thing, I guess, endeared me to them in a sense—that we had an eye for these things. Mr. Weyhe, who was a kind of institution, would have me wait until the shop was closed, and we'd sit around and we'd talk. That kind of thing you cannot replace. The other one of that kind was a bookshop known as Mannados Bookshop, which was run by a man named Walter Latendorf, who had in his early days been the manager of Singer's Midgets and gradually turned to books. That's at least a 180-degree turn for him. [laughter] He handled drawings, and I was becoming very interested in American drawings, particularly illustrators. He knew a great deal and had a great many things, a lot of western material. He dealt with Amon Carter and people like that. He was of German extraction—German-American—and very Prussian in his way, but after the first few encounters, we became very warm friends. He had in the lower part of his gallery a round table which he reserved for his friends. Once a week you were expected to get to his shop by three o'clock in the afternoon, whereupon he only admitted the friends that were invited. There'd be a bottle under the table, each foot of each table. For me, there was some sweet wine, I think. I was the youngest member of the group. But you'd find Mahonri Young and people like that. Cowboy collectors, all sorts of interesting people, would gather together. This was chiefly a male thing. The one female who hovered in the background was Helen [Luise] Card, who was his friend, but who really wasn't admitted on those special occasions. That was strictly a men's club. After we sat around and chewed the fat for some three hours, we then all went out to dinner. I found out later that this had become legend. Actually, it appeared in one of the booksellers' journals as kind of an event in the history of bookselling in New York. I got to know both of those people very well. Helen Card was a collector of illustration. [She] formed her own collection, but also dealt in it. [She] made her money by clipping the magazines, let's say, for White Rock ads, putting them together in a scrapbook, and selling them back to White Rock, who didn't keep records of that kind. This is how she made her money, enough money to eventually buy some acreage of land in Springfield, Vermont. My last sight of her and of Walter was the summer of '56, when I went on vacation with them in Springfield and we went off to visit Maxfield Parrish's studio nearby and had great, great fun. She would open up her barn and let me go through all the material, and we kept up a great correspondence. Those two have passed into legend, as I say. Especially Helen Card, who is dead as long— Walter died a year after I left New York. Her collection ended up at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Alberta, and recently they came to me to write an essay about Helen Card. There was nobody else who remembered. But I had photographs and I had letters and so on. A very amusing, witty lady, and very talented. So these are among the precious recollections you have of some of those people. But there were other bookstores. You'd go down to Ann Street to Mendoza bookshop [Isaac Mendoza Book Company], which was an area that was frequented by Edgar Allan Poe. It was still a very old booksellers' area. These antiquarian booksellers were amazing places to go through. I am sorry to say that so much of this has now disappeared. The antiquarian bookstore is going to become a matter of the past. When we have a fair here, I still rush to it in the hope of capturing something of that time, but not many young people do. They simply use the books in libraries. If we're getting to the point now where they're only going to be interested in looking at books through microfilm or computers or what have you, a lot's going to be lost in losing touch—meaning it in both directions— with the object.

GALM

Were you building a book collection?

BLOCH

Yes, I was building my own library. Having access to these people made them more alive to my needs. When I became interested in American things, it was still very hard to build a library of this sort. Since a great deal of American publications of the period I was interested in exist only in flimsy documents, published documents, it's very hard to come by these things. They're quite rare. The Harvard [University] library didn't even catalog them, but kept them in boxes. I would find things in the Harvard Widener Library that were given to them by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow but had never been out in the air, things that dealt with the old art unions and so on, which were my sources. So early imprints in American art are very important. I began to develop my own library. Had I not had that here when I came, enough to work with, I would have been lost. Although now, I think, all of them are trying to buy such material. There was one dealer very early when I started in the American field, Harry McNeill Bland of Bland Gallery [Inc.], who was also on Fifty-seventh Street. He was a kind of adviser to the National Gallery [of Art (Washington, D.C. )] in the early days in the American field. He had a good library, and he would lend me things, so that I became early acquainted with these things. He'd spend hours going over this material with me and bringing me up to date and going back into his back room and bringing these things out. He was very useful to me. Unfortunately, he had, I believe, an alcohol problem, and what happened was he—at least this is what I'm told—was put through some rigorous cure, which included some brainwashing, electrical shock treatments, or whatever. It wiped out his whole memory—at least that's what I was told. It was a sad case. But one of the interesting people in the American field. There weren't too many people who were dealing strictly in American art. The Old Print Shop—which was Harry Shaw Newman's gallery and is still in existence today—was a kind of a haven for all of us, those of us working in the American field. There was sort of a little clique that would meet there. Bartlett Cowdrey, who worked there for a while and who was one of the early scholars in the field, was a friend of mine, so we were always welcome to come down there and look at things. They'd have little openings and so on, and we gradually met the few scholars in the field with whom we could work. As I mentioned, there were some people in the museum world. But through people like Victor Spark, who was one of the first people to sell to Maxim Karolik and get him involved in artists like Fitz Hugh Lane and Martin J. Heade, this was another place where you could see, material. I should say they were also generous in providing you with photographs if you needed them for study purposes. There was never any problem with this. It brings to mind— It wasn't always New York, but in Boston you had Charles [D.] Childs and you had Robert [C.] Vose, and you had Doll and Richards [Inc.], the old galleries there. These were also people who were most helpful. Vose [Galleries of Boston] in particular. This is one of the oldest galleries in this country. They go back to the 1840s. The whole Vose family has been involved in picture dealing and gave some of the earliest exhibitions to people like [George] Inness and William Morris Hunt, way back in the early days. I didn't know the first Vose, of course, I must quickly add. But I did get to know the father of the present Robert Vose, who calls himself Robert Vose, Jr. His father, Robert Vose, who lived to be in his mid-nineties, was a wonderful place to visit when I started to go to Boston and got to know them. He would drop everything, the old man. Even in the days when he was already on crutches and not able to move about, the mind constantly was active. He loved young people and would drop everything to show me around and bring me into some acquaintanceship with things that were interesting to him. And there's a funny story— If you want me to tell it, I will.

GALM

Sure.

BLOCH

Which has nothing really to do with just that. But I remember one very hot summer's day going to the Vose Galleries. I had just left New York. This was when Pope Pius XII had died. New York had made a big thing of it. I went to one of the memorial services, I remember. But out in the lobby of Saint Patrick's Cathedral they had a vitrine with a full-length wax figure of Pope Pius, dressed in the robes that he had given to Cardinal [Francis Joseph] Spellman, who was a friend of his, and the pope is sitting there and blessing. But it wasn't the pope that I had remembered seeing in Rome at one of those audiences, a very vigorous and interesting tall man. This was a kind of shrunken, very waxlike figure that looked for all the world like one of those Coney Island fortune tellers: if you put a dime in, something's going to happen. I shouldn't say that. I was kind of shocked. I thought it was bad taste. But there it was out in the lobby, you see. So when I went to Boston, this was still fresh in my mind. I went to visit the Voses, and Mr. Vose said, "Oh, I want to show you. We have this—" I don't remember the name, and I rather conveniently forgot the artist. They were sponsoring a portrait painter, and he wanted me to see these portraits that he thought were really great. So he had his sons draw all the velvet drapes—this was always part of the performance—and suddenly each one would release part of the drapery, would open up to reveal a picture, you see. What was the name of the bishop who was very prominent at that time who lectured?

GALM

Oh, Fulton J. Sheen?

BLOCH

Fulton Sheen. Bishop Sheen. So there, after one or two preliminaries, he opened up the thing and there was Bishop Sheen stepping right out. It was painted in much the same kind of starkness that reminded me of the waxwork thing. And I was absolutely taken aback, because he wanted me— It was like a trompe l'oeil, you know, just— And he wanted me to recognize how great all this was, and of course you had to make pleasant statements to echo his enthusiasm. I remember staggering out into the bright sunlight after that, somewhat shaken. I went into another gallery, a man named Castano. It wasn't quite the same level as the Vose Galleries. (These wonderful people are still my close friends. ) I said, "I've just seen this thing after coming to New York." "Well", he said, "that's those Irish Catholics for you. Let me show you what I can do." It turned out that he also painted on the side. He said, "I supply the Catholic diocese of Boston with everything they need in this direction." So he wheels out a portrait he had done of Pope Pius XII which looked for all the world like a Time cover. And I said, "This is enough." [laughter] I took the next train back to New York. But all I'm saying is these people shared their enthusiasms. They all became friends. And through them, you become rather enriched. Kennedy's [Kennedy Galleries, Inc.] was a gallery I knew through the Wunderlichs. They really ran the gallery; it was no longer Kennedy. The old man Wunderlich, who was really the founder of the firm, I only knew very slightly. But I knew and still know his son Rudy [Rudolf G. Wunderlich] very well, and remember his mother when they had the gallery at Kennedy's. It's now run by Lawrence Fleischman, who entered into partnership with them and eventually took over. Rudy is now operating out of Chicago. First, when I started working with prints, I became very friendly with Albert Reese, whom I'd even known before that, who was in charge of the print area and had been for many, many years and who helped me develop and get material for our own collections. Very enthusiastic and very helpful. There again I had access to their files, their basement files. On the other side of the coin, a bookstore like Argosy Bookstore, which still operates, is a kind of institution. It's a whole family. I came to know them extremely well. That's Lou Cohn and his family. There again I had access to files. They bought up all the remains of Puck magazine and Saint Nicholas, so I had a chance when I became really interested in illustration to have access to masses of material that otherwise I would never have seen. I think what I didn't follow through was I was telling you about Max Safron's gallery and that while they certainly collaborated with one another, they were also strongly competitive on certain occasions. One of the tricks that I found was happening in that little narrow building that Max had a gallery in is that his neighbor underneath, Julius Weitzner, who was an expert in old master pictures, had a little trick: if he heard the elevator going and the elevator man wasn't there, he'd ring the bell and stop the elevator at his floor first, so he could see who was going up to Max Safron's. He was always kind of shocked if he saw me, because he knew I wasn't a client. This was the way they kind of kept their eye on one another. Wildenstein was another one of the big, big dealers. I came to know Georges Wildenstein, who was an extraordinary man, not very well, because we didn't have a great deal to say to one another. I went to all of the big exhibitions. A friend of mine worked there. They were publishers of the Gazette des beaux-arts. The first article I ever wrote was for the Gazette des beaux-arts, "Rembrandt and the Lopez Collection." Georges Wildenstein came down to Cooper Union Museum [for the Arts of Decoration (New York)] when I was there. He tried to buy the [Winslow] Homer paintings, I remember. He was a grand man and an interesting man among the scholarly dealers who handled really great pictures. If you really wanted to see great things, you went to those Wildenstein [and Company] openings. They still have that building on Sixty-fourth Street, which I remember from the early days. As far as Duveen was concerned, I never met Sir Joseph, or Lord Duveen, as he came to be known. We would go there either as a group from the Institute, or even earlier, you could occasionally go to a major show they were holding. I think one of the Renoir shows was held there. But this was an incredible building to go to. I mean, the collection of porcelain, Chinese porcelain, famille noire porcelain, was incredible, in great vitrines. These were things that were on permanent display. I remember he had a manager named Mr. Bogars, whom I first didn't pronounce correctly. I pronounced it "bogus," which was a little dangerous. I think I wrote him about something at one time relative to a visit we had made, thanking him for his cordiality. There's so much been written about Duveen and [Bernard] Berenson that there's not much I can add to it. The one person I came to know through these visitations that I arranged—which weren't always well-known private collections, but other things—was the Carl Hamilton collection. As it turned out, and I didn't know it at the time, Carl Hamilton was a salesman for Duveen. They set him up in an apartment filled with furnishings, textiles, pictures, and so on. Because the idea that Duveen had was really to sell a complete complement. They would like to sell the whole room: furniture, paintings, etc. That's how they provided Bache with all of this French furniture and everything that went with it. It was, in a sense, sort of decorators par excellence. This was all part of the whole thing. Carl Hamilton operated out of an apartment. I think it was on Forty-second Street in the Park Avenue area. It was in a building that was really not an apartment building; it was an office building. But in the center of that building—one whole block—was this apartment that had originally been, as I recall, built specifically by the builder, whose name was [Samuel W.] Katz. I believe he occupied it. Carl Hamilton, whose old masters collection had been written about in Art News, was, as far as I was concerned, a private collector not a dealer. I didn't know this. So we went there. It was a very hospitable arrangement. Very cold—it was a winter's day, I remember. There was a kind of skating rink that went around the periphery of this building. It was glassed in, so that nobody was skating at this time. Carl Hamilton met us with a scarf around his neck on this cold day. It was rather chilly, but he prepared to offer us refreshment as we went around this house, which had massive Renaissance furniture and textiles. And various rooms he led us to— One, I think, he called the Louis XII bedroom. It's not often you see Louis XII furniture, but there it was. Against one wall was a [Jose De] Ribera crucifixion, life-size. At a critical moment, he pressed a button and the Palestrina choir came out of the walls, you see. I remember that distinctly. There were icons. All of this was material that were basically Duveen material, and he was to interest clients in this sort of thing. I don't think Carl Hamilton at this time had anything like the fortune he must have started out. He [Duveen] frequently would appoint people with some kind of social connections that could serve this. That was not unusual. You would find other galleries would like to hire scions of wealthy families to act as clients and bring in other people who would buy. But that was a kind of interesting glimpse. As I found out later, we actually were glimpsing a Duveen operation. I'm sure there's more about that which I haven't read; that was just my glimpse of that kind of situation. [There were] other people I came to know, people like Antoinette [M.] Kraushaar of Kraushaar Galleries, another very old gallery that deals in more contemporary things, but who have been the dealers of [John] Sloan and [William J.] Glackens, and so on, over the years. My long acquaintanceship with Antoinette Kraushaar came to fruition at the Huntington, when I went to New York to look for a painting by John Sloan. Well, Helen Sloan, the widow of John Sloan, Helen Farr Sloan, is a longtime friend of mine too. It was through her and Antoinette that I was able to get the important Sloan painting, the last important one on the market [McSorley's Cats]. That's how we also bought our Glackens at that time. They're not always very willing to sell this, and certainly Helen Sloan was rather loath to sell that painting except to an institution. The fact that I was behind it, I think, played something of a role with her. But I remember galleries like Macbeth's [Macbeth Gallery], with Robert [G.] Mclntyre; Milch Galleries; I remember Bertha Schaefer quite well (but that little story will have to wait). I even remember seeing Alfred Stieglitz. That's at the very beginning, when as kids we stumbled into An American Place. That was a dangerous place to roam, because Stieglitz has been known to throw people out. But somehow or other we didn't get thrown out. Perhaps we didn't have muddy feet that day. One could see him: he was a really great character with his flowing cape and his porkpie hat. He was a complement to Frank Lloyd Wright, who also dressed in this manner. It's fascinating remembering these glimpses of people. He, you really didn't get to know well, but you at least had glimpses of them as part of the whole scene in those days. When I was speaking to Bob Wark yesterday, he agreed with me that those were unusual times when all of these galleries were operating full steam. Some of them still exist, but not in quite the same fashion.

GALM

I know each gallery has its own background, and some of them have a longer history than others and continue on to the present day, but was there any common background of these galleries of that period?

BLOCH

You mean where they came from?

GALM

Where they came from and who were the types of individuals that were forming galleries.

BLOCH

No, Bernard, there weren't common relationships as far as their backgrounds are concerned. Some of them came out of rather humble backgrounds and sort of built themselves up. I won't say that for people like Wildenstein, and so on, that there's really a strong background in their evolution. Some of them undoubtedly studied and had some experience. This we didn't talk about at all, because I don't think it's really necessarily appropriate. My interests were far-flung. Anybody who had a door open, I was in there. Or if something attracted me in a window, I was in there. That could be Third Avenue or Fourth Avenue or whatever, because the galleries that dealt in antiques were always interesting to me. There you would find the real scholarly dealers who had to deal with medieval antiquities or classical antiquities. They really had to know the business. They were frequently of European origin, and certainly these were people that came over here as refugees. We have such a dealer in this community—the last of the Mohicans, I would say—Walter Laemmle on La Cienega Boulevard. You set foot in there, and you talk to Walter— who's at least a second generation. His father was in the business. You talk to him for ten minutes, and you know with what loving care he treats every object. They deal in mostly medieval, northern European works of art, and I go in there to be refreshed to this day. He's eighty-six, eighty-five years old at this point, maybe in his last year on La Cienega, but his sense of knowing what he's handling when he brings out an object—whether it's just a piece of carved wood, or whatever—is extraordinary. I knew many dealers like that in New York, and these are his friends, his colleagues, too. Now, they went to school and they went to the university, but what the universities did in those days— And this I gathered from some of my teachers, like Jakob Rosenberg, whose training he readily admitted not only came from his university background, but his first job was working for an auction house, where he cataloged works of art. There's nothing brings you closer to an object than having to handle it and catalog it and describe it and so on. He said this was invaluable. These people who never taught could still teach us just by being with them for ten minutes. You learn things that you couldn't possibly learn by looking at pictures in books or dealing with the social history of it. But you really have to know what the object is, because the great danger if you don't know this is that you might be looking at something which is not authentic, which can lead you down a most dangerous path. So the first thing is the security of knowing that the object you're handling is right. You go to work for a museum— Unless you've had the access to these people, unless you yourself have an addiction to this—and certainly mine was an addiction—you have no business being in a museum. We know, we read it every day in the paper, how many museum directors have been taken in by objects, because there are supreme craftsmen doing this work. You've read all about the pre-Columbian fraud. Some of them are absolutely exquisite works of art, but in their own right, not in terms of where they belong in time. That's the level of education that at least was available when I was growing up in New York. I mean, it was there. If you chose to go after it, it was there. I won't say many people did it. Too many students were occupied with getting through their degrees and getting through the research materials. They didn't have time to do this. But for me, it was a habit—better than a drug habit. It was something that played a very interesting role, not only in the friendships, but in the varieties of things that you could put your hands on and learn to come to grips with. So that I felt very comfortable when I looked at slides, because I'd already seen a lot of things, not only in museums. Museums are wonderful, except that a glass case and a rope and a lot of other things keep you from handling it, particularly if you're looking at a print or a drawing. Most museums in America, print rooms, are very loath to let you even look at an original print that's not behind glass on a wall. This Albert Reese whom I mentioned to you, who was at least forty years at Kennedy— I remember going in there one day and he said to me—he was very upset—he said, "I went to the Metropolitan and I wanted to look at one or two Rembrandts to make comparisons, and they wouldn't bring it out. All they brought out was the Bache catalog." It so happened at that very same day I went to the Met on other business, and the curator there said to me, looking at the guest book, when I signed it, she said, "Do you know this man?" And I said, "Yes, I know him." She said, "You know, he came in here. I don't think he can read French." She absolutely was unaware of the fact that what he really wanted to see was the object, you see. This doesn't occur in European museums, I hasten to add. You can go to the British Museum, or if you have a permit to the French museums, everything's open to you, [although] you can't touch them. That's what at least you can get from the gallery. The dealers are anxious for you to handle it, providing they know that you know how to handle. You have to handle a paper to know what you're dealing with in a print. It's not just the visual close-up, but the handling of the paper, the feeling of a drawing. You know, the Norton Simon [Museum] collection's incredible, but in order to secure it, everything's behind glass. That creates a totally different dimension, unless you're really familiar with it. It doesn't bother me, but I really feel that some people are, I don't like to say shortchanged, but missing something by not really having at least a view of what goes on in a painting and getting some sense of the structure by looking at it not behind glass, which creates something else. It's like looking through a window: you can see a garden through a window, but you don't get any sense of its dimension. But these people provided that. They put a medal in your hand. The museum won't do this. Some museums in Europe— The Victoria and Albert [Museum] does have—or did have when I was there—several study rooms where students from universities can come and where they can handle secondary works of art, just to get the feel of it. The Fogg has done that in some of their classroom procedures. And Jakob Rosenberg's classes always had an original work of art. If he was talking about a Rembrandt, there was a Rembrandt there that he could talk directly to. European teachers like to do this sort of thing—it's part of the training. But that's not a dimension which we often find in this country. To come to their defense, I must say that museums have a serious problem in security. They're not so accustomed to be surrounded by works of art that they can share so liberally as they do in Europe. They are loath to bring out, let's say, the one Michelangelo drawing they will have for you to see. You go to the Cabinet des dessins at the Louvre, and they'll bring out a whole raft of Titians. You go to Windsor Castle, all the Michelangelos are brought out. Not to everybody. There, too, you have to have a permit. But once you have that, everything is available. I don't care what permits you'd have in America, you wouldn't have access. You could be even a famous scholar. In fact, they're a little more afraid of the scholar than they are of anybody else, feeling that they can't be trusted, that they want to handle the object. We had that at Cooper, so I know it's true, that we were more careful of the scholar who came. He was the one who always wanted to lift the drawing up by the mat and have it dangling so he could see both sides of it, whereas the visitor is a little more polite, a little more cautious. You just give him a pair of white gloves, and he'll accept that. He won't fight you. But we do have to be careful. I think I was very privileged in knowing some of these people. As we said we would talk about it, many names started flooding in on me, all the people that were really not always the first-rank people. Very frequently, it was the lesser people who were more accessible and who willingly shared everything that came their way, and it was always fascinating. There are people here like that too. Among scholarly booksellers, I've already mentioned Jake Zeitlin as somebody I immediately wanted to know and to be with. We traveled even in England and went to the other booksellers, and to watch Jake in action was always a fascinating experience.

1.25. TAPE NUMBER: XIII, SIDE ONE JUNE 26, 1987

GALM

Dr. Bloch, today I'd like to ask you to discuss your recollections of the early history of the [UCLA] art department when you came. In past tapes, we have gone over the history of the Grunwald Center [for the Graphic Arts], but now I'd like to have you discuss the art department at large. You can approach it any way you want, but maybe a sense of the people of that early time, and then maybe the structure and the general offerings that were provided.

BLOCH

Well, I can speak to the year in which I first came into contact with UCLA. First of all, it was always my hope, for some strange reason, when I decided that New York wasn't going to be where I really wanted to settle— Because of the fairly provincial attitude I felt we found in New York, particularly in the museum world, and the limited teaching in my particular area, American art history, which I had decided was going to be my major area of concentration in teaching, that I would have to leave New York. The experience in Missouri certainly set the pace for it, and the follow-up with the University of Minnesota, where I was allowed to control the whole program and where I had extensive teaching experience, prepared me for the final move. My thought was the West Coast was where I really wanted to go. Not that I knew a great deal about it, but I see in my personal notes that I long ago thought about California as my ultimate destiny and my family liked the idea too. When I left Cooper Union [Museum for the Arts of Decoration (New York)], I really had some thoughts at that time that perhaps I might go far away in another direction, take some cultural attache post abroad and devote myself to a life of that kind, but I was happily dissuaded from that decision. At about that time, I was completing my dissertation, which had been long deferred because of the work I was involved in at Cooper. During that period, I heard of an opening at UCLA and decided to apply for it. None of this moved very rapidly, so much so that after I finally submitted a dossier to the department— But that had followed an interview I had had in New York with Gibson [A.] Danes, who was the chairman of the art department, where he felt encouraged to ask me to submit that dossier, which I submitted. I may be repeating myself, but it took several months. There was nothing happening, and I had more or less given it up. Then one day I did get the call, in the spring of '56, saying that I was certainly somebody they wanted: they wanted an Americanist, as it were, and would I consider this. So after a certain amount of negotiation, I did agree to come. My dissertation was completed by that time but had not been accepted, and that remained to be completed the following year—all of the detail and the taking of the oral, and so on, back in New York. I was impressed by Gibson Danes. He was a very outgoing man, scholarly and yet, as we say in California, somewhat laid-back, an easy person to get along with—quite different from the problems I had faced in New York. I was very impressed and rightly so. Gibson was a very good administrator. When I came to the department here, he immediately made me feel comfortable, just as he made everybody comfortable. We were only in a two-story structure, which is now the School of Architecture [and Urban Planning], but he made it his business almost every day to visit the design area, the painting area, and the art history people, approaching them individually or as a group, encouraging them to submit ideas, to feel that we were all working together. He was a unifying force and yet without any impression that he was applying any administrative force to the picture—although we knew that he had the final word. There was no question that he was in charge. We looked to him as one might to a father confessor, but it wasn't anything pious or difficult. There was easy access. I think the only person who may have felt some unease about the whole thing was probably Fred [Frederick S.] Wight, who secretly I soon found out really wanted the gallery to be independent of the department. Yet Gibson Danes I won't say interfered, but involved himself in the exhibitions and acquisitions and so on, as I found out within a short period. Although Fred Wight didn't complain about this, I realized after Gibson had left that he really wanted to separate the two entities. But Gibson saw the whole thing together. He issued even a kind of newsletter that would describe what was happening in the department—who was doing what. When I came and John [M.] Rosenfield came, there were little biographies, not in any formal fashion, very loosely conceived, speaking about John's wife and child and what charming people they were, and we all must get to know one another. It was that kind of thing. It may seem perfectly natural, but those things didn't occur in many places. To me, this was a wonderful and open feeling. I felt that suddenly I was really going to have colleagues I could work with and get to know and be able to do my work without the pressures and stress I had always experienced no matter where I went, particularly in New York. The only thing he pressed me was to make sure that my dissertation went forward and that I could get the degree, so that I could be made an assistant professor, not an acting assistant professor. That was perfectly all right. I mean, he said, "I'll pay for the shipment. I'll do all these things. But you've got to promise me to get it done." So I broke my back teaching a very heavy load of three courses at that time. It wasn't long before I was also involved with the Grunwald, but that wasn't anything major at that time. I felt very happy, because I soon got to know the painters and the design people. Since we were only two floors, we were bound to meet one another in the office, or they would come to my office. Although they were a varied group of people—there were many different characters—I enjoyed this contact. There seemed not to be any real split, at least not obvious to me as a newcomer. The first year was absolutely a honeymoon in which I really felt welcomed and enjoyed all of it, although I was working very, very hard. It seemed like there was really a lot for me to do, and I was encouraged to do what I wanted. I told you when we talked about the Grunwald that I met Fred Grunwald very early in the game. I now believe that this was plotted ahead of time by Gibson telling Grunwald, in order to get him aboard, that a print specialist was coming and would probably curate his collection. Grunwald always believed that that was what I came for. But of course that wasn't so, nor was I brought into that picture. So there was a little bit of skulduggery going on behind the scene, but it wasn't villainous. It was done to get a job done. I was open to any kind of suggestion at that time, because I was really on this great honeymoon with the department. I didn't realize at the time that there were problems, that the painters and the designers didn't get along all that well. I think I've already mentioned that really the department was founded in the years past by a group of strong women, headed by Louise [Pinkney] Sooy, who hired people like Laura [F. J Andreson, Josephine [P.] Reps, Archine [V.] Fetty, Annita Delano, and Dorothy [W.] Brown. It was really headed by a group of strong women who didn't even tell their true ages, you know: they planned to stay there. [laughter] And they were there. They came out of kind of normal school tradition; they didn't come with Ph.D.'s or advanced degrees. They were professionals. Some of them were craftsmen. In turn, a lesser group of people were hired. In design, you had a strong craftsmen tradition. Warren [G.] Carter, who taught metalwork design, was one person I remember. [J.] Bernard Kester, who was a student and became active in the department, was a ceramist and later on a textile person. Archine developed her own force of people in interior design. I came to know most of these people, who were still dating from the old days. Now, that's how costume design developed, and so on. The painters really didn't have great affection for the designers. They were sort of pushed into a lower echelon, even though some of the strongest individuals, like Laura and Archine, were still a force to contend with, and there were people who bit the dust because of them. I mean, they were very strong individualists and strongly defended their area. That may have caused a problem where the male painters certainly started— People like Gordon [M.] Nunes. [Jan] Stussy had been a student and became a member of the faculty. Hay [Raymond B.] Brown was a student a little bit later on who became a member of the faculty. Bill [William J.] Brice— I think they wanted to assume the strength of the area in terms of what they were doing and to bring in their own people. So you can see where certain problems were beginning to evolve, but that had nothing to do with me. Art history was a small area struggling to develop a graduate program. There still wasn't a real graduate program. I was ultimately to give the first Ph.D. in art history, so that gives you an idea where we were at that time. We had relatively few graduate students. It was mostly an undergraduate program where we were still trying to put together a program that had a certain wholesomeness and breadth in the traditional level. It wasn't anything like what was going to happen later on.

GALM

Later breadth.

BLOCH

No, no. The breadth was the typical traditional art history concept. On the faculty was Karl [E.] With, who had a tenured appointment, but who had been brought really to curate the gallery collection, and who soon bit the dust on that one. But he was a dynamic teacher and taught a very general kind of art history program, a kind of humanities- oriented program, a campuswide kind of thing, and taught in extension and so on. A strong force and a distinguished scholar in his own right. There was Karl [M.] Birkmeyer, who had come over with the Berlin collections and ultimately settled in California at UCLA, and who taught what they called Northern and Southern Renaissance art, which was a great deal of breadth. I mean, he could teach from the thirteenth, fourteenth century on to the baroque: he controlled a vast area. Each one had his own area of concentration which he jealously guarded. That goes back to a kind of European tradition, in that sense, which I was familiar with from New York. Carl [D.] Sheppard [Jr.] was the medievalist. I was brought in for the American, which was considered rather unusual, as I say. But since I had a breadth of experience, I also hoped that I might teach in my old areas as well. I soon found this was going to be a little more difficult, because people control their own areas. I'm trying to think now—Gibson Danes wasn't really teaching. Fred Wight taught contemporary art. John Rosenfield was brought in to teach in the Indian field. He was not in the Japanese field. That came much later on, actually after he left UCLA, and I can go into that. We were the two youngest members of the faculty. I really at this point can't remember any other names that come forward. It was a fairly small department. But we did sit down and we did work out programs, and even though there were personality differences— Karl With and Birkmeyer and Sheppard did not get along at all, and I soon found that was a strong personality conflict. We always used to speak about the three Karls and their problems.

GALM

So they didn't get along with each other?

BLOCH

Each other on a personal level. Some of this—and I hesitate to say it at this point, but I think it was true—is that Carl's personality, which was rather free and open and frequently abrasive from that standpoint, could say things that could bother someone else. Karl Birkmeyer— who was a rather private person, but could be easily inflamed, very Germanic in that sense—and Karl With, who was certainly easily inflamed, were the two that stuck together. And Carl Sheppard was sort of on the other side. That was soon joined when Gibson Danes left the university, which was within a year of my coming. Not because I came, but he decided to accept a job at Yale University. He was coming to the end of his five years as chairman, and I don't think he really wanted to go back to teaching. He wanted to continue as an administrator, but the tenure was only five years in those days. It was either three or five; you could stay on for three or five. But five years was the limit: then you returned to teaching. It was my feeling that he really liked being an administrator. He was very good at this sort of thing. So he had a job to move back east. His first wife [Claire Tomowske Danes] had died, and then he had remarried a woman who had been his secretary [Joan P. Dewan Danes]. I don't think she wanted to leave this part of the country, but he felt inclined to and so they did go. Then we had to institute a search for a new chairman. It was eventually decided to look outside the department, because there could be no agreement. Since all the chairmen were art historians in those days— It was not a written law, but it seemed to be the way it went. They had had, you know, other people who acted as chairman out of design and so on in the old days, and these things never worked. I think Laura had served as temporary chairman in the past and was to do so again.

GALM

Why didn't they work?

BLOCH

Well, the design people—after all, those were when the women came in—were fairly strong individuals. I think that after Mrs. Sooy, who was herself a design person, I don't think the rest of the department wanted that. With the growth of the art historians, they felt the art history people were the recognized people in the field. And I understand this. If you speak about the elite organizations in the East, like College Art [Association] and so on, if the art department was to grow in any way, having a design person running the department might not have created the international reputation UCLA was looking for. The real scholarship and publications would have to come out of art history. I think that's where it really began. There was nothing written into the law; it was an unwritten kind of thing. So beginning with Gibson Danes, who had a doctorate in art history—incidentally, in the American field—they seemed to wish to consider moving in that direction. I don't think Karl With or Karl Birkmeyer or even Carl Sheppard would have okayed anybody out of design or painting to run the department.

GALM

Were the three areas separate at that point?

BLOCH

No, they weren't separate. They were together. It was just called "Department of Art." It was only much later on that each one had a separate identification. But no, not in that day. There wasn't any great compulsion for that, and I won't say that there was any deep-rooted action taking place. It just became a normal way, at least from the university's standpoint. You must remember that the ultimate decision for chairman of the department was with the administration. They weren't yet faced with the problem of having to bend to the will of the department. I mean, they sought out the department and wanted them to be happy with what was going to take place and wanted their approval, but they knew full well that when the administration made the decision it was made. That certainly was true in [Franklin D.] Murphy's time, still within that period, and up until Murphy resigned from the university, that the department head had a great deal to say in administering the department. He turned to the dean, whoever he may have been, and ultimately to the chancellor. We knew where the powers were and the responsibility was. So there was instituted a search since there was nobody, really, in the department who was willing or able to accept the responsibility. The search was instituted, and John Rosenfield and John Paul Jones, who taught the graphic design program— Or rather, I forget where prints were. I guess they were located in the painting area. But they were friends from [University of] Iowa days, and they remembered the distinguished chairman of the Iowa department, Lester [D.] Longman, as somebody who had done a very impressive job at Iowa over a period of something like thirty years, where he had made that department well recognized, where painting, design and art history, in a rather similar pattern, had evolved. I remember asking them rather pointedly, particularly John Paul, about Lester Longman, whom I had never met, whether he could find happiness in California. He said, "Well, he's no angel, but he certainly can do the job." I had a feeling that Lester had had it at Iowa and that they were happy to see him go. I soon was to find out that very probably that was the basis of it. He had become rather rigid in his concept. You have to maintain a certain kind of flexibility with changing times and different notions of what painting is, and Lester had his own convictions—had his own problems in Iowa which preceded him. I think one of those had to do with the long-standing rumor that he and Grant Wood had had their sessions and disagreements to the point that Grant Wood was forced to leave Iowa and in 1942 had died. People began to rumor that it was Lester who caused this problem, but of course it's just the way things were. Nothing of the sort, except that it was a famous story that got around. I used to wonder about this, but would never discuss this with Lester. In any case, he did arrive. And he was a strong administrator, proceeded almost from the beginning to reorganize the department, based on his own ideas of what a department should be like. I used to say that this wasn't what we had hoped or expected—that you cannot turn Los Angeles into Iowa. When he finally decided that he didn't want us going into the office to collect our mail, and he put in little mailboxes with little— What do you call those? Well, we each had our own way of getting into—

GALM

Oh, they were actually keyed?

BLOCH

No key. It was a number, like a safe.

GALM

Combination lock.

BLOCH

A combination kind of thing which never worked, so we'd ultimately have to go in and put our hand in. It was his idea that we shouldn't enter the office. We were used to going there, meeting one another. We were on two floors, and it was a kind of friendly situation. I always found that, sure, you'd bump into somebody at the mailbox and have a little chat. To me that was part of the delight of our relationship. We might then go back to the office and sit down and chat a little bit about something, whether it was a painter, a design, or what have you. Lester was against that. His idea was that the office was a private domain, so I used to call it "the Iowa City post office." It became rather funny to me in some way, although as I look back on it, what was evolving was not funny at all. Lester took on a kind of dictatorial attitude. He was very well organized—I will always say that about Lester. A very logical person, a good brain. Somebody who was an art historian, but not necessarily a successful art historian. He wasn't that interested in art history. He was much more interested in the philosophy of aesthetics, which he had evolved at Iowa simply because he really wasn't making it in his own field. He had been a Ph.D. at Princeton [University], but had never evolved into a formidable scholar. His publications were mostly in the field of aesthetics. His strength was as an administrator, and he could manage a meeting like no other person. These were always very well organized. But he didn't fall in love with the department, as I did from the beginning or as some of us who were there a long time began to feel about UCLA. We really felt very committed to it. With me, it was still a great love affair. And I could tell from the beginning that Lester was not going to do it that way. He didn't really make any great effort even to get to know our names. Frequently we were sort of "Hey" to him, as I saw it. I guess we were spoiled by Gibson Danes, who knew us all in a very personal fashion and could ask us about family and so on. But this wasn't Lester's way of doing it. He did have a series of parties at his house. He moved into the [Pacific] Palisades, and he and his wife would have evenings eventually where groups of us would be invited. Never together, but small groups, carefully selected, would come and meet at his house for drinks and a meal around the pool.

GALM

Would he combine people from various areas? Or would they tend to be by area?

BLOCH

Well, it depends. I think sometimes it was areas, sometimes it was a little mingling. I think he separated the areas more likely than not. I think that's true, come to think of it. But I can remember Mrs. Reps, who was a rather grand lady who taught in costume, but who had been a widow for a good many years, was kind of turned off by Lester from the beginning. First of all, he wasn't that interested in design. Design was not having a good time, even on an administrative level. They were being reviewed and reconsidered, and Lester had no great fondness for the craftsmen tradition that was certainly the backbone of the art department in design and which attracted me greatly. It took him many, many months before he decided even to visit the design department to see what they were doing. They were trying desperately to get him to go there. But he did invite them to the house, or some of them. I don't know what the division was, how the guest list was drawn up—I really didn't watch this. I was too worried about getting indigestion. [laughter] I remember Mrs. Reps coming to me. She said, "Well, you know"—and she always spoke rather this way—[affects upper-class accent], "I was invited into Dr. Longman's office, and he said— Didn't address me by name, but simply, 'Oh, hey,' you know. He said that he was inviting me and my husband to come to his house." She said, "But Dr. Longman, I'm a widow." And he said, "Well, in that case, you'll have to come another time." She was completely taken [aback] by that, [laughter] So all I'm trying to say is that Lester really didn't have any of the niceties that one expected and which we certainly got from Gibson. It was suddenly rather astonishing as to what could happen. I remember speaking about design and my concerns about design. Because when he came, which must have been 1958 or thereabouts— And I'm talking right on till 1960, so he may have come '58, '59—I'm not certain of the exact date. This you can probably find out. But certainly by the time Murphy came, the problems of design and how the administration looked at design was becoming something of a problem. I found that I, because of my feeling for design people, got myself somehow into the middle of this thing. As soon as I had become friendly with Dr. Murphy, I made it part of my business to use my access to him to try to make clear how I felt about some of the problems that were evolving. Now, all of this was evolving before Dr. Murphy came, and I don't think there was anything he could do. There had been a certain impetus in changing the direction of design away from the craftsmanship area, although ceramics remained. The idea was if it wasn't to be a fine art then it had to go. How much of a role Lester Longman played in this, I really cannot estimate, but certainly there was something going already on administration levels by the time Murphy came which could no longer be easily controlled. Certain people were beginning to be let go, people who did not have tenure. People like Margaret [T.] Lecky, who just celebrated her eightieth birthday a few days ago, and some of the people I knew so well got together at the Southwest Museum to do a party in her honor. She was the bookbinding specialist and one of the outstanding bookbinders in this community. She was the first to get the ax and to depart. Maury [Maurice] Nemoy, who was the great calligrapher, and still is, was a later appointment. He was let go. Warren Carter was forced to resign. So you see how it was going. They were nibbling away at those areas that were most vulnerable. Whereas some of the others, like Laura's area, which turned ceramics into a fine art, managed to hold on. Besides, she was a professor. It wasn't easy to do that. Archine Fetty gradually changed her area of interior design into environmental design, which was becoming popular. All of this didn't happen immediately, but these were how they had to do it. I remember the idea of costume became "vestments and accoutrements," or something like that. And I said, "What are you doing? What you're teaching is the history of costume or you're teaching costume design, and make it quite clear that this is what you're going to do and not try to change the language so it becomes acceptable." But those are some of the things that were happening in design as time went on. I may be going a little bit ahead of chronology. That sort of points up the problems that design was having. The painters didn't have quite that problem. They were all on a similar level, and most of them had tenure. The only problem they felt they were having was that they didn't want the old-timers there. They didn't want the women in particular, and they were trying desperately to discourage them from continuing. Those were the things that weren't necessarily evolved by Lester Longman I must quickly add. But they were there, and I think he fanned the flame, because he proceeded certainly to court certain areas of the department and ultimately to create suspicion of one group against another. He did try to create a division. Whether he did it deliberately or whether it was just a modus operandi, I don't; know, but those were the beginnings of certain suspicions that did begin to split the department into three sections. The only time they came together, of course, was when they suddenly realized that they couldn't go along with Lester's changes. I mean, he wanted to change the whole philosophic direction of the painting department from abstract to formalistic painting. You can't do that. So there was a lot in the press, eventually. The big controversy that he created over this got into the pages of the L. A. [Los Angeles] Times art section, which you can probably put your hands on, interviews with Longman and so on. So he was creating some problems and writing about it, which got into the press and forced sides to be taken. These were conflicts that were growing in the department largely through him and through the kind of management that he had inaugurated in the department. I saw a lot of it as rather humorous, but it really wasn't. The department became very tense. We'd sometimes have a party where we'd get together. I remember some comedy routines I had worked out around this in order to relieve the tension for myself and for them, but I dare not repeat some of that here. It was rather funny, and we often recall those days now with some amusement, although it wasn't at the time. The tensions in the department, in any case, grew very, very strongly within the three years or so that he was chairman of the department. He had taken Gordon Nunes, who was sort of the guru of the painters, to be his assistant in the department. But Gordon was a very independent kind of man, and soon there was disagreement there. The disagreements among the art historians, particularly between Lester Longman and Carl Sheppard, became very, very intense and very bitter as time went on. To the point that Lester—that sort of came at the climax of all of this—simply said he wouldn't conduct a meeting as long as Carl Sheppard was present. He was doing things that showed a lack of humor on his part, a lack of tolerance. As I think back on it now, it rather surprises me, because he was a very logical man and a good administrator. I guess he wanted to turn the whole department around to get something going, and it wasn't going to go that way. We moved very slowly. Certainly among art historians, we worked out our own programs, and Lester came and tried to make his aesthetics the central core and brought in a whole lot of people. We resented that. We found that wasn't what we wanted to do, and all these people he was bringing in to teach these courses—his friends and associates from Iowa—had nothing to do with the serious art history program we were trying to evolve.

GALM

Did he bring in any tenured people or—?

BLOCH

No, I won't say he brought in tenured. They were mostly young people who he felt would suit the program. But there was always a threat that they would ultimately become tenured. And we did not want this aesthetics thing, which really wasn't the philosophy of art that it pretended to be, but simply a kind of aesthetics that no longer really held water as far as we were concerned. We were still struggling to get together a solid, basic art history program, and we had many, many areas to fill. Suddenly to have this thrown into the pot was not— Because I must say Lester did not respect art history per se. His own personal experience wasn't a happy one, and he had absolutely parted company with art history in the traditional sense—or in any sense. So that created tensions in our midst. It eventually caused a real split between Lester and art history. Eventually there was a split between himself and painting over how they should operate. Certainly the design people, who were in some disarray already, were feeling even more put upon, unrecognized, bypassed, and so on. I remember we had a party at my house, and that was strictly to try to do something about the design people. We had a visitor from Germany, Hans [Adolf] Halbey, who came from the Klingspor-Museum [Offenbach am Main], a printing museum, and he was an expert on printing. I was worried about Maury Nemoy too. We had had Hermann Zapf, the famous calligrapher, visit the campus, invited I think by the library. I remember becoming very friendly with Hermann—I had known him from New York as well—and the hope was that the importance of what Maury Nemoy represented would be somehow stabilized by the presence of such a distinguished person, and certainly with Hans Halbey. So he was the guest of honor at my little party. The Longmans came. The Grunwalds were there. I can't remember everybody that was there. Lester had determined that he was just going to ignore Halbey. He just was not going to have anything to do with him, didn't want to speak to him, didn't want to have anything to do with him. He was so set in closing his eyes to any possibility that it was not a successful evening. Maury Nemoy, I remember, finally when he was to leave, had written a letter in his marvelous script—which is still in my files—expressing his own philosophy to Lester, who replied only by saying, "You'll have to teach me handwriting one of these days." You see, it was no real understanding. It was a kind of denseness that I couldn't understand, a lack of real sensitivity to the climate here. What attracted me was the openness and the fact that I could do things here that I could never do in New York. The Grunwald was certainly the best symptom I had. That I was encouraged to do these things by Gibson Danes, was the thing that brought me here.

GALM

What was the basis of his conflict with Carl Sheppard?

BLOCH

That was strictly personality. Carl was a charming, breezy kind of guy who was very active on campus, however, very active on the budget council. One of the few people in the art department who really had a campuswide involvement. He was very political in that sense. I mean, he had ambitions. He wanted to be a dean. He wanted to be a lot of things—he wanted to head the department. And it was because of that ambition, plus the fact that he had independent means while the others were struggling. He had this great house up in the Palisades and liked to give parties, and so on. There was something about Carl that irritated a lot of people, especially the Germans. He had that problem. But Lester disliked him from the beginning. I can't pinpoint it. It may be that Carl simply went in there and told him what he thought. Certainly he was expressing himself quite openly at the meetings. And when we had votes to be taken, Carl was out there in front politicking to get the votes going the way he would like to see them go. There may have been, certainly, personal ambition, but at the same time, there was nothing that I could see so dangerous that this kind of hostility needed to be developed. Certainly the real personal antipathy developed with Carl, but then Lester always wanted to have his own way in lots of things too, so the two clashed on that level. If he wanted to appoint somebody that he— I remember the question of [J.] LeRoy Davidson had come up. We were looking for a specialist in— Well, that comes a little bit later. I think this is when John Rosenfield decided to leave, which wasn't too long after. It was still within Lester's regime, as I remember, that he decided he wanted to leave. I'm quite sure that took place within that period. Lester had been very much involved with John and his family from an early time, in terms of adoption of their children and so on. Lester, I think, took advantage of the obligation that he thought that John owed him and expected that he would go along with everything he wanted. I think that was something John never wanted to do. He needed the kind of independence of thinking and yet felt, as he himself admitted to me, a certain obligation to Lester Longman. All of those things did not make for the best kind of company. Carl Sheppard lost no time in needling John Rosenfield because of his involvement with Lester, that he was on his side. So you see, these things were beginning to evolve. I remember a party at Carl' s house— No, it wasn't Carl's house. Carl was very careful not to invite these people. It was at someone else's house where the two parties met, Carl Sheppard on one side and the other Karls on the other side and John Rosenfield in between. It ended up with his wife sitting in the car, leaving the party. Very embarrassing situations.

1.26. TAPE NUMBER: XIII, SIDE TWO JUNE 26, 1987

GALM

Professor Bloch, you were talking about the Lester Longman chairmanship of the art department.

BLOCH

Yes. I really don't intend to prolong this, except that what it does is simply point out where— We had a fairly complacent department, perhaps moving rather slowly, too slowly for Lester's taste, who in these autumn years of his life as an administrator wanted to see something happen. To his own credit, I think this is what he had hoped to do, to bring everything into focus. Nevertheless, through his own personality problem with some other members of the department, he really created— I won't say so much created, but rather began to take advantage of the differences which already existed on a very low scale, raising the pitch of all of this, through his own involvement and his own perception of where these weaknesses were, to create real problems. Which he thought he could resolve, but which ultimately backfired, and he found himself bearing the brunt of all of this. What finally happened—and that was rather interesting—was that when he finally ordered Carl Sheppard out of the meeting— I was at that time the secretary of the department, so I took all of these notes in enormous detail. It was almost like a Senate hearing, or whatever. Nothing was taped. I took it down verbatim. Something was happening, I felt, that needed to be recorded. The department—and I mean all areas of the department who were represented on the executive committee, of which I was a member—decided there and then after this expulsion of Carl (who wasn't necessarily their favorite individual) that it was so humiliating, so unlike the democratic system we had going, that we couldn't bear with this any longer. That was the real break after that. None of us showed up for the meeting, and Lester found himself sitting all alone. I don't think he really understood what was happening. After that, he had the greatest difficulty in getting anything really accomplished. It became very hostile. The meetings he had ended up really in personal attacks upon him. He ultimately developed phlebitis, I think brought on by the stresses which he was meeting. It went from bad to worse, so that within three short years he had completely changed the department. Some of it he had planned in the sense that he wanted to really separate the areas and deal with them individually, but by doing that, he split them and caused suspicions that never really healed after that. I remember the day when we were summoned by Chancellor Murphy to his office, where representatives from the department met with him to discuss this problem of Lester Longman and the request they had that he be removed as chairman of the department—which Dr. Murphy did.

GALM

Where did that request originate?

BLOCH

I think it was a petition that was sent to— I think I must have a copy of that.

GALM

In other words—

BLOCH

That was signed by various members—

GALM

Of the art department.

BLOCH

Yes. Issuing a complaint, in essence. I don't think they asked for his removal specifically. They wanted to make it known that things had reached a point of no return with Dr. Longman. Now, I must say, he came with all the blessing of the department. Everybody hoped it would all develop and we'd all move forward with what we were doing. But it didn't work out that way, and he was removed. This kind of thing I'd never experienced before. Lester did not leave; he remained as a professor of the department. And I must say, from that point on, he seemed to relax and to become an excellent member of the department. It's very difficult to understand. I mean, he had reached a point of such— We were talking about the appointment of LeRoy Davidson, which he particularly wanted, but some of us had questions about, in terms of LeRoy's own personality, his ability to be a continuing scholar of some production in this particular field. That was after John Rosenfield had left. So Lester would interview each of us individually, and it was almost an order that we support his view that this appointment be made. If there was any question or any disagreement, he felt that this was a personal affront to his authority and, from what I understood, was placing negative letters in each of our files on this subject, which were later removed and shredded. [laughter] But it wasn't funny at the time, I must say. It made it very difficult for us to work. Then after that was the question of who should replace Dr. Longman. Should we go outside again? Which did not turn out to be a very happy situation. Should we look to the department members for someone to play this role? Which was the logical thing. By that time, as I say, there were strong suspicions and the department wasn't as well unified. They unified in terms of Dr. Longman, their negative— And it was an interesting moment, where they all did speak to one another and confer on this one problem which they all agreed upon. But after that, they were worried as to who should replace him. I can remember at one point I was approached. But I did not have tenure. I had known that in the past people who assumed positions like that were placed in jeopardy, and I didn't want to get involved in anything of that sort. I would have done anything for the department, anything short of getting into a political situation which I felt I couldn't resolve. In any case, Carl Sheppard had strong ambitions; he would have liked to be chairman of the department. And I undertook to go around and talk to various people in the department. Those who thought of me in that position, I carefully explained what my position was, that Carl was a full professor and that he would do a job, as I felt. But his personality was such that they were a little bit uncertain that they could really count on him. That was part of this rather flippant behavior that he had. I think he was very serious, an individual who would have done the job. But they weren't quite prepared, and I don't think the administration cared, either—and Dr. Murphy was very much involved by that time. So after a lot of discussion, I think a vote was taken. I was somewhat influential in persuading some members of the department to vote in his favor, and there was a kind of narrow majority that said okay for Carl Sheppard. But in the end, this didn't happen. Frederick Wight was selected to run the department, because they felt that he got along with everybody and was a little bit out of the mainstream. So he ended up running the gallery and the department. Interesting, because he never wanted the two to be together. But once he became chairman of the department, he thought this was great and he would want it no other way.

GALM

Did you support him then for chairman, or were you still holding out for Sheppard?

BLOCH

Well, no. I mean, I just made my bid in favor of Carl Sheppard as a scholar and as someone who I felt, because of his experience on administrative levels, on head committees and so on, could do the job. I felt it might take some more work on some of our parts to make it happen because of Carl's personality, but I felt he would do it. Because he was dedicated, a dedicated teacher and a scholar who continued to publish. I felt that we could overcome the personality problem, which we couldn't so easily do with Lester. And as I say, Lester was quite prepared to then play a cooperative role. Once he was out of the picture, he agreed to serve on committees and to be part of the picture. So Fred came aboard. This was a very interesting period in those years that he served as chairman of the department. It was precisely during that time that Chancellor Murphy concentrated on art history. He started in a small way. First of all, the interest in the Grunwald. Secondly, building such things as the slide collection and the library as working tools. It was nothing for him to come across campus and consult with me and the department to talk about slide collections. Times have changed since that time. You don't ordinarily have the chancellor crossing the campus to speak to a faculty member. But these were constructive days, and Franklin Murphy was very interested in developing a strong art history area. He ultimately was interested in developing a strong painting area as well. Design remained the low man on the totem pole for some reason. It was allowed to sort of drift. The only area that they decided might give it some stature—and he played a role in that—was developing industrial design. And to this I can refer a little later on. But the art history was to be the main thrust, and he found the funds to support other appointments to flesh out the art history offering so that we could move ahead on a graduate level much more strongly than we were able to. It was still a very weak program with a very small faculty, as I pointed out. I only mentioned some of the major people. There were other people, of course. Lester had brought in a whole flock of these aesthetics people, who had to leave, and that was very sad. Some of them were good people, but there was no room for them after that. So we were really beginning from scratch again. Remember, this is a period in which the chairman had considerable power and autonomy, even in making appointments. He might consult with the faculty, but that didn't mean that they had the power that they ultimately felt was theirs. People were recommended, and it was Fred who would go out, maybe with somebody of his choosing, to interview such people. And the decisions were made there. It wasn't so much that the faculty could say yea or nay completely. These were rather interesting periods. He brought in a classicist. Up to that time, the only classicist who treated those areas was Paul [A.] Clement, who came out of the classics department. He handled all the art history people in the classical field until Susan [B.] Downey was appointed in Fred Wight's administration. She was a young person whom he had met in Rome, at the Academy of Rome, and who was recommended. She had not taught before. It was he who ultimately brought in Otto-Karl Werckmeister, who was then living abroad too. Fred had gone on a trip abroad in connection, I guess, with a gallery situation. The [UCLA] Art Council was then beginning to emerge as a strong and powerful influence in the gallery, earning considerable funds to enable us to have a more ambitious program of exhibitions. They were guaranteed, more by Franklin Murphy than anybody else, that they would have the ability to put on an exhibition of their choosing, working in collaboration with the gallery head, but not with the art department—and that was another problem—to put on major exhibitions. As you know, they raised a lot of money through their Thieves Markets and other means. [The council] had a very strong administration of their own and were the ones who put up the funds to extend the gallery, to hire the architects for an expansion of the gallery. We had moved to the new building by that— I'm going a little bit ahead of the game, but— I'm certainly going considerably ahead of the game, because I think we're talking about the time when the new gallery opened and the Matisse show was put on, and so on. But we're talking about a period in which these things were evolving. I can't give you a specific chronology.

GALM

Well, I think we've established that in earlier tapes.

BLOCH

Yes. I think largely through Franklin Murphy's influence, a lot of things were beginning to happen, including specifically the development on the one hand of the gallery programs on a high level of competence. And he thought that equally the department should be emerging as an internationally recognized community of scholars. These two things do belong together. So a number of people were brought in to help flesh out the various fields. Marcel Rothlisberger came in for the baroque field. Fred Wight also hired Henri Dorra to be his assistant in the gallery, but also to teach in the modern field. He still himself was teaching in that field, but Fred became very involved in the administration of the department. He wasn't teaching all that much—a course, perhaps. Other people were brought in as well, so the department began to take on the shape of a growing art history area. We were beginning to have graduate students who went on to Ph.D.'s. I had the first one in my field; Karl Birkmeyer had the second, as I remember. So these things were beginning to happen at that time. In retrospect, it would have been a great— I'm not going to try to estimate what Carl Sheppard might have done if he had become chairman. I'm only saying that I think it was rather unfortunate that we didn't at that time have a distinguished scholar running the department, whether he be imported or somebody from the department. Certainly there were very few people in the department who could assume the strong role that was needed at that time or who could work with Franklin Murphy's complete respect. I don't know what Franklin Murphy's thoughts are at this point as to what was happening then. It was an important moment when job openings were at hand and when we could really move forward, and certain appointments were made. Not all of these were happy appointments or wise ones. I'm not saying Fred Wight was responsible for all of this, but at least in one appointment, he really didn't have the capacity to take a strong hand from a scholarly standpoint. That's how, let's say, the Werckmeister appointment took place. I mean, he was not okayed by ad hoc committees? he was turned down. I happen to know this. This was precisely the moment that the medieval and Renaissance center [Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies] was being formed. They were very anxious to have a medievalist, and the powers that were involved in the formulation of that center were the ones who really got that appointment across. In other words, Fred Wight wasn't able to take a stand himself as a scholar, saying, "Oh, no. This is not what we want at this point." He was not really the scholar, not really the person who could be a spokesman for scholarship, if you know what I mean. It would seem to me that if it had been one of the really dynamic scholars that everybody would have listened and nobody would have pushed that through. So things could happen that would not have ordinarily happened if we had a strong administrator—I mean from the standpoint of renown as a scholar. I think that was really what was needed at that point, and we just didn't have it. Fred's attitude was he wanted peace at all costs. He was willing to back up on many, many things and not take a stand, in the sense of just wanting no big waves. As a matter of fact, the administration on the top level wanted no big waves either. They'd had enough with the Lester Longman affair and wanted a period of some peace and hopefully growth, and that perhaps despite everything, the gallery program could go forward, the art history program could go forward. It was within that time that Chancellor Murphy found support for a slot for an important painter. That was the time that Richard Diebenkorn was appointed to the painting area. Now, of course, we know what happened to that. That was a very important appointment, but that was to bolster the reputation of painting, which did not have a real reputation. You don't often have people who teach as well as being famous painters. As a matter of fact, it doesn't always work. Painters look with great question on colleagues in their midst who make great fame as a painter on a worldwide scale. Not just because of the money involved, but after all, we're talking about egos, which exist on a very high level among painters and craftsmen.

GALM

Who was it who promoted Diebenkorn as the selection?

BLOCH

I really think this worked between Fred and the chancellor. I'm not quite sure how that worked. But I know that he was recommended, and I have a strong feeling that his name was preeminent when the slot was opened. I don't think the department reacted violently to this. They had no reason to. But when, as it turned out, Dick's fame was growing immensely— It probably wasn't at that point at the level it was— He was only moving in with Marlborough Gallery around that time where his fame was being bruited about. I think the fame grew almost within that same general period, so he didn't seem like a threat. But within a very short period, his reputation grew with leaps and bounds, and he needed time off to work and to help that reputation go forward. His opportunity was there. All he asked for was some time off from his teaching—he didn't want to get paid—and the department refused. His colleagues refused to grant him that. So he quit. There was a lot of bitter feeling on administrative levels from the dean up. The painters were summoned for their inability to handle this situation. They thought that the slot was one they could fill with somebody to their liking. They soon found that the slot was only created for Richard Diebenkorn, and they had lost it. They certainly didn't recover from that particular situation, because that was the one opportunity they had to bring in a distinguished member to their faculty that would add great luster to the department. I think really this is what Chancellor Murphy wanted. He had instructed, or at least guided, Fred Wight in that direction, and Fred was certainly going along with it. It was an important period—I can only repeat that—in which many opportunities opened up for the department. And it was within that time that the idea of a museum program evolved, which we're going to discuss in greater detail. My notes say that this began about 1964. The memos from Fred Wight clearly indicate that the instruction was coming, as far as I'm concerned, from an upper level. One must never discount how deeply involved Franklin Murphy was in creating a prominent art history department, a prominent painting department, an important gallery adjunct. All of these things were happening within that period. This was certainly the period in which the new gallery was opened, the move to the north campus, the putting up of the building that is now occupied by the art department. All of these things were happening during the Murphy administration, and a great deal of it was happening under Fred Wight. Some of this began with Lester. I think the building program begins in Lester's time, if I'm not mistaken. Because some of the discussion was taking place, I remember, at that time, and so was the development of the College of Fine Arts. Lester was playing a role in the development of the College of Fine Arts, with the expectation that he would probably be the first dean. I think he really felt encouraged to think that he might be invited to do that job. But, again, you would have to refer to the chronology of dates to figure out— I believe that all happened within that period we're talking about.

GALM

How much power or control does the dean of the college have over appointments within the department? Any?

BLOCH

Well, he takes the recommendation of the department, generally.

GALM

Does he have any recommendation himself that he passes on to the—?

BLOCH

I don't think so. I think ordinarily not.

GALM

What about the appointment of the chairman of the department?

BLOCH

Oh, yes. He plays a role in that. He certainly interviews. He gets the feeling of how the department thinks and makes those recommendations he passes on up above. It's never been terribly clear to me, but I remember that certainly in [Charles] Speroni's time we were called in and asked for our own recommendations—not in writing, these were oral discussions—as to what we thought. I'm not at all certain that this happened in earlier times. I can't remember that specifically happening in [William W.] Melnitz's time. I'm sure that the feelings of the department were always taken into consideration, but the appointment of a chairman was always finally the decision of the chancellor. A chancellor could play, and so could a dean, a fairly important role in determining who would fit that role. It was considered an important position, a service appointment. This, as you know, gradually deteriorated. As the prerogatives of the chancellor grew less in terms of what he could do (this developed in the sixties, the latter sixties and seventies) so did it filter down to the college level and finally to the department level—to the point that in more recent years there was no distinction, as far as chairmen were concerned. It became strictly a matter of how the department felt and with whom they could live. Since they were so suspicious, very few people could fill this bill, and it had to be somebody who would really fulfill all their smallest desires to just have it go normally from day to day without conflict. My attitude was always that the department head should be a strong person with strong prerogatives that should always be maintained. I'm not saying on a tyrannical level. Certainly not on the level that Lester Longman was maintaining things. But somewhere in between, where he was respected not as just somebody they could get along with, but somebody whose opinion counted for something and who had some distinction in his field. Where are we in more recent times? I don't have to mention names. It's entirely visible. Gradually the prerogatives were being given up by each chairman—and weak they were—to the point that the department could do exactly as it felt. And that's why they still, to this point, would like to have complete autonomy. As it points out, they're not capable of running their own show. They haven't shown the capability of doing it. If all it means is that they're to just get along with one another and do anything they please, I find that rather disturbing.

GALM

Now, at this point, are the chairmen coming strictly from within the department?

BLOCH

I think the administration's reached a point where as long as it's peaceful and they get along, we'll let it go until such time as we make a radical change. Which may be in the making at this point. Certainly after the big review of 1977 it was all too visible. That was the first review in any department on that kind of administrative level that ever took place, and that created more problems within the department's ability to govern itself. But still the university administration wasn't ready to bankrupt the department. They weren't willing to take that extreme action, and so allowed the department to keep on drifting until it wore itself out, I guess. That's the only thing I can assume, because I know something of what was going on. So you will have an appointment of at least one person who lasted something like eight years, because they couldn't find anybody else. That's unthinkable. Someone who had really no ability at all, except to allow them to go along, you see. One or two others who were certainly well-meaning people, anxious to do the job, who found it extremely difficult, might last for three years and just drop it at that point. So then it would go from one hand to the other. Not too many—maybe two or three people. Now I think it's run by a designer. [James W. Bassler] Certainly I'm not going to estimate the competence of that person. These are people who have agreeable personalities and simply allow the thing to go on. I think that's exactly what's been happening. Until we can come to grips with the problem—I'm speaking through the mouth of the administration—we will just let them go on.

GALM

So Longman was really the last appointment brought in from the outside?

BLOCH

Absolutely. After Longman, there was great fear that that situation would be repeated. It's too bad in retrospect. I think perhaps they should have gone out and tried to do something about it. But there were too many bruises that had to be healed, too many problems—which never really did heal, for some reason never did heal. To Longman's credit, from a personal standpoint, as I say, he eventually adjusted himself and became a valuable committee member in many, many ways. He had great wisdom when it came to cutting through all the complications of a meeting and getting to the bare facts and getting things done. This is something he was able to do, but not while he was chairman for some reason. But I can remember when you asked me how appointments were made as chairman. It eventually got to the point that the dean would summon the senior professors to his office and ask for suggestions that could be fed, I guess, into the administrative pot. At one of these meetings I was present with Lester Longman, who certainly by that time must have known I wasn't exactly his buddy, considering he was a man with a long memory. I say this only from an interesting personal recollection. He looked up at Speroni and said, "There's only one person that can do this job, and that's Maurice Bloch." I was quite taken aback. So these are the things that I think play a role in estimating what has happened and where we might be going. The problems and the weaknesses and the structure of the department began at that early period and simply went on growing, especially since you did not have chairmen who could take a firm hand in the sense that Longman wanted to do and to create a firmness to the department. The opportunities were there, and some of the appointments were okay. But not all of them were, and some of them were dangerous, particularly where, let's say, one appointment could be affected by some outside interests on the campus. I remember speaking to the person who played that role in one appointment and saying, "Stay out of the business of the art department." But that only meant there was weakness at the administrative level.

GALM

Can you give me an idea of what type of outside influence this would be?

BLOCH

Well, we have influences within the university, strong, powerful individuals who had their own ambitions as to what they wanted to do with the development of centers on campus. They needed these appointments, just as we needed to fill the medievalist slot after Carl Sheppard left. There were two people appointed rather than one. I'm speaking specifically of the one appointment that we were talking about a little earlier [the appointment of Werckmeister]. The ad hoc committee turned down that appointment. I was told about it by another of my faculty members, who should not have leaked this information to me, but he was so disturbed because that person was appointed. He said, "What power do these committees have if we turn them down and they go and they appoint it?" I knew that the influence had come from the outside. A professor from another department who was influential in the forming of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, it seems obvious to me, went on to the administration to point to the importance of having an appointment of this kind made and quickly, because the slot had remained open for a while. Again, when you find that they're unable to fill openings, that there is a weakness in the department, that enables somebody else to step in and take a firm hand. This happens all over. There's nothing unusual in this. I think the fact that my own position, my own slot in the art history department, hasn't been filled in six years is enough of an indication that there's weakness—certainly a lack of respect from the outside as to our ability to attract really impressive candidates. Those are always indications of problems. Where a department is weak on the top level—as I say, I've seen this elsewhere—it creates the possibility for individuals from another department with the power to go to bat to push through an appointment, even if it's your department. Or even control a budget. These things do happen.

GALM

I guess I'm curious as to in what ways the area of art history may have changed under Fred Wight's chairmanship?

BLOCH

Well, the change, certainly, as far as Fred Wight was concerned— He had the opportunities to go out in the field and interview people with administrative blessing.

GALM

So it was really the appointments, you feel. But how did those specific appointments affect the changes in philosophy?

BLOCH

I think what happened at precisely that time is that we were trying to return to the original concept of filling the slots and creating a basic art history department. That would have been Franklin Murphy's thinking. That would have been all our thinking. It was a perfectly valid thing, and the openings were there. I think the problem was that the chairman was going out—and I think he took one person with him—to interview some of these people. I cannot remember that we were really consulted seriously in some of these matters. We did have meetings on tenure affairs; those we always did. And the department had very decisive feelings about this. But after the problem with the appointment of LeRoy Davidson, it would seem to me that we weren't really consulted in such depth as we were [before]. Possibly because there was so much conflict within the small art history group. I'm not saying these were terribly serious—I think everything should be discussed, pro and con. But the idea was to fill many of these areas. The people who came our way, like [Marcel] Rothlisberger and Werckmeister and Susan Downey, and so on, were considered very safe bets, and so they were made.

GALM

Safe bets in what way?

BLOCH

Well, as far as their scholarly possibilities or attainments. Certainly in Rothlisberger's case, that was probably the best appointment that Fred Wight was able to make. He was a scholar of some reputation and accomplishment. It was far less so with Susan Downey, who was only recommended as someone to be given a chance, and we needed a classical scholar of our own. In the case of Werckmeister, there was seemingly some emergency and need to fill the medieval gap which was left when Carl Sheppard had left. The idea was to make this a very important area of the department.

GALM

What was his reputation at that point?

BLOCH

As far as I can gather, he had no reputation. I mean, he was living in Spain. He had been a student. He had no teaching experience. I really can't remember seeing the dossier on this subject. All I'm saying is that there were some scholars in his field who felt very negative feelings, and what that was based on, I don't know. It wasn't on the political philosophy at that time at all. None of that was visible at the time. He made certain it wasn't visible and was a very quiet member of the faculty for several years, so it wasn't on that level. It was simply, I think, on the basis of lack of accomplishment. His publication record was very weak. From what I'm told, he was turned down by the ad hoc committee, and the representative from the department was very, very negative on this, so much so that he felt he wanted to leave the university. Because he knew the European opinions and could reach out for that. But that was pushed through with an effort to have someone to represent— This is my impression. Because I remember making myself heard on this subject to the person whom I felt was responsible for helping to push through the appointment. I think they felt a certain urgency on campus to get some of these things going. I'm not speaking strictly that there was any plot or anything of the kind. I think this was all a desire to get things moving, and mistakes sometimes are made. I still will always—and I have to reiterate it—feel that if we had a very strong, let's say a distinguished, scholar at the head of the art department, these things might not have happened. But Fred was at a disadvantage at a moment when he should have had at least very strong advice. But he could select his own adviser, it would seem. The only people he would consult— Well, he certainly didn't consult with me. Not that I expected that I would have been a leader in this, but I don't think there was strong consultation at all with any of my colleagues.

GALM

Was there one member of the art department to whom he turned, though?

BLOCH

He became very friendly with Karl Birkmeyer after a period in which they had a period of very strong hostility. That was in connection with the development of a kind of museum organization in the gallery. This was before my time, when it was thought that members of the faculty should serve as curatorial advisers, or curatorial posts, as they do at Stanford [University] and places like that, or at Harvard [University]. And Karl Birkmeyer, having been a seasoned museum person connected with the Berlin Museum, he played a role. I think I showed you a little publication of that—

GALM

[UCLA] Bulletin [of the Arts].

BLOCH

Yes. That was the beginning of the attempt to develop some kind of a museum program. Not a program in terms of degree granting or anything of that sort, but the idea of tying the department and its students to the gallery. That was to be Karl Birkmeyer's position, the first appointment of that kind. But he and Fred had great disagreement over that first show, which had I think to do with security and various other things that Karl felt very keenly about and which Fred knew nothing about or cared less about. So they had a great falling-out at that time, but eventually they patched up their differences and became very friendly at this period. So they, I think, would be interviewing some people together, but not in these European affairs. I think this might be going east or thing. By the May 25 meeting, I could report to the board that I felt that the American painting project, as envisaged by Millard Sheets, was too ambitious if we were talking about availability of funds. We're talking about a collection of maybe not more than a hundred paintings, which is what I believe he had in mind. The span from the eighteenth century to 1974, which was present in the collection, was quite impossible in those seventy-three pictures. There were huge gaps in that collection, which he knew. I said a comprehensive collection of that scope was unattainable—that is, if quality and funding were to be the main considerations. Also, I said, there was the concern as to what size and shape the collection would have, particularly shape, if we were getting to the point where we knew in some way where the collection was going to go. They were, as I say, feeling their way through this problem. That again would have been a problem for Sheets to contend with, because it went all the way from Ambassador College to the County Museum, Claremont Colleges, that sort of thing. I then spoke about Virginia Scott's collection, which I concluded had really three different collections. She wasn't really a collector with any sense of where she was going. It was whim that played a great role in it, and the something like that. There was some consultation at that level. I can remember being very disturbed about some things that were happening that way. It had to do with the gallery and that I wasn't being consulted about things that really had a great deal to do with me. I felt that I should have been brought into the picture if it has to be somebody I needed to work with. This particularly happened in the case of the appointment of the assistant director. Karl Birkmeyer, as you know, eventually became chairman of the department but quit after two years. I can't estimate precisely what happened. Karl was a man with strong feelings about his responsibilities and that sort of thing. He was not born to be an administrator. He was an excellent teacher and he was a serious scholar, who just didn't have the health or energy, really, to pursue this in any great depth and had various other problems. But a man of goodwill. As a matter of fact, after Fred Wight had to retire from the chairmanship, the question was who was to be the next chairman. I think Fred Wight was very anxious to have LeRoy Davidson do this. Some of us felt that Karl Birkmeyer would make the much better chairman, because, remember, he was still a scholar with some reputation and certainly had the integrity that I felt was needed at that point.

1.27. TAPE NUMBER: XIV, SIDE ONE JULY 6, 1987

GALM

Professor Bloch, last time we concluded the tape you were discussing the appointment of Karl [M.] Birkmeyer as chairman. He served a relatively brief period of time, two years. How would you describe his chairmanship, its accomplishments or its lack of?

BLOCH

Well, as I think I've already said, Birkmeyer was a sensitive man of goodwill who wasn't particularly aggressive. Nor was he the sort of man who enjoyed administrative responsibility. I think he took it on because he felt it was going to be a revolving situation in the department, as it always had been. There was no such thing as one man appointing his successor kind of thing. But there was certainly no objection to Karl Birkmeyer at that particular time. It's quite different from the period between [Lester D.] Longman and Fred [Frederick S.] Wight. That was a period in which the department was undergoing a serious self-appraisal, in a sense, as to where we were going. Longman had thrown all of this up in the air, and it was Fred Wight who brought it down once again to a kind of sobering level. But that didn't mean that we were necessarily moving ahead with great force. Some important appointments were made during those years that Fred Wight was chairman. As I pointed out, it was a great opportunity, largely through the interests of the chancellor [Franklin D. Murphy] in fine arts, to make some serious appointments that would add some distinction to the department. This was also in painting, as well as art history—far less in the area of design, where I think the main interest was in developing an industrial design area. This is before the School of Architecture [and Urban Planning]. So Karl Birkmeyer was meant to provide a kind of continuity. At the same time, from the art historians' standpoint, a serious scholar was indeed a real solution to the problem, because the department, generally speaking, looked with favor on this kind of a solution to the administrative problem of the department. The painters weren't that anxious to be involved in this sort of thing at the time. They just wanted input. They wanted to be able to express themselves. However, you must realize that during this period, between '66 and '68, there was the beginning of the political aspect of the department beginning to evolve, chiefly through at least one of the appointments made in Fred Wight's time. He may have seen this occurring more than I did. I don't think I was as conscious of that as the chairman might be because of his meetings with executive committees and so on. I think this was beginning to happen, and certainly there was a certain amount of friction between Birkmeyer and [Otto-Karl] Werckmeister evolving during that time. That little bit I heard about, but these were things that didn't necessarily affect my work.

GALM

What was the basis for that friction, if you can say?

BLOCH

I can't really say, except that Birkmeyer did tell me at one time that Werckmeister always wanted to have his own way, and wanted to take hold in what he felt was to the benefit of the art historians, and felt that Birkmeyer wasn't a very productive scholar. It may have been during this period that Birkmeyer was coming up for a promotion. I can recall that Birkmeyer decided not to come up for a promotion because there were too many students now being involved in promotional committee meetings, reading through and evaluating. This was beginning to be part of the whole political situation of the department. Although the involvement of students was certainly approved by all of us, the numbers of students who were brought into the picture was becoming a little bit difficult—and I'm putting it mildly. Having them present at promotional meetings in greater and greater numbers was something that I eventually saw as a very serious problem. Now, I'm not exactly aware of all of the chronology in this, but certainly it was Werckmeister's feeling that a fellow German should behave as he should. I remember Birkmeyer telling me that he couldn't really abide Werckmeister. "In many ways," he said, "that was why I left Germany," to get away from just this. He was a gentle man, a German of the old school, as it were, and certainly didn't go along with this kind of thing, which of course had been evolving in Germany during the period that he was growing up. What he saw he disliked, and when he had the opportunity finally to leave, he did and began a new life in California. I think basically, let us say, he was not happy in the administrative role. There were decisions he made which I think in some cases he wasn't pleased with personally. He could appraise what he was doing; he could step back and see what he was doing. He was in a sense a perfectionist, and I think that this didn't really work out. So without any consultation, he just resigned. I can remember—and I think this probably may play a role in estimating or in analyzing what was going on—he felt himself really quite alone, I think, in the department. He didn't really mingle with some of the others. There were always personality problems, as I pointed out earlier, but some of those had dissipated. Carl [D.] Sheppard [Jr.] had already left. But we now had Werckmeister and a few other problems evolving in the department, and possibly a little group forming around Werckmeister who recognized his particular strengths and who went along with it. All of these were things that Birkmeyer could not really deal with. He and I were always friends, which didn't mean that he consulted with me on many things. In fact, he went pretty much on his own. So it had nothing to do with that—there was no infiltration between us of ideas and so on. But we respected one another and got along very, very well. At one point I had a visit from an official at the National Gallery of Art [Washington, D.C.]. I had just come back from there. I knew the director, who admired my work with the Grunwald Center [for the Graphic Arts] and had come out here to see our facility and attempt to build a similar facility at the National Gallery. So there were very good connections between me and the National Gallery. Well, anyhow, I was made aware (by Karl, actually, who knew the man who came out here, Charles Parkhurst—as it turned out, an old friend of his) that I was, in a sense, being considered for a position at the National Gallery. At that particular time, I might indeed have welcomed the change, because I had seen the great exhibition out there and I had felt I could do things at the National Gallery on an international level that I couldn't possibly do here with the struggle I was doing in a strictly administrative service position at the Grunwald. I mean, I had tasted some success and felt that there I really could expand and make an important statement. So I was sorely tempted. Although I loved California and UCLA, I can't deny that there was a temptation. But this never really happened, because somewhere along the line, Karl Birkmeyer made it quite clear to Mr. Parkhurst that I couldn't be spared. So that by the time Parkhurst was speaking to me, he was speaking about my recommendations of other people, rather than myself. But Karl more or less told me, "You can't leave here because you're needed here." My feeling after that, which was rather surprising, was that it was Birkmeyer who really didn't want me to leave because he needed a colleague, and I felt that rather keenly. Yet within four months of that, he resigned, quite suddenly, over a weekend, with no consultation whatsoever. So the department was left without a chairman.

GALM

Did you learn why he resigned so abruptly?

BLOCH

No. He never explained that little bit of business, and I felt that was his decision. I don't think he really made it quite clear to anybody. I certainly didn't get any clarification of that from the dean, who was just as shocked as most of us were at this sudden decision. It was made over a weekend. The decision was not just to leave the chairmanship, but he was deciding to get out of the university. Now, again, I must retrace my steps slightly. I'm not sure how soon after the retirement from the chairmanship that the decision to leave took place. I'm only giving you this information to provide that something was certainly evolving and that I feel that a lot of it had to do with the change in the department and the fact that he really didn't enjoy being an administrator. At the same time, he wasn't making great progress as a scholar and was receiving a great deal of flak from a budding change in the art history section where he couldn't really be comfortable.

GALM

Were any major appointments made during his chairmanship?

BLOCH

Fred Wight made most of those major appointments. He brought in a young man who he thought would be an addition, although that was only a temporary appointment, a young man from Liechtenstein. That he was very unhappy about because it was not a good appointment, but it was only a temporary appointment. It may be that—and I cannot be sure of this—there was a young Swedish scholar who came to the department. Whether this was a Karl Birkmeyer appointment, I really can't answer at this particular point.

GALM

You had mentioned student participation on committee assignments. How did the students achieve that? What was the means by which they gained more representation?

BLOCH

Well, I think this had become rather a campuswide thing.

GALM

Was there a strong student organization?

BLOCH

Well, there was supposed to be understood— It wasn't prescribed, because, as I understand it, the painters didn't include students in their councils on tenure and other serious appointments within faculty. They may have brought them into meetings at which they were consulting about program and that sort of thing. But it was generally agreed upon campuswide, or perhaps even universitywide, that students would receive an opportunity to be consulted. They had long expressed a strong desire to participate, that they felt they were being left out. None of us objected to that. I thought it was important for students to have the experience of participating in program making since, after all, the programs do concern them as to what the offerings are and where the needs are. They frequently have a keener insight into that than maybe faculty. But when it comes to tenure and faculty appointments and so on, I think this becomes more serious, depending on just what the involvement is. If they want to provide input, I see no reason to be against that. And I see no reason why students shouldn't participate in many or even all phases of activity, providing this doesn't get to be carried too far. What I mean by that is where students are evaluating faculty performance beyond the classroom. That is okay I think: this keeps a professor on his toes to know that the students are evaluating his performance. But when it comes to evaluating him in terms of scholarship, in terms of what other people in the field think about him, for students to canvass this on their own can be carried too far and can be extremely difficult to deal with and to evaluate in meetings that are meant to be held by faculty themselves. What actually happened in our department was that from one or two representatives, it gradually grew to points where it was an open meeting. At the time that I certainly was being considered, along with another faculty member, I went to the meeting where both of us were being considered and I counted seventy students. There was no room for faculty. I mean, this became a circus in which all the students wanted to— It was like a Senate hearing. Everybody was standing in line ready to get in and participate, or at least to savor the climate. I think these were things that were already beginning in Karl Birkmeyer's time when he was coming up for promotion, and he resisted this strongly. I remember being at a meeting in which one student demanded to know why Professor Birkmeyer had decided not to submit his name for promotion. This was just an ordinary three-year promotional procedure, and Birkmeyer had decided not to simply because he felt too many students were becoming involved in what he felt was really purely a faculty matter. This indeed became a very serious problem in the department. The department felt it was being extremely, quote, "democratic" in providing this, but like in any other matter, these things can get out of hand, and this is exactly what happened. So I think in a sense, if we're talking strictly about Birkmeyer, he was a victim of what indeed was occurring around him. He just was too sensitive and too private a man to want to have to be faced with these things. He felt that as a professor—a professor of long standing, something like twenty-three years, I think, when he retired—that he was entitled to something more than this kind of treatment.

GALM

So then how was his replacement chosen?

BLOCH

Well, since he resigned—and I believe this happened just at the beginning of a summer, early July, something like" that—we were all left high and dry. A lot of people had gone away for the summer. There was no chance for a faculty to get together to discuss this in any comprehensive way. (I was always there, because of the center and other things. ) But suddenly everybody was called to help fill the gap at that particular time. So a committee was formed, appointed by the dean as I remember, to discuss what we would do on a temporary arrangement up ahead. This was not to be formal, because the total faculty wasn't around at the time. There were representatives from painting, and design, and art history. I remember I was one of the members of that committee called to discuss the temporary situation up ahead and how this would be handled. Once again we were faced with the question of whether there should be one chairman or whether there should be a committee to run the department. It had always been that the person who was chairman was an art historian, but that wasn't prescribed by law. It was just simply the way things went. Now it would seem that the painters and the designers, who were up to this point fairly content, felt that they wanted more of a say. This may have come up at precisely this time, but certainly was to become more prominent an issue in the months that followed. In any case, we sat around and we talked about all of this. Fred Wight was not present. He had gone on some exhibition exploration and was in Europe at the time. [J.] LeRoy Davidson was around, but he wasn't a member of that committee, as I remember. In the course of all of this discussion, people sort of looked at one another to decide who might make a temporary arrangement in the matter, since things had to be decided upon. I remember at one point the faculty turned to me and asked me whether I would agree to play a role in this if they recommended me. I said that, once again, as I had said in the past, I had no illusions or ambitions to be a chairman of the department. I was glad to play a role, and certainly on a temporary basis, but with my teaching and the Grunwald responsibility, I couldn't assume much more than that. I think that was the way the committee made its recommendation for at least the fall. In the meantime, as I eventually discovered, LeRoy Davidson, who indeed did have ambitions to be a chairman before he retired, was very upset that he hadn't been made a member of the committee and evidently was making himself heard in the outside office. These are things I found out later on. In any event, before too many weeks had elapsed, Mr. Wight suddenly returned from Europe, announcing he had come because he had a cold or something of the sort. But I soon discovered, at least from other sources, that he had returned in order to exert some authority in the area of the chairmanship of the department. Remember, he had felt considerable responsibility there and I think would have liked to name his successor. The point was that suddenly there was a great deal of activity. At one point I can remember—and I can't, again, give you exact dates on this—I was called by [Charles] Speroni, and he invited me, because of the recommendation of the faculty present during the summer, to act as chairman of the department for the fall of that year. I said that I had understood that there had been considerable activity on other levels relative to LeRoy Davidson, and that, as a matter of fact, Davidson had already been letting me know, at least, that he was going to assume responsibility and more or less saying, "Well, I'll be doing this" and indicating that he might be the regular chairman. Speroni tried to indicate to me that no, I would serve for the fall, and that LeRoy, who was going to India, would come back and serve in the spring. I said it was different from what I understood, both from the hints I got from LeRoy, as well as from other sources, that indeed LeRoy was going to be a permanent chairman. And I said, "If so, get on with it, since I have other things to do than to simply await his return from India." It was my feeling that if he was going to and wanted the chairmanship, he should get on with it in the fall and get the thing going, since there was too much of a hiatus already, even a summer period. To extend this was, it seemed to me, unfair to a faculty that desperately needed guidance and leadership. Suddenly I realized that Speroni was in something of a bind over this matter, and he finally admitted that this was so. I said, "Well, I'm glad to know that, but now you'll have to find somebody else if you're awaiting his return." So it was at that point that Archine [V.] Fetty was brought in to serve through the fall period, awaiting his coming back, and that's the way it actually worked out. So LeRoy came back. Yes, that's the way it evolved I think, if I recall correctly.

GALM

Did he still come on, then, in an acting capacity?

BLOCH

No, no, no. It was exactly as I figured it was. It's just that the administration was unwilling to admit to me. But when I pointed out that there were already difficulties— LeRoy wasn't being cooperative with me. He didn't say, "Look, I'd be very pleased if you worked with me on this." He was rather angry. For what reason, I don't know. "Belligerent" is perhaps a better term as far as I was concerned, not at all cooperative or appreciative of what I might be doing for him. So I felt that this was not something I cared to do.

GALM

Did Fred Wight remain a major force in the department right up until his retirement?

BLOCH

Well, it's difficult to say whether he was a force. Fred Wight had input on higher levels and through the [UCLA] Art Council and so on. I think he could exert force that you wouldn't necessarily observe in meeting the man. He was generally rather bland and tried to give the impression of being rather a gentle, fatherly individual. But he liked power. I think he would have liked to remain as chairman at least; I think he began to enjoy that through those years. Certainly he created a peaceful atmosphere, but I wouldn't say necessarily the most creative atmosphere, despite all the opportunities which were available. I don't think he really took advantage of what he might have done, and part of that was because he pretty much did as he pleased. There wasn't a great deal of communication with faculty, certainly not on these appointments. These were decided upon and acted upon, and he consulted, I guess, with some people, but the department didn't get full consultation. This, again, added to the dangerous political climate. I think it opened the door to a disgruntled faculty expressing itself quite openly that it wanted much more to say about appointments and so on. It came to a head, actually, when Fred Wight retired from the university altogether. As you know, he was kept on beyond the ordinary retirement age until his seventieth year. This was by special arrangement with the chancellor to allow this to happen. My feeling was it was to really allow him to have a full twenty years and get the benefit of his pension that that was done. But that was a onetime thing that could never have happened in later years when the faculty had so much to say about just that kind of thing—and they were adamant. Later on, the students would sit around with faculty in a meeting and look across the table at anybody who was approaching sixty and say that they think all faculty should retire at sixty. Because in those days you were over the hill at thirty. This was what was going on. It was getting more and more ridiculous as time went on. But Fred Wight benefited, certainly, by the more traditional way of doing things, where there was considerable power in the hands of a chairman who could make decisions, and where a chancellor could make a great many decisions he later on might hesitate to do because of the great involvement of various committees on campus and of course within departments. In any case, I would say there was some disgruntlement probably building up through the little art historian clique to indicate unhappiness as to the way appointments were made. They weren't happy with LeRoy Davidson at all. There was considerable irritation with LeRoy and the way he did things on the part of the art historians. A lot of it had to do with his rather volatile temperament. In Davidson's defense, I should say he wasn't a well man. He had a heart problem which was causing him considerable distress. His wife wasn't well either. He had to contend with all of that. Besides that, he wanted to make a strong statement as his own career was drawing to an end. He wanted to accomplish something, and he felt that as chairman he could do this. It just didn't work out all that well. So some of the unhappiness of the faculty was to grow even more evident at that time. Certainly when he left the chairmanship and was approaching his own retirement and wanted an extra year to remain on the faculty, there was considerable negative expression in faculty meetings about this. I felt that was rather unfortunate and disrespectful of the man—this wasn't too great a request. But these were things that were definitely beginning to occur. If you speak again about Fred Wight, I think he himself realized that he had retired at just about the right moment, because times were changing. After Davidson retired, it certainly got to the point that the succession wasn't going to be quite as simple as that, that in fact they might turn to both a chairman and two vice-chairmen, a kind of a troika arrangement, to have greater input and much more of a say in the way the department was run. I think this was bound to happen. I think that the department was not running too well, that there were really problems with the way LeRoy administered the department. You could no longer run it in the old-fashioned way, where the chairman made all the decisions. The faculty was demanding much more involvement. Now, I was about to say this a moment ago, and that had to do with the clear evidence of this when Fred Wight retired from the gallery and the question of the future director of the gallery came up. Fred Wight tried on his own, as he did in terms of the chairmanship, to appoint his own successor or to come up with a name that he would be happy with. I don't think he realized that the department— at least the art historians—were getting to a point where they wanted very much more of a say in the way the gallery was run and what it was to do. They weren't happy with the exhibitions and so on. Of course I'll be dealing more with this a little later on, because this is a rather sticky area in which to enter at this particular time. I think when it came to the Gerald [J.] Nordland appointment, the faculty became very vocal. Where Fred Wight had had a faculty appointment with tenure, the faculty was no longer willing to allow this to happen. Fred Wight had an M. A., but he was handling Ph.D. candidates, and not many of them were successful in completing their work. This may have been something that the faculty was examining. I can't be certain of all of the detail of that. I was present at one particular meeting in which Fred Wight tried to plead for a tenure appointment for Gerald Nordland, who had only recently come from his directorship of the San Francisco Museum of [Modern] Art. But Gerald Nordland had no real history of accomplishment as a scholar, and he had a bachelor's degree in quite another area, I think in law. I would have to check this to give you the details. At that point, the faculty came out very strongly against giving tenure to any director of the gallery who was not a distinguished scholar. Nordland was made the scapegoat of the whole thing, and they rejected Fred Wight's plea to give him that. I can understand what Fred was thinking, that after all, you can't expect a man to really actively play a role in the teaching program or to make an important contribution in terms of the gallery and his relationship to the department if he doesn't have a teaching appointment. He felt that the tenure gave him the security he might wish, and to deprive him of this was to make his life and position fairly insecure. This I can well understand, as well as I can understand the faculty position in the matter. Because I felt we did have difficulty with Fred Wight in precisely that area. I was one who voted in favor of not giving tenure to Gerald Nordland, though I had nothing in particular against the man himself. It had to do with the general idea. As far as Nordland was concerned—and I can go in that direction for a moment—he was never very happy in the position. He did, in fact, feel insecure and unwanted. Someone must have given him all the detail that had gone on that made him feel that he was an unwelcome member of the department, that he really was betwixt and between. Not being a terribly agreeable personality to start with, he always had a kind of a chip on his shoulder, no matter what we were doing. I tried to collaborate with him. Although in certain areas we certainly made headway, in other areas the personality problem came very clearly into view. I wasn't the only one who had to work closely with him who found this great difficulty. This even found its way into his meetings with the Art Council. You must remember the Art Council had been somewhat spoiled. They got along brilliantly with Fred Wight. They loved him dearly, and he encouraged the evolution of the Art Council to the point where they were creating their own exhibitions and all that sort of thing. The power that they had and the creative interest that they had in the art history area was evident and largely due to what Fred Wight was able to encourage. He may have given away the store, but whatever it was, we certainly had a lot going in our relationship with the Art Council at that time. Nordland wasn't quite the same personality, and there was friction. He took issue with some of the ladies of the Art Council on what they were trying to do. Every now and then there was a great flare- up that certainly didn't help him, nor did it help the development of the exhibition program along lines that he would wish. Some of it I regarded at the time as rather amusing, but as I look at it now it was far from that. It was very serious business. After four years or so, Nordland decided to leave.

GALM

Was this a voluntary move upon his part to leave? Or was there no future for him here?

BLOCH

Well, if one examines Nordland's history— As far as I understand—and I think it's a fact—he was fired from his job in San Francisco. There were people connected with the board in San Francisco who wanted to get him out of the way in a rather genteel fashion. Rather than to make a great announcement about this, they had him simply more or less retire and move into another position. The position at UCLA opened up, and I think there was a certain amount of political pressure to bring him into that position. Remember, the faculty was not really consulted, except when his name was put up to the faculty. Then it was how he would come, as a faculty member or not. And at that point, the faculty rose up. The students were very much involved. It was the beginning of the student involvement in some depth, students who were more or less used by the art historians. Remember, this all begins and ends in the art history department. I have some of those documents prepared by student representatives, who did a rather thorough job on this and who came out in clear opposition to giving Nordland the faculty appointment. So it was rather unfortunate for him. He was really in a sense manipulated and took this job merely to fill the void in his life. It wasn't something he might have selected on his own—I think that's quite clear. And he wasn't happy. He didn't feel that he was a welcome person, nor was he made to feel welcome. I mean, I tried very hard, but by that time he was so paranoid on the whole affair that he didn't trust any of us. Now, how much he was told about the activities in the meetings of the art history faculty, I don't know, but I spoke to him again to indicate my desire to work with him. But it was a very difficult affair. One of the reasons I felt it very important is that at just about the time he came in— David [S.] Saxon was assistant chancellor at the time, and it was decided then that certainly the working budget for the gallery and the Grunwald was to be in his hands, and I think also [the Museum of] Cultural History. So that we had to turn to him to evolve our own exhibition program. Now, this never bothered me. I had the greater problem with Fred Wight, who never would let me know exactly what part of the exhibition money I would have for myself. It was practically nothing. I really never had a clear vision of this. At least in this situation, we knew where we were. And Nordland was very fair in his handling of that budget, so that actually we were able to do better exhibitions with much more impressive catalogs than we were able ever to do before. Catalogs like The American Personality[: The Artist-Illustrator of Life in the United States 1860-1940 (1976)] and The Image and the Means, those rather impressive catalogs we were able to do, came largely through the fact that now there was a budget that we could see and feel. It always seemed to be mysteriously fluid and not very visible in the past, and that was always a point of conflict, as far as I was concerned, with the director of the gallery. So that part was no problem. But beyond that, Nordland was an unhappy man. So after a few years he left, I believe to go to Iowa.

GALM

Wisconsin.

BLOCH

Wisconsin. You're quite right. Yes.

GALM

I guess I was still wondering whether he was forced out: of the position or whether he just took a position that he felt he would be more happy with.

BLOCH

No, he wasn't forced out as far as I can see. I think it was a decision of his own. I think he was seeking another post. I must add that his private life wasn't very happy either, so all of this mixture didn't help. He was a fairly lonely man, some of it of his own making. Because some of us who worked closely with him tried to make his life more agreeable, but this never was to happen. So quite on his own, he decided to leave for this position in Wisconsin.

GALM

I do have a question about— At about this time, Franklin Murphy left.

BLOCH

He left in '68.

GALM

Yes. I know that he had real influence in the art department as far as Fred Wight was concerned. I wonder whether that worked for or against Fred Wight after Murphy left? Is that question clear?

BLOCH

Well, I think Fred Wight continued to do his own thing after Franklin Murphy left. I'm not going to say that Fred Wight and Franklin Murphy always saw eye to eye. I think that Fred Wight's position was one of power as chairman of the department, as well as head of the gallery, and that he also had all of this influence with the Art Council, which in turn was eagerly sought by Franklin Murphy. Murphy, in all of his wisdom, realized that he would never, as indeed he once said to me, make big waves. I mean, he wanted things to go smoothly. It wasn't that he specifically admired Fred Wight or anybody else in that matter. He had his own private thoughts about it. Even with our work together, it was only many years later that I realized that he really did think a great deal of me and approved of what I was doing. At the time I worked with him, I felt that he was being cooperative because he felt it was to the benefit of the university. He was not a man who dealt with personalities. What he was looking for was getting a job done and getting it done well and seeing some of his projects being fruitful and coming into being. He knew that these things take time, and he worked with what he had.

1.28. TAPE NUMBER: XIV, SIDE TWO JULY 6, 1987

GALM

I guess the question that I'm trying to get at is whether your past association with Franklin Murphy as chancellor affected your relationship with other art department faculty, what their feelings might have been in that relationship that you had with him?

BLOCH

Well, first of all, I never exaggerated our relationship, nor did I speak about it. I think the faculty must have been aware that I was able to work with Franklin Murphy, but I never gave them an agenda as to exactly what I was doing. I was working independently. It was to the benefit of the university and the department, and I think they understood that. There was never any discussion, as far as I can see. I don't know what their private views were. In any case, I never exploited it and I never made it seem, "Well, look. I can resolve this question on— You know, just turn to me." It was never that kind of thing. Nor did I feel that. Because Murphy always let it be known that what we were doing was to the benefit of the university and there was no personality relationship. Whatever he felt privately, or I felt, was never something we discussed. It was never very evident. It was simply a working, professional relationship. I think the happy thing was that we saw eye to eye on many things and he provided the support for it—that was the beauty of it. When Murphy left, Charles [E.] Young was very quick to let me know that nothing would change. He couldn't provide me with the kind of rapport, that instant rapport which I had had, and which I think he knew quite well, but he wanted to make it quite clear that his support was there. Within days of his assuming the chancellorship, he eventually met with me and let me know that he would provide the budget—which up to that time was a rather fluid one—for acquisition, that he would settle a budget that I could count on every year. Because I then was much more on my own. Franklin Murphy liked to be deeply involved, and that was a lot of fun, a sharing of ideas which I always enjoyed. It was like having a colleague who enjoyed working with me. I never had that with the faculty, the art history faculty. There wasn't either the knowledge or even the interest in involving themselves in what was happening in the development of the collections of the Grunwald, not the slightest.

GALM

Did there come a time within the faculty that there was actual resentment of any outside university authority?

BLOCH

I think that point was coming, that they wanted to run their own show, didn't want any recommendation from the outside. Part of that was started with these irritations that we now can begin to see in some perspective, like the Nordland affair. I could see them beginning to get the students more deeply incensed over these changes that were being done without consultation with them. They wanted to point out that, indeed, after Fred Wight left, that they had very important notions about what the gallery should be and how it should serve them—large protestations of their great interest in the gallery and that they wanted to be able to approve the exhibitions. There's enough documentation on this in my own files. This rather amazes me at this point as to these loud protestations of how interested they were, not only in who would be the director, but how the gallery would be run and how they would like to be involved in it, to the point of having their own gallery where they could put on their own exhibitions. How this in any way relates to their eventual reactions against gallery- or museum-oriented procedures is difficult to measure, in terms of what they were saying at this particular time. But all I can say is that these were simply the beginnings of a demand for an important say in all of these things, so that even a chancellor's involvement would be something they would resist, even if it was to the good. Though they really never knew what was happening with me. Since they weren't interested in collecting as such and knew nothing (part of it had to do with the fact that there was no expertise in these areas), they were perfectly happy to let me go on. Although they began to assume—at least the students assumed this (where that came from, I don't know)—that I was receiving two salaries and that, therefore, this was a profitable enterprise for me. At least that was how they began to evolve the picture about me, which up to that time had not occurred. In fact, the faculty was always generally supportive. They knew what I was doing. I didn't ask for any special dispensation from them, as far as time off and so on was concerned. I just went about my business. We certainly began to have our own advisory committee. When they began to want involvement, we had that. Their input was always requested, but they never provided it. They simply, by general gesture, indicated that it was perfectly all right. I would get very good responses to the exhibitions that we were putting on. I must point out that, after all, the students were involved in seminars and so on. I never heard any real criticism of this until a long time later, when they decided that perhaps they should take a sharp look at all of this. Since they wanted input and everything else, why not demand more and more? But we did have our advisory committee, where there were members from art history, from design, and from painting always present. The dean would attend all the time. Speroni was the most faithful member of that committee, would appear at every one, whereas many of them did not show up. And the students who were invited—there was a representative from each area—it was a rare moment when any of them appeared. So there was never a problem of their not being involved—they could have as much involvement as they wanted. The question was once they had it, they didn't use it.

GALM

Perhaps we can go, then, back to the chronology of the chairmanships. LeRoy Davidson served from 1968 to '72?

BLOCH

That's right.

GALM

Was that considered a full term or not?

BLOCH

Yes, that's a full term.

GALM

You had mentioned three or five [years].

BLOCH

Three or five. So this was somewhere over that, slightly. This may have coincided with his own retirement. I can't remember too clearly. But, again, as I pointed out earlier, there was a great deal of unhappiness with LeRoy Davidson. He was not a popular chairman of the department. I knew this would happen, and that had to do with personality and his general attitude, imperial attitude, toward the chairmanship and what power it conveyed. Which I thought was kind of amusing, since there really wasn't power connected with it, not anymore anyhow. But he still belonged to the old school. At about the time we knew he was leaving, once again the question came as to who would be the successor. There were meetings certainly. Speroni invited various members of the tenured faculty to meet with him in his office to discuss suggestions, recommendations of that sort. It was open much more now than it had been before. And there were meetings. I guess the painters met on their own; the designers met on their own; and certainly we met to discuss this. The political situation was growing more evident by this time. When I say "evident," it wasn't that evident to me as to just how intense this was. A lot of this was going on behind the scenes, kitchen cabinet meetings of small cliques within art history, and so on. Other people in the other areas were evidently having equal discussions. Whether there were discussions from one area to another is something I can't really ascertain now, nor was I interested then. Speroni, I remember, invited three professors at a time to come to meet with him. I met with Professor Longman—who had been chairman of the department and was still a member of the faculty—and Alexander Badawy the day that I was there, that morning that Speroni had summoned us. He wanted to know what suggestions we had. I can't remember myself having any particular suggestion in mind. It was interesting that—and I think I had mentioned this once before—Lester Longman, who had had a rather bitter experience being chairman of the department, but who had become a very good member of the department after he left— He had stripped away all the rest of it, and his ambitions no longer were that great, nor [did] the bitterness remain, to his great credit. He turned to Speroni and he said, "There's only one person who can do this, and that's Maurice Bloch." Which surprised me. I had no intention of getting involved at that point, but I thought that was a rather generous gesture on his part, considering how he must have felt [toward] his colleagues in a slightly earlier period. But the point was it was quite clear the selection wasn't very great. Where do you turn? I know when we sat down in our meetings, there had been no preparation in advance, no thinking through the years as to what the succession would be. We were running out of art historians who could really satisfy the demands of a department that was changing—no question about it. The involvement of faculty, the unhappiness with the appointments which were being made and how much they were involved in it, and so on, which had come from the previous administrations of the department, was beginning to make itself quite clear. It's conceivable Werckmeister played a very strong role in this, although up to that point he kept a fairly low profile. I recognized in him a young and strong force of the department, and I was looking for that myself among the younger faculty. Not that I was ancient, but I was feeling that at this point that we should be trying to groom younger faculty to assume responsibilities with changes that I instinctively knew were happening, although I couldn't put my finger on it. In any case, there was evidently a lot of politicking going on that I didn't know about, nor was I that interested. There certainly was a certain amount of politicking going on in design that I hadn't figured on. What was happening in painting I don't know, but I think the art historians were playing some role with the painters at this time and bypassing the design people. So these were all the discussions that were going on. The business of the chairman certainly had been discussed, but Speroni was calling in various members of the faculty, and the ultimate result of that was the nomination of [J.] Bernard Kester. Some of this had come out of the department, because I remember there was one member of design who went around asking whether we would vote for or approve of Bernard Kester, which rather surprised me, because I didn't think Kester had any real interest in this. He was a craftsman who had a career going in this regard, and I never thought of him as particularly an administrator for a department, although certainly a very decent and honorable citizen who could be trusted. But it was finally Kester who was made chairman of the department. It was then that we began to have our meetings as to vice-chairs. I remember, again, my name came up in the department, because, as I say, there weren't many people you could turn to. LeRoy sort of chaired that discussion. I was again put in a position of having to think about whether I wanted to get involved with it, and I wasn't that anxious at all, again because I had enough to do. I remember looking across the table to Werckmeister. I could see he was sort of breathing heavily. I looked at the faces of the faculty. It was impossible to tell what was going on, but I felt that there was some sort of political action taking place. I asked him, I said, "Is this something you would like to do?" Because, as I say, I felt that he was strong and was interested in creating a strong art history area. I wasn't sure just what direction this was going; I was completely unaware of his further thoughts along that line. But I was thinking much more in the strengthening of an area that had begun to slip and be some part in disarray. And he shook his head. With that, when the vote was taken, I voted for him and he voted for himself.

GALM

He shook his head "yes," I assume?

BLOCH

Oh, yes. Well, you know, he nodded. And I voted for him. It was those two votes that really made it for him, although he later on assumed that he had received an overwhelming majority. He probably had assumed that I voted for myself, but I had no intention of doing that, [laughter] I always think back now—what did I do? But that's the way my thinking went in those days. So he became the vice-chairman and always regarded himself, as he said, as the spokesman of the area and took, indeed, a very strong hand. I think this made for considerable difficulty for Kester, although I certainly hadn't realized it at the time. Certainly Kester's administration was a kind of turning point in the department's history. He was placed under a great deal of stress. [There were] difficult promotional problems involved during that particular time, and I remember how stressed he was. Some of the details of that he could probably tell better than I as to just what happened, but I think it was very threatening to him. He was not able to— He was trying to maintain his own integrity—and that's one of the great tributes to Bernard Kester—but really his authority was beginning to fall apart. As the areas demanded more and more of a say in what was going on, and the demands, particularly in art history, to get across one or two rather difficult promotional appointments— I was on the budget council at that time, so I could see this happening. They had put Speroni in a difficult position, too. This was the beginning of the period when faculty members who were up for tenure might find every way and means of infiltrating committees if they could, upper levels, reaching people, of suing the university on some small pretext. There was a teaching union they would turn to that would intercede for them. It made it extremely difficult for the assistant chancellor, who had to act upon these matters. It was a very tense situation in which legal questions became very, very preeminent, almost to the point that the importance of teaching, of scholarship, almost took a backseat, with everybody being much more aware of the legal consequences of any false move. The threat of legal action was always present. This was part of the expanding political situation on various levels, both in the department and on a university level.

GALM

But has that really diminished any over the years?

BLOCH

I don't know. I was on the budget council for a year, and when I saw how badly this was affecting at least my own activity and how it affected the budget council, at least during the period I was there, I decided to leave it after a year. It was becoming too stressful, because the enormous amount of work that one put into that kind of activity was seemingly futile in terms of what the eventual results would be.

GALM

I guess the other question I have— Is there much that the dean of the college can do to bolster the authority of a chairman?

BLOCH

I should like to think that this could be, but a dean's position is not always that strong. After all, he takes his orders from—

GALM

Or was that eroding too?

BLOCH

I think so. I would say that in terms of the deans we had of the college—and, after all, my experience was only with two or three—that their positions weren't all that strong. All they wanted to do was to—to quote what I said before—"not make big waves," to just try to keep the boat moving and keep things going. They would get rather upset if you came with any serious problems. The deans were always accessible. At least, my experience with [William W.] Melnitz and with Speroni is that they were remarkably accessible people, fatherly, open people you could deal with. But at the same time, they couldn't make strong decisions without consultation, and I think they, too, were fearful of hostile reaction from a department. The departments were getting more and more independent, to a point that they felt that they were running their own show. I remember Werckmeister discussing this with me and saying at one point, "We have a parliament." I said, "Let me just assure you, before we go too far in this discussion, that we're all simply employees, state employees, and paid a salary to do a job, and that our main job is teaching and getting programs implemented and seeing to it that our students receive a proper education and direction." I said, "That's all." "Oh, no," he said. "We are a parliament." So the political attitude, whether Marxist or otherwise, was becoming the preeminent factor. "Let's run our own show." It came to a point where the art historians, at least, got control of the Dickson scholarship [Edward A. Dickson History of Art Fellowship] money, and they are the ones who made the decision as to how the money would be disseminated. That was not the intention of the Dicksons at all. They simply placed great trust in the art historians to devise a program, not realizing how this would be used. And that was an important thing. I think the university was very anxious to run that particular fund themselves and to disseminate, instead of turning it back to the department. But the will and the endowment was worded in such a fashion that it really, more or less, turned it over to the department. This only increased their sense of power and well-being. I think to this very moment they would like to be a separate department; I think that itself is under discussion even at the moment. The point was if they could have managed to do this affair properly, I see no reason why they couldn't. But when the situation is so politicized and the intention becomes more toward exerting power rather than working specifically for the benefit of students and their responsibility to educating those students and providing a program that gives them a broader base, this certainly was not happening. When you ask about the position of a dean, I can remember when I reported my dismay at the numbers of students who were attending promotional committee meetings that Speroni said, "Well, you know, I can't come unless I'm invited." Because I said, "You should really see what's going on." "Well, I cannot come unless I am invited to come." So a dean had to assume not a very strong role in all of this, nor was, I imagine, the university anxious that he do this. Very difficult position.

GALM

So you would say then that during the Kester chairmanship that the vice-chairman really grew in power?

BLOCH

Yes, I think— As I say, he would have to report on this himself. But from my discussions with him, which were practically on a daily basis after a while— (I mean, he was so— He's a very private individual.) He was growing more and more alarmed at the way things were going. He had really to more or less give up more and more of the prerogatives of a chairman of a department, so that he became much more of a figurehead, somebody who may have done all the paperwork—and I think that's precisely what is happening to this day—and simply carrying out the decisions of these heads of the department. I think at that time he also acted as kind of vice-chair for the designers, certainly their spokesman. Design was the weakest arm of the department and constantly under attack by the other two areas. By this time, art history and painting were working pretty close together, but not with design, and this must have made it extremely difficult for Bernard to operate. Certainly things were changing at that time, but not for the better.

GALM

Was this also a time of the shift within the art history area in their program and what the requirements of the program were?

BLOCH

Well, they were making their own decisions. Oh, that was certainly happening at that time. Werckmeister was taking a much stronger role, and being a strong individual, he certainly convinced in one way or another his colleagues to go along with him, some of them out of fear. Others merely left without saying anything. Certainly the younger members, who were either seeking tenure or moving up the ladder, were under a great deal of stress: it was either go along with him or get out. So the whole political climate within art history changed very radically during this period.

GALM

Was this in small ways, in an accumulation of decisions? Or was there a major change in the program?

BLOCH

Well, I think a major change was in the making and finally took place. Up to this point, it was only hinted at. I must say that this kind of approach to art history— what eventually is called the revisionist, or whatever, approach—was beginning to happen in various parts of the country. It wasn't just here. This was, of course, imported strictly for our benefit. I think many areas of the country were keeping an eye on UCLA, which became an experimental area in this. What was to eventually occur was that the department decided that it wanted a complete social-history environment. They kept changing the title, speaking about Marxism or Maoism or whatever was going on— it depended on what was in favor or in style at the department. They later on became much more outspoken in this regard. What they wanted was to be the first completely socialist social-history department in the country, and attracted somebody like [Albert] Boime, who was probably very unhappy where he was, because there was a combination of traditional and more social-history oriented approaches to art history. So this was very attractive to him when he came here. Certainly we were doing things here. The strength that Werckmeister brought to it, the aggressiveness that he brought to it, became very well known throughout the country. It was being presented at College Art Association [of America] meetings that he presided over, specifically in terms of their philosophy, so they became very well known for this. Several members of the department completely changed their approach to their own scholarship to meet the new standard.

GALM

Was that a survival tactic on their part?

BLOCH

Yes, I would say so. Sure. You can't blame them. In one or two cases these people were under threat, under people like Davidson in particular. I feel very strongly that Davidson's dictatorial ways offended some of these people, who then turned to Werckmeister, who provided them with what they felt was a very sober approach to their own problems and to creating a strong department. I think they were sold on it.

GALM

Were there any other departments nationwide that had as strong a socialist approach as UCLA?

BLOCH

No, I don't think so.

GALM

So there were individual members in departments, but not a—

BLOCH

That's right. They each had their token Marxist, or whatever it was. I think that exists to this very day. I'm not speaking about token Marxists. I mean, we were all kind of Marxists, in our own way. We were all brought up to treat of art history on humanistic levels that— I remember being at a dinner party at which a colleague of mine from an eastern institution was present. He had heard about this, and he said, "What are they talking about? We all have been involved with this from the beginning. It is all part of our understanding in terms of we're not just strictly traditional art historians, but we recognize the values of the broader approach." We've all recommended it, but we never made that a major consideration. In fact, I had students through the years who went into other areas beyond art history, but I always said to them, "This is fine." I had one student who dealt with the history of medicine and its relationship to art history, which led them into areas that were far removed from strict aesthetic approaches to problems. I always would say, "Well, remember that you're first and foremost the art historian, that these are aspects that are very important to the problem, but that in the end you have to return to what is basic to the area we're talking about." So there was always that kind of balance. I always thought that our department should have the balance of traditional, formalistic, whatever approaches to art history, as well as the more advanced. (If you want to call it advanced—they were really just as traditional as the other.) There should always be the opportunity for students to make a selection, to make a choice, to move freely, not to be frozen into one area. These people became very intolerant of anything except what they were doing, where they always proclaimed that we were the intolerant ones. This was never true. That kind of split was more destructive than beneficial in my opinion and is certainly evidenced in the resultant disarray in the department as we see it today and the demand for change, which is now reaching higher levels of the administration. Where all this is going, I don't know. But I think some of this was destined to happen because of certain intolerance that was going on and the way departments were being run and the way programs were being evolved. I can remember Davidson saying to me that he didn't think there was really such a thing as American art history, that he related American art history to Hungarian art, or something of the sort. I mean, some of this was unbelievable. Certainly when the art historians of the new generation said that we want a stronger representation in non-Western art, I was all for it. We had begun this, but we really hadn't carried it as far as it might be. It was interesting, because Davidson represented one of those exotic areas, which he himself recognized. He was in Indian art. But certainly we're talking about thousands of years of art history, a very, very important area. So these things began. But what happened was that they again lost the balance, and they began to remove baroque art and reduce the strength of Renaissance art, and so on and so forth, in their program organization. They seemed never to be able to create the kind of balance which was required, the kind of breadth that so many other institutions were able to do quite readily.

GALM

Since they were seeking such breadth of offerings in the curriculum, were you ever asked to teach in other areas besides American art?

BLOCH

Well, I remember Fred Wight once saying that he considered I had greater breadth than anybody else, and sort of resented that. Because I was teaching not just American art, but the history of prints and the history of drawings, and I was in the field of design as well. I had started out as a Renaissance scholar and was very anxious to occasionally have an opportunity to teach in my own field, but this came very rarely. Even from the early days, those representatives of particular areas guarded those areas as if it was a fortress. They built walls around themselves and did not wish to have others work in their areas. When I wanted to teach a course in the trecento or duecento areas, which were areas for which I had great fondness, Birkmeyer was very resentful of this. I don't know how strongly this was really felt. I had my own areas and enough to do, so I was not— These things didn't really occur to me. I think, as in some institutions, it's extremely healthy to request or invite art historians who are specialists in one area to teach occasionally in another area in which they might have some expertise. I think it's good for teaching. It's good for the individual not to be blocked in, as it were—and that's not a pun—in their own area completely. But that's kind of traditional for that to happen. Werckmeister, who came as a medievalist, eventually wanted really out from this and began to teach in the contemporary area, which is precisely what he's doing now, what he was doing until he left. So he certainly had that feeling, at least for himself. But remember that this also can be dangerous in terms of building any program. If you bring in a scholar in a particular area, this is meant to represent that area in the total picture. If suddenly in midstream this scholar decides that he's no longer interested and quite on his own moves out, I think this is time for reevaluation of his value to the offering and to the university. I think there is a commitment to at least be the representative of that area. You might wish to teach occasionally in the other area, but I think your commitment is to that area that you were brought to teach. It's just as bad as a department that moves off on its own and decides there should be only twenty students in each of their classes, in order to give them more time to themselves, or something of the sort. I think there's a responsibility to take care of the students, regardless of their numbers, and that you just, let us say, turn these over to teaching assistants while you move off on your own— Some of that was, in a sense, happening in our department too. I never cut the size of my classes, and there were times when they were overflowing. There was a demand for those courses. I'm not saying it was because of my personality that they were there, but the offerings were evidently needed and/or popular. Classes that would seat maybe seventy-five might have ninety-five occasionally. I recall that my colleagues were very dismayed: it had to be on the basis that they were easy classes. Which wasn't the case. I was simply overworking myself and overburdening myself. But I felt that it was my job to provide the seat, or whatever, even if it was on the floor, to that student. I certainly wasn't an easy grader, as they might assume. They wanted more and more to run their own show and to limit the classes and all of that sort of thing.

GALM

How were the course offerings determined during that period? Did you have a curriculum committee or—?

BLOCH

Well, I can't answer that with any great clarity. We had our own course offerings, and we would simply submit that to the program. If you're asking whether we had a kind of a committee in which we developed the program so that it would look like a nice healthy program that would provide students who were moving toward a degree with some kind of comprehension, I would say no. I would simply say, "This year I'm teaching such and such a course." They generally knew what I was doing, because I would alternate. There would be one year of American and another year of— Because the drawing classes and the print classes gradually grew. And when we had the quarter system, three quarters of a year, or four quarters, would be taken up with that particular area. And I would teach seminars. So I couldn't teach any more than that.

GALM

Right. I was thinking more about other people in—

BLOCH

I think I know what you mean. It would have been much more healthy if we all got together and agreed to compose a program that had a certain amount of breadth to it and content variety. But this didn't happen. I know many students were very unhappy [trying] to develop a program, and frequently they had to take things that they weren't particularly interested in. Of course the department was very anxious for them to take as many non- Western courses that were represented by people in their chosen philosophies as possible. Many students wanted the kind of breadth that they knew I both represented and recommended, but it was almost impossible for them to do this. They were sometimes compelled to take things that they didn't really want simply to be able to get through with their courses, to get through with the program to a degree. Some of them went to other departments to try to complete such programs. I think we could have done a much better job by getting together and comparing notes. I mean, as far as I was concerned, I would have been perfectly willing to fill an area that might not be represented that particular year if it was necessary to make that program look more attractive. Certainly if you look at the programs on a yearly basis presented by other universities, they much more clearly show some comprehensiveness and some degree of deep thinking in putting together such a program for the benefit of the students. But in many of these cases, the faculty just went along on its own whim.

GALM

I think one of the criticisms that came out in the investigative committee later was the thought that maybe too many course offerings were given and that this was stretching the faculty.

BLOCH

I don't remember that as being so typical at all. I remember students being rather unhappy with the limited kind of offering, at least in the areas in which they were interested.

GALM

Maybe that's the key.

BLOCH

Yes. So when you ask was there some concentration in that, I just never felt that. I always remember we were simply asked to indicate which courses we wanted to teach, and I made my own decisions. There was no sense in protesting.

GALM

So there was no master plan, so to speak?

BLOCH

No master plan, no. The master plan that we had at the beginning, when we all sat down around a table and thrashed it out, no longer existed.

1.29. TAPE NUMBER: XV, SIDE ONE JULY 30, 1987

GALM

Professor Bloch, it's been a while since we last spoke. Last time our discussions really centered on the chairmanship of the art department of [J.] Bernard Kester and also the political changes that were beginning to take place, mainly in the art history area, but I suppose in the art department as a whole also. Perhaps you can speak about the end of Bernard Kester's chairmanship in that period and then the appointment of the next chairman of the art department.

BLOCH

Well, Bernard served three years. The situation from the political standpoint had reached, as far as I can see, rather deeply into the whole structure of the art department. Kester was, as you can see, the first non-art historian to assume responsibility. He also was a professor of design, an area that always was sort of kept on the low ranges of the department's activity, not regularly supported by the painters and certainly not recognized by the art historians, which made his situation rather difficult. Bernard is a very dedicated kind of guy. I mean, he has served on many committees, administrative committees. He at that time and even afterward constantly was available at any time to do these things. I know his heart was always in the right place. But he was already taking over that responsibility in a difficult position, since the political situation was rapidly getting worse. The design people as a whole never had any problem of that sort, or very little of it. They generally hung together. Perhaps I shouldn't use the word hung, but they at least supported one another, just as the painters did, but in their own way, not letting much air in from the outside. The design people did have a lot of good community contacts, and they were turning out a lot of good people professionally. But design always had a struggle to maintain its health as an entity, and that I think I've discussed before in terms of what had gone on over the years. I know Bernard worked very hard in trying to be a true chairman of the department. Remember, up to that time the chairman did have a certain amount of clout. His access to the dean and to the administration was a fairly clear route, but that was gradually breaking down to the point where the vice-chairmen were having a great deal to say and the students had a lot of involvement. Some of the old hostilities were certainly coming forward, and having a design representative was something they never really cared about. I can still remember forming an M.A.committee for a young man who wanted to do something in abstract ceramics. I asked Bernard to serve as a member of the committee, and that created such an uproar: they wanted no design person on that committee. I said, "But here is a man who knows this field so well and who would be excellent and who was certainly consulting with the young man, as it were."

GALM

I don't quite understand what their objection was.

BLOCH

Non-art historian, non-scholarship, not crediting the design people with any scholarly—

GALM

Oh, I see. "They" being art historian people.

BLOCH

Right. As a matter of fact, it was during the period that things were getting so difficult for me. I was trying to formulate a museum program, which we haven't yet discussed in great detail. I had evolved a course in the history of design, specifically with the design people in mind and at their request. I only taught it once—it was an extremely difficult course—but I had, again, a big attendance, not only from design but from art history as well. The art historians realized that the history of design plays a very important role in what they were trying to resolve in terms of some of the style and other problems, like the graphic problems that came their way. They were absolutely enthralled. And it was an eye-opener to many of the students. I think this got back to my colleagues, who weren't too supportive. But then after all it was my course and I was a full professor, so there wasn't anything much they could do about it. They went along with it kind of reluctantly. But after that experience—and I can't remember all the details—I felt disinclined to add that to my responsibility if I wasn't going to get proper support to carry it through, that plus my unhappiness with the whole museum picture. So at one time I spoke to Bernard Kester, who was always the strongest representative of design, about my thought about finally breaking my ties to the art historians and perhaps joining their area, teaching the course in the history of design and evolving the museum course, which I felt I could not do through art history—it was too much pressure, too much strain, and too many years had gone by. He seemed very interested, and I even met with his group. What I heard was that the wind of this—he may have been chairman by that time—got to some of the art historians, who still claimed that even though they weren't going along with the program, it was their private domain. Though I don't recall all the detail, I had some hint that there was some discussion, some of it not very pleasant, with certain members of design relative to the idea that I might want to teach a museum course. There was no discussion about my shifting—that never got to them—my teaching a museum course under their jurisdiction, because I felt it would work beautifully. What I gathered was great fear on the part of the design people, being the weakest link in the chain of the art department, to start anything with me, especially the big shift. So that was the last I heard of it. Bernard didn't say very much. We met with the committee of design, and that was the last I heard of it. He never referred to it again. My feeling was that there was great fear that this would shake a lot of apples on the tree and cause problems that they didn't want to deal with at that time. So better to leave this stick of dynamite alone—which is I guess what they regarded me as at that time. I didn't think of it that way—I thought of it as a solution to my problem. Heck, we were dealing with the department, and he may have been chairman at that time—it certainly was close to that period if it was not. He may have been, because I can't imagine my not speaking to him as chairman. We were very close, and we talked about a great many things. I knew the problems that he was having with art history. Eventually, when they wanted some things to go their way, I understand they attacked him in committee meetings as chairman, actually taking advantage of his position as chairman to get things to go their way or else. They were trying to work up sort of sidebar agreements that made life very— He was a very sensitive man, and he was going through an extremely difficult period within those three years. After three years, when he could have stayed on for two, he went to see the chancellor, I understand, and told the chancellor that he intended to leave and not continue. From what I understand—I wasn't present of course—he more or less told the chancellor that he felt it was time for a review of the department, which is something that the chancellor discussed with me. I'm not sure whether I initiated it or not; I think it came in the course of a meeting I had with him on something else. He asked me about that and intimated that here is a department that could be bankrupted if they really weren't going to carry out their responsibilities. I'm not sure of the timing of all of this with relation to what I'm saying, but it was all within the same general period. I haven't drawn up a chronology, as it were, on this affair. Bernard was an unhappy man because gradually he had to give up many of the prerogatives that a chairman previously had. He more or less became a kind of signer of papers and that sort of thing rather than the leader of the department. What I'm really saying is that the leadership that the chairman was supposed to represent on a level just below the deanship was going, and just to keep peace, he obviously went along with a lot of it when it was certainly against his principles. After that, there were very few people who really wanted the job. Those among the painters whom I conceivably— Once they had broken the mold and were moving off into other areas, it could be anybody. Not that there was ever any rule about it; it was just that it was always a scholar. The reasoning for this, if I may just add that, was that in terms of recruiting, it's much easier to recruit a good scholar for a department if there is a scholar running the department. I know how scholars feel: if you're recruiting and they find there's a painter heading the department, there's far less inclination to make a change on the part of an important scholar. I'm not talking about a young scholar, because that wouldn't have bothered me when I first started, but you always would turn to the scholar as seemingly having the more responsible line and being also the man who would have the clout in your own field and to whom you could turn to for support. So after that there was, from what I could observe, very little interest on the part of some of the painters to assume this role, knowing how the department was running. It was finally Ray [Raymond B.] Brown who was offered the job, because he had been a student here, had never been anywhere else in all of his life, and they looked upon him as one of their people. His general role, his general attitude, was to let them have their own way. He had that ability of just letting things go along. He was perfectly satisfied with it going that way, even though, in my opinion, he became rather political himself, feeling that possibly was the way to go. From someone who was very approachable, at least from my standpoint (I always got along beautifully with the painters, and Ray was one of them—I was very supportive of him), he became very hostile to me suddenly. I still to this day can't figure that one out. But obviously he went along with whatever the area wanted, and the only area with any problem was the art historians.

GALM

What types of things were you discussing with him as chairman?

BLOCH

I didn't discuss very much with him. Once I realized the role he was taking, I decided there was very little I would say. First of all, he's not very articulate. He can be when he sends a letter off about Michelangelo or something of the sort, but he's not very noted for being a very articulate person. Even when the Rockefeller Foundation [Humanities Fellowships] grant came through— I mean, he did call me about that, because he knew that that was given because I was there (it was in the American field), but he allowed the art historians to handle that as they saw fit. When there was a meeting in New York of the Rockefeller Foundation, instead of sending me, he sent someone else out of art history, obviously appealing to the art historians to select their own person, when as a proper chairman he should have said, "I am sending Maurice Bloch, who after all is the father of this, and he's the proper representative." But he become so involved with the art historians personally as well that he took on some of that political attitude. He was on board when I finally resigned. I'm trying to think, because when I came up for my— Yes, he was chairman when I came up for [promotion to the] professor V [level], that's true. That's what I'm trying to think about. Because Kester was not there, and I would certainly have had no problem with him. I mean, he was still able to make his own decisions. As you may know, when promotional things come up, while there is discussion and the chairman is advised as to the opinion of the art historians, as they might meet, let us say, and if he's a non-art historian, he would need that kind of information. He is still in a position to write his own letter. They write their own letter. The chairman is supposed to write his own letter, whether it's in agreement or disagreement. He can take his own stand in the matter. It was very clear to me—and I guess I felt that from the time he came aboard, even though as I say we were friendly before that—[that his practice] was to take whatever stand they took, regardless. He was not a scholar. Even on these Rockefeller things, he actually sat in with [Charles] Speroni and other representatives if we were dealing with candidates for the scholarship. I noted with some amazement that he would suddenly become very articulate after not being articulate at all, offering his own criticism of a particular candidate. It was natural that my candidates would be the ones, because I was the only one teaching American art. And I would notice that he would take whatever side the department, the art historians, took with relationship to some candidate, whereas he had no knowledge of the field whatsoever. He didn't consult with me beforehand. He would just sit there and say, "Well, I don't think this person knows how to write" or whatever it was. Then it was up to me and Speroni to fight the battle. Because Speroni would take my opinion. Although he would do his own investigation, at the same time he wanted to have some input from me if it was one of my students or something of the sort. We had a very, very rough time. Ray Brown would play that kind of role, and those I found as distinct hostile acts as far as I was concerned, although I never knew what the cause of it was. Except that as I look at it now, I have a feeling he just wanted to go along with whatever they had to say, and there was no further discussion of it, certainly no inclination to talk to me about it, but rather to cooperate with them. When the time came to write, let's say, a letter to accompany my dossier, he wrote, I remember, on that one occasion a distinctly hostile letter, an attack on me and my production and my qualifications, something he had no knowledge of whatsoever. It wasn't based on any kind of intellectual evaluation; it was very personal. I can remember my discussion with Speroni, who took it upon himself to write a six-page letter, some of which he quoted to me in the meeting afterward, in which he was really very upset. He very rarely became so emotionally concerned about something. Because he saw what was happening in the department. He knew reading the chairman's letter that this was a distinct and personal attack, in which he said— I can only remember one point that so offended Speroni. He [Brown] said that had I cooperated with them, meaning on the political level, that they would have been more "charitable" to me—that was the word he used. That so offended Speroni that he seized upon that to write the most involved letter I had ever heard. At least the parts I heard showed how he seized upon those things almost from a legal standpoint and made it his business to be in contact with the vice- chancellor in charge of this sort of thing to work this out, because it was distinctly unfair considering our production. They were looking, you know, for problems. Now, remember, this is post-Kester. We're dealing with Ray Brown, and we now are seeing a department going more deeply into disarray, where there was no real chairman but somebody who just went along with what each area wanted. There weren't the problems with painters, and there weren't any problems with design people. Generally they kept low profiles. He knew the painters pretty well, so that was one thing. I don't know what his role was in the [Richard] Diebenkorn affair. But as you know, they're a closely knit little group, have their own views of things. That disaster certainly was the worst move they had made, but that goes back to [Franklin D.] Murphy's time and just right beyond that.

GALM

At this point were you participating in meetings of the art history section, or were you alienated entirely from the group?

BLOCH

Some of this alienation really began, I think, about the time that I served on the budget council. What they wanted from me was to come back to them and report back to them on the meetings of the budget council, which are very private meetings. I said I couldn't do that, because I said I dealt with not just art historians, but I dealt with painters and designers—I would have to attend everybody's meeting. I said at the same time I'd have to abstain, and I said I certainly couldn't communicate. Well, this they couldn't understand. Since they had no rules or regulations of their own regarding leaks, they felt that certainly this would have been something I could very readily do. In fact, when they were having the review and I went to their meetings, because I was very concerned about that review, they wanted to know exactly whether you went to a meeting and what you were called into say and all that. I had to remove myself. I mean, they created very difficult moments for me, extremely embarrassing moments. Because they had their whole agenda and the questions they were going to ask already plotted and planned. You're talking about a table this long in which not just faculty members but students were there in abundance, who were also making comments and had been for years. Besides, the stresses were beginning to tell. I couldn't go to all those meetings. I think I really cut myself off from it when I began to find that my chief interest in going, the evolution of a program— I was interested only in programs, not for the political situation, you know, who's going to vote for what and what we're going to do. But by that time, everything became political. "Museums" were of course a dirty word: this was totally against their philosophic principles. Here I was smack in the middle of something like this, running a center, putting on exhibitions. As it came out, anything I produced that came out of the gallery— And they weren't personal things. I made a very strong distinction between publications that came out of the gallery and anything I did on the outside. So I never leaned on those. Mr. [Frederick S.] Wight once said, "Well, now that you can publish, you can publish whatever you like under your name." I said, "I don't intend to do that. I intend to use my ability to publish as a means of training young people to have this kind of experience on their own and give them a lift as they move into the professional field so they'll have a dossier with a publication in it." That's what I proceeded to do. About the only thing you would find would be a little preface or a foreword or once in a long while a short essay. Those were always signed Maurice Bloch as against E. Maurice Bloch, to show that one was not the same as the other. Yet the department refused to come to grips with— When you say did I go to meetings, they gradually in a spiritual and physical way had removed me from their gatherings. I wasn't privy to what they were doing behind closed doors in private sessions. They came prepared to run a parliament, as Mr. [Otto-Karl] Werckmeister told me, to which I was not a member. I asked to be on various committees and they would vote me out, because plans for those voting responsibilities were done before they got to the meeting. So any committee I wanted to serve on I was not given, and I gradually saw that I was being eliminated from service on those committees, gradually but surely. They would formulate all the votes ahead of time, come to the meeting, and I was out. Not being interested in the programs I cared much about, and my younger colleagues being loath to talk to me for fear they would get into difficulty (and many of them were in difficulty) I was gradually being eliminated by them from many discussions. It finally got to the point that I said it wasn't worthwhile going to these meetings. I wasn't really involved anymore, and I ceased to go. Sometimes I would get a threatening— If there was something come up in which they used my name, I might write back and say, "Look, if you're not interested in the museum problem." Because when the situation would warrant it, they would not hesitate to use the Grunwald Center [for the Graphic Arts] as something that they had sponsored or produced, when it wasn't true. I remember on one occasion writing to [Arnold G.] Rubin, who was our vice-chairman, I think, at the time, and saying, "Look, since you're not interested and do not even visit the Grunwald Center, since there's no involvement at all no matter what we do, please do not use the Grunwald Center or my name as part of your accomplishment." Then I would get a threatening letter saying, "You will appear before us and debate this issue." Well, I wouldn't debate the issue. It was a fact, and there was nothing to debate. All they wanted to do is have a little spectacle with all the students sitting there. It was childish. It only added to my irritation. It was unproductive. Going to those meetings was not productive for me anymore.

GALM

Did this become, though, a real issue in your promotion review?

BLOCH

Well, of course. But, then they would have done that anyhow. I could see what they did to [J. LeRoy] Davidson. That was when I was still on the budget council, and I had to fight with that. They went along with Mrs. [Katharina] Otto-Dorn, who was coming up for similar promotion. He [Davidson] was on a professor IV level, but I think it was a question at that time of his wanting to stay on an extra year before retirement, from '67 to '68. While they came through very strongly for Madam Otto-Dorn, they did not wish to give him that privilege. What he was doing to try to do that, I think I may have implied in a previous discussion, wasn't what I would have done: he was almost selling himself short in order to get that. But I felt this wasn't necessary, that if she was to get it, he was equally. But they did not like LeRoy and made life extremely difficult when he wasn't really well anymore. It was just the privilege of staying on for an additional year, which they were ready to grant to the other person who was associated with them on a political level. Davidson was rather ambivalent, so they took advantage of that. They always knew where I was, and I never made any bones about that. I had no objection to their doing what they were doing, providing they allowed me the privilege of carrying out my own program. So when the promotional thing came up— First of all, it wasn't just the question of professor V which nobody had yet enjoyed, but it was the idea that it was me who was coming up. They felt that this was an ideal opportunity to bring all the forces into play. Professor [Alexander] Badawy was coming up for IV, I believe, and they were giving him equally a bad time. Professor Badawy, who was an Egyptologist, was a very nonpolitical type of person. He just wanted to do his own work, and he was vastly productive in his own field. They had used him on various occasions to carry out some of their own thoughts, and he was doing that just to keep peace. But he didn't go to many meetings, and if he did he was always somewhat removed from it. He was living in his own little world and didn't seem to be really on cue when they needed him to be on cue. That always seemed to me a little bit amusing. But that was all part of the fact that none of this interested him. How other people behaved is another question, but basically you either went with them or you didn't. There was no middle of the road at all. So when I came up for that promotional thing, I knew it was going to be difficult, but I felt that if they examined all of the materials and production and activity that they would see quite clearly that everything was pretty much in order. At the same time—I should go back a little bit—I can remember when I came up for just a merit increase, I had an inkling already that difficulties were going to occur. Up to that point, certainly all through LeRoy Davidson's administration— Let's see what date that was. [pause] Yes. Well, I know that I came up for a merit increase there, and he would see it through and I would get a note from him saying, "I'm pleased to let you know that your merit increase has gone through." No problem. Suddenly in a merit increase that came up—I guess it came up after he left—there was a problem. I don't remember whether it was something that was discussed with Kester or not, but there was going to be a battle over that minor thing, and I couldn't figure that one out. I remember that about that time one of my books [The Drawings of George Caleb Bingham, with a Catalogue Raisoneé] was coming out. Well, the students were already so deeply involved that they would go into the secretary's office, the chairman's secretary, and demand all the papers, all the papers that were meant to be read by faculty. Now, we're not talking about representatives. We're talking about a whole mass of people who suddenly found themselves in a position to examine all the papers. My feeling was that this wasn't just one or two people: we were talking about a whole group of people. I never could put my finger on it, except that I was getting wind of this through the secretary's office that so-and-so was coming in. I remember one I used to call "Rasputin" was looking madly about, because I had a book coming out. All the investigation was still going through, and there was plenty of material there for a mere merit increase, which ordinarily, if you're going along as always, it just goes through. I mean, you don't have to make a vast demonstration for this. But I was having a book. The announcements had come out—it was University of Missouri Press I remember. I only got one copy, an advance copy, which I had presented to my mother [Rose von Auspitz Bloch]. It was a very handsome oversize table book. Suddenly I got a message from the secretary's office saying that so-and-so had been in (that was one of those students; it was Rasputin in this case) demanding in very excitable terms that that book be produced for his immediate inspection. So I said to my mother, I remember, tongue in cheek, "Are you willing to lend your book to this occasion?" She said, "No way," because she felt as I did that the question of disrespect had gone pretty far and that what I would get back was a book in some damage because of their behavior. She said, "I'm not giving it up. It's my book. If they don't like it, they've got the announcement. That's enough for them." So a lot of screaming went on. That's why I got the call from the secretary saying, "They're demanding to see this book." Well, "they," it turned out, was not really the faculty. It was the students, who were being put up to doing this kind of thing, who were really sent out into the field. They were the advance army, as it were.

GALM

Why did they want to examine it, do you think?

BLOCH

You can rest assured that the examination would not be based on scholarly grounds. I can remember that that same book which came up during the promotional affair— All I heard, I think from— Whether it was in writing or orally, I'm not certain. It may have been in the report, which was so bad that I felt unclean after reading it. It was Rubin, I believe, who said that the introduction was a very short and not significant introduction. Well, the book was this big, you see, so the introduction didn't cover that many pages. We're talking about an oversize book.

GALM

This is the book on the drawings—

BLOCH

The Drawings of George Caleb Bingham, yes. Actually, anybody who knew the field would have realized that this was indeed a breakthrough in terms of not only his drawings but the whole attitude toward it. Again, I was approaching the problem of American art history through standard traditional scholarly lines. Sure, it was not a social history document, and there was no room for that in what I was trying to do there. It was a putting together in the right order something which had not ever been done. I don't want to go into that in great detail, but that was the way it went. It would have made no difference, I felt gradually—no matter what I did it would not be examined in an unbiased fashion. It was getting out of hand. I feel that people like Rubin and others really were in difficulty themselves because of Werckmeister's strength in the department and their obligation—at least in his case, obligation—I felt to Werckmeister, who'd played a very important role in getting him his tenure. These things were not easy for people like that to deal with either. When the actual promotional situation evolved, as I said, Badawy was also coming up at the same time. Badawy was very concerned about this because he had been turned down on a previous occasion, I think for a merit increase. I can't remember the details. Whatever it was, he was very disturbed, and since he had problems— He could write very well in his own field, even in English, but he had great problems in trying to put together a defense of his own work. What happened with Badawy— He was a loner and didn't really have people to consult with as I did, wasn't a very outgoing man. Very, very nice man and a friend of mine. He trusted me with his confidences and he said that he wouldn't hesitate to go to the chancellor, and he did several times. Of course gradually the chancellor, at least Murphy, who had brought him here, left word he wasn't to be disturbed anymore, because he would get emotional about it and then sometimes demanding. I mean, he's a Middle Easterner, and he had his own way of going about things. That didn't always agree with the people he was dealing with here—it's a completely different situation. He came to me, telling me what he was prepared to write in terms of defending his own work. I read it, and I said, "You can't do that." I said, "That will only get you into deeper water, because it shows an emotional outburst." I said, "You've got to stick strictly to your scholarly accomplishments and deal with it on that level, as difficult as it might be." So I agreed to write the letter for him that he needed. Now, I'm not quite sure what the chronology is again, but this was one of the things I remember doing for him. This might have been in connection with a merit increase. I didn't get involved in the promotional thing except to go to the meeting to defend him, but I remember having to write this letter. I said, "But please, considering my own problems, rewrite the letter in your own language," but I don't think he did. I think, come to think of it, that it did have to do with the promotion, because he eventually got the promotion. I remember that. I went to the meeting the day that both Badawy and myself were coming up for consideration, that is, within the department, department level. I naturally couldn't attend my own, but I attended the first part of it, which had to do with Badawy. To my great amazement, I counted at least seventy students present at that meeting, which was meant to be a faculty meeting with perhaps a representative or two. I knew that this was going to be a very, very difficult thing. I mean, there was no seat at the main table with my colleagues; I sat against a wall. There were students all over the place. The students had passed the word around it was to be a circus, Circus Maximus as it were. We were the Christian martyrs, both of us. I felt a little flattered that I was in Badawy's company, because here was a man who'd done 150 books, who knew hieroglyphs and I didn't, all of this kind of thing. I said, "If they attack a man like this, I don't stand a chance." Because there was no complication with him, no museum involvement except to write, perhaps, scholarly treatises relating to material in the Cairo museum or on archaelogical digs where the material would go to a museum. He didn't exhibit; he wasn't involved in any of those things. He was dealing with things like fortifications and bricks. I mean, if he would find Egyptian treasure, he'd throw it back. He was interested only in this. A very, very social kind of history orientation. I was still rather naive about it, but I felt, well, this is interesting. The attack was very vicious, with faculty making very inappropriate personal remarks about Badawy in full view of this audience of students. The students, a number of them had been put—it was at least obvious to me—on the task of digging out whatever dirt they could, mostly by calling up other students to find out whether they have anything negative to say—not positive, but negative. Remember, we had all those reports that students have to submit.

GALM

Evaluations.

BLOCH

Yes. But this went farther than that. That wasn't satisfactory to them. If you came out looking anywhere decent, that wasn't enough. They really wanted some proof that you were a bad teacher, an easy grader, you name it. Remember that they were then coming, faculty and students, to attend one's classes. I had visitations that were incredible, in which faculty would be very vocal sitting in the back rows. You could hear them muttering. I could hear them interrupting the lecture. Coming to my classes was always something they didn't enjoy anyhow—they never did before—but this time they didn't enjoy it because my classes were always overenrolled. If you had room for eighty people, there were usually ninety, some of them sitting on the floors. I was, I guess, considered a popular lecturer, but I enjoyed teaching and the students enjoyed me. I still get that from students who see me after thirty years and remember. We enjoyed one another, we had a great time. But having to grade those papers and deal with all that was not easy. I could tell that there were certain problems, because now and again you'd get a student who would be very much in view, either in class making some remark or coming up to me afterward and saying some things. I knew exactly where they came from. In one case it was somebody out of painting, a graduate student in painting, who knew nothing about art history. So I began—you spoke about Ray Brown— to have some suspicion that he too was playing some kind of- - In this particular instance I'm thinking about, he was that person's adviser. Again, this is speculation on my part, but I don't think without some basis, as it turned out. So I wasn't getting paranoid? I was just observing this. I couldn't afford to be paranoid, not about them. I was too busy in any case. So they would come attend, be vocal. The students were very much annoyed, the students who were trying to attend the class. There was a certain amount of shushing going on. But I put up with it because that was part of the procedure. I did think it was disrespectful after twenty-five years to have that kind of thing going on, that somebody had been teaching all those years and— Part of it was that my colleagues didn't like big classes. They liked the small classes which they could handle more readily. Twenty, thirty people would be the most. Twenty would be agreeable. They didn't like classes that attracted so many students. I never turned down a student. They would, and that, I don't think, sat well. It generally doesn't. But I disregarded it because the students were there because they wanted the course, even if it was one of those difficult students. The one I'm speaking of was constantly flunking, and I thought, "This is masochism on his part. I mean, what is this?" He kept insisting that he wanted those classes, but it may have gone deeper than that. I thought he was put there— Part of it was to observe me and to report back, because he was one of those who eventually wrote a letter. He could scarcely write, so I had every reason to recognize his handwriting, even though the signature wasn't there. I'm pretty good at handwriting. In any case, we get back to that famous meeting, and I don't have the day in my head.

GALM

Okay. Why don't we continue on the next side.

1.30. TAPE NUMBER: XV, SIDE TWO JULY 30, 1987

GALM

So, Professor Bloch, we're now at a discussion of the famous meeting.

BLOCH

Yes.

GALM

This was the art department faculty meeting, or was it just of the art history?

BLOCH

Just art history. You must realize that there were no representatives of other areas, not even the chairman. It would seem to me that if the chairman was to write an important letter, he should have attended these meetings too. And I should point out that neither design nor painting ran the same kind of system of this many students. They might occasionally have a student representative, which was part of the process.

GALM

Now, was there any limitation placed on the number of students that could attend?

BLOCH

Not in art history, not in art history. Originally it started out that they fought to have more and more students, and finally it was kind of an open-door policy. Certainly an occasion like this, it should have been a much more restricted affair. I mean, suddenly to come into a room full of people was something I could scarcely believe. It didn't occur to me to say, "Well, I'm going to rush over and report this," because I don't do those things. I did think it was improper. I didn't know what the legal situation was or whether indeed there was [one]. I think at that point, anything went. The vice-chancellor wasn't involved in seeking the legal system. Maybe he wasn't aware of what was going on. It wasn't until later, it seemed to me, that at least he expressed to other people some astonishment and did some investigation. But the parameters of this kind of operation were not laid down. The departments were running their own show, and within our department it was each area running its own show. But from what I understand, the painters when they were doing anything that had to do with a step situation in the promotional system, the students were not admitted to those things. I think that was also true of design. Only in art history did this get out of hand. Now, when I say it got out of hand, it got to the point that when it came— Well, I'll go one step further. The preparation for this kind of promotional thing was very intense. I don't know about Badawy's situation, although he certainly had to get letters too, but I was requested to get letters from my colleagues in the field. As one of the best known American art historians in the field, surely this seemed to me unnecessary, but I was asked to do so. But when it got beyond ten and they began asking for more and more, I really became a little alarmed as to just what the purpose was, because you surely run out of top historians on one hand. I was writing to people whom I didn't have any correspondence with. I had to go after it myself. The job of the students was to call up various students who had had my courses and to see whether they could find out something that didn't appear in the ordinary records. If they found, I guess looking through those evaluations, something that looked negative, they went after that student to see whether they could get further information. See, Badawy was very vulnerable because he was an extremely difficult person for the students to know and had alienated some of his students. I think there was one time that he literally flunked a whole group of them or was very threatening. He was difficult to understand and very demanding in his very special narrow area. So he never had a great many students anyhow. It was always a very small group of people. If he had one graduate student, that was a lot. It had to be somebody who had the stick-to-it-iveness to remain with him throughout. I didn't have that—I had a goodly number of students. I didn't take them easily. I was very carefully selective, as far as graduate students were concerned, and took a very strong stance relative to policy, department policy, and the standards I believed should be set up. My problem with the art historians was that they kept changing the rules all the time. You couldn't keep up with them as to just how they evaluated a master's degree as against a Ph.D. There was a time when the master's degree practically meant nothing to them, and some very difficult situations evolved from that particular approach. You can't blame the students for taking full advantage of these chinks in the fabric of the policy. You can't blame them at all. In fact, I remember telling one student, "Well, here's your one opportunity. Go right ahead." As it happens, they realize now that these were errors, although they won't admit to them, and they've changed back to exactly what I said they should be doing in the first place. They were trying everything, you see, but it made difficulty for someone who really wanted to follow the rules. What Werckmeister would like to do— He was desperately anxious to accuse me of what he called "circumventing the rules." It was very difficult for him to prove this, but every time he could find one little thing, he seized upon it and then relayed it to the faculty, and they created a small but elaborate discussion in their midst as to this person who was upsetting them, whatever it was. When I could prove they were wrong, they wouldn't accept it. Even though I remember bringing a case directly to the chairman's office, Kester in this case, and confronting him— Actually, the people in the department outside literally disappeared. They thought there was going to be fireworks of some sort. All I did was confront him with a problem that had made things very, very difficult for a student who was coming up for an M.A.degree. I pointed out to him that what he thought I was doing was not true—it was a matter of some paperwork. But they had their own people, students sitting around in the department looking around for these things, looking for trouble. So he said, "I still believe that you are—" He didn't say guilty, but circumventing the rules or whatever it was. It was a game they were playing. You might consider it childish, but at the same time extremely dangerous, since students were involved, who were easily inflamed and easily carried along. What they think is this fine— Not really a vendetta, but some kind of safari, as it were: who could shoot down the most people. I wasn't the only one, certainly. I was the biggest fish in the pond, and so it was especially interesting game for a lot of them. That meeting with seventy people, I knew, was probably more set up for me than it was for Badawy, but what they tried to do was to criticize him as a person, as a teacher. There were a couple of students that testified to this, and then there was lots of chuckling about this. I found it very, very disrespectful, and I finally stood up and spoke out for him. I could hear the snickering and all that business going on—you had to put up with ridicule on top of it all—but I had my say and I sat down. When they broke up, had a recess as it were, I left, terribly distressed but not knowing quite what to do. I said, "Well, I'm next on the frying pan, God knows." I made certain that some of my students were there. I said, "You might just as well go." They didn't want to go, and I said, "No, I want you to go. I want you to be aware of what is being said. You don't have to say anything." Because they were all frightened to death. I can remember that one undergraduate student who used to send me notes because she kind of enjoyed the classes— They tell me that she stood up. She said privately that she was going to stand up and protect me, whatever she could do, because she was leaving the university anyhow. I mean, they really were frightened, because it was a very hot political situation in the department. If you were my student and you defended me, you could not get a scholarship. I mean, this was the kind of thing they understood. I'm not sure how that was carried out, but certainly I had no evidence that they were getting these awards. The awards were going to people who played the rules. Remember, by that time they had the Dickson scholarships [Edward A. Dickson History of Art Fellowship]. Those were going to the favorites, and that was the danger of their having control of that large fund. That was the real danger in that: they were using it politically. The Rockefeller was the one area that they didn't have control of, but obviously when I was being left out of the meetings in New York, then there was some reasoning to them and to the chairman of the department to make certain that I had no direct involvement with this. Matter of fact, the representative who went from the department told the people at the meeting in New York that "We don't need you. We have our own scholarship." That came back to me from colleagues in the field. That's not hearsay. People came out here and said, "Who was that person who told us that, 'We don't have any interest in the Rockefeller thing. We don't need your scholarship because we have our own'?" And this was very prestigious.

GALM

Was there then a falling out of awarding of scholarships?

BLOCH

Well, we had the one award, the one that would last for a year, but it wasn't renewed. I don't know whether indeed the Rockefeller Foundation went ahead with future American ones. I've never investigated it. It may be that was the first time they did that and the last. But whatever it was, we were no longer going to be considered. I must also say, along with this, that for many years I was able to get students Kress Foundation grants [Samuel Kress Foundation Fellowships], some of which involved internships at the National Gallery [of Art (Washington, D.C. )]. Several of my students had those grants and went on to very good jobs from that. It was a very important connection. But that ceased once this whole political thing began evolving, and I'm compelled to think that this has to be in the back of it. It got across the country, and I think they wanted no part of involvement with this department. So I lost out in having my students considered. I didn't probe it. I didn't go after it because it's useless to do anything. It was there. I know this was so because I had one student who had a great deal of difficulty with my colleagues—some of them in art history—who came here from [University of California] Berkeley to work with me. She had already earned her master's degree from Columbia University. I won't go into all the details of this, which I have to regard as peripheral, but she did have some very nasty confrontations with a couple of members of the faculty, at least one of them that I know about in a very serious way. She worked very closely with me and sought my advice and needed it, and it was a very difficult situation. Well, anyhow, not going into further detail, she eventually applied for a special grant, a scholarship at Harvard [University] in her field. As she told me, she went there— Either she went on the interview or wrote to them. No, I think it was an interview run by one of my colleagues who works at Harvard, somebody I have known for a great many years. When she said she was from UCLA, he said, "Oh, no." It was for—what do they call it?—a tutor. That's part of a scholarship you get there is a tutorship. No, she had a scholarship and then applied the second year to be a tutor, which is a distinction at Harvard. When she was interviewed he found out she was at UCLA, and he said, "No, I'm sorry." Then she said, "But I worked with Maurice Bloch." He said, "That's different," and she had the tutorship. This is maybe a minor thing, but I do feel that the reputation of the department was beginning to suffer across the country. People either laughed— Because they were very active at College Art Association [of America] meetings, and it would be packed with people wondering what was going on. Very political, very Marxist in approach, which was kind of a novelty at that time, and coming out of California, a particular novelty. So they thought they were vastly successful, but a lot of them were just going there to listen at those college art affairs. The word was out that this was a problem department, and many other departments didn't want to hire people that were coming from here. I think later on they felt a little more secure in hiring people of that kind, having your token Marxist or whatever it was in the department. But all of them were frightened of a department that was becoming rapidly totally involved in this, with me really one of the very few people standing apart from that. Badawy wasn't. Certainly [Carlo] Pedretti kept himself quite aloof from all of this, going to their meetings, but at the same time not really supporting them, not on a voting stand. But they were inclined to leave him alone.

GALM

All this turmoil and the fact that you had to seek these reference letters from colleagues, did that have any effect on your reputation or your relationship with your colleagues?

BLOCH

I don't know. I mean, I drew up my own list of people I knew with whom I had worked.

GALM

Did you find this highly embarrassing?

BLOCH

Yes, I did. I found it very embarrassing, particularly with people I didn't know personally but who had reputations in the field and who knew me and knew about my work. I found it very unfortunate. I remember in one particular case when finally one of my colleagues said, "Why isn't there a letter from so-and-so in there?" In other words, it got to be twenty, twenty-five letters finally. They kept coming back for more and more. Why I agreed to continue this I don't know, except I wanted to keep peace and I didn't want them to say that I was not cooperative. I found it increasingly embarrassing once you get past a half a dozen letters. Then when I discovered that these letters from the referees, which were supposed to be confidential and their names kept secret, that those letters were turned over to the students and everybody with the names visible— What I heard—and this is only what I heard—was that the students, at least, were given the responsibility to even evaluate the referees. Things can very easily get out of hand. I have no direct proof of any of this except these are the things I heard from fairly reliable sources. But when I found that the referees names were being released and all of that, I felt very unhappy. I knew about some of the letters because my friends would send me copies of what they had said or what they were planning to do. Most were very cooperative but terribly amazed that after twenty-five years I was being investigated. They couldn't figure this all out. "What's going on?" That was generally what I was hearing. "We don't mind doing it, but what is this?" I couldn't explain it. But as you say, when it gets beyond the people that you know best, whom you first will turn to, and you get into areas of people you really don't know very well but who have to know you by reputation, it is embarrassing. You can't explain it to them. That's the fault of this, when a perfectly valid policy goes astray. But that can happen anyway. We see it happening on, let's say, other levels in our experience. We just have to turn on television and we hear it on a daily basis, that these things can happen. I've never had any objections with policy. I've always felt that the university has worked very hard through its various senate committees and so on to work out the fairest evaluations so none of this can happen. Because in the past there was a lot of emotional impact and personality conflicts that were used in evaluations, and those were very bad. I remember when I first came and sat in on some of those just how vicious they could be. So the system, I felt— I had no objection, even at this late date, of going out and getting the letters, although I realize it was going too far. We discussed it at home, and I remember my mother saying, "You really shouldn't be doing this. Take it or leave it." I said, "Well, I've gone this far. They're asking for more letters. I'll do the best I can, considering that some people may not reply or whatever it might be." But you ask that question. I will repeat it: I was very, very embarrassed and humiliated. And that was, I think, part of the reasoning, just as I felt that Badawy was being disrespected and humiliated too.

GALM

Do you know whether Badawy was put through this same procedure?

BLOCH

Yes, and I can't always figure why except that the students weren't terribly fond of him and so he was a natural target. His colleagues felt him kind of a strange individual who didn't mingle with them socially and so on. He was very much of a loner. So he was a target as a kind of comic figure, although he certainly wasn't comic by any means and he was vulnerable. He tried to go along with them, I remember, in these voting procedures, and I felt that that was very wrong. So he allowed himself to be used. When I observed that I said, "First of all, it's not my way of doing it, but I see that no matter what you try to do with those people it doesn't come out right." So I withdrew from them. I think I've explained earlier today that there was really no other way for me to go if I wanted to keep my self-respect.

GALM

Were you vulnerable? Where would that area be if you were?

BLOCH

Well, I guess they thought I was vulnerable because of the museum attachment. They resented that. Plus the fact that many students came away with the notion that I was earning two salaries, one for the center, one for the department, that a Brink's truck was driving up to the back door on payday. I got this from one of my assistants who sat on one of the student committees—because they have their own committees—in which I was being discussed. She said, "Do you realize that Dr. Bloch does this out of the goodness of his heart?" It was the term she used. They didn't want to believe it because they'd been fed other information, so they felt that I was running two jobs. But in no way was I taking leaves of absence, no way was I cutting down on my responsibility. I never took even a course off, which I was entitled to do. The way the courses were related to the center I really couldn't do that. I was teaching three specific areas in sequence. I couldn't really take off at any time, even when I was doing an exhibition for the [UCLA] Art Council. If I took a few days off and had to cancel a class, it was a big deal. That was something I didn't like to do and there was no way out of it. Whereas other colleagues were given a whole half a year off. I mean, they would demand it to do a job of that sort, and certainly in terms of the scholarship I had to do. I combined them both. I never asked for time off to do any of these things. I waited for the summer or took a few days in the course of doing some other job to also complete some other investigation. No, I don't think— The vulnerability would have to be strictly from their standpoint. I fulfilled all the obligations without really concentrating on it. They complained that I had a far greater community service record than any of them. I don't see what that's to complain about, but they didn't like it because they didn't have it. So I wasn't vulnerable there. That was always a big blank with them, relationship to the community. I always gave lectures. I was always involved in various things. Certainly at about that time I was involved with the [Virginia Steele] Scott Foundation. I guess they felt that was another—

GALM

There was no criticism of your neglecting students, was there?

BLOCH

No. They could see by the classes. I think one point they came up with, they said I was an easy grader, because one student wrote in his evaluation that he found my courses easy to deal with. Well, there were some students that were very good students and they were A students from beginning to end. The student that gave me the bad time who came out of painting— And who had a real mental problem. There was no question about it. Very serious emotional problem, and was being used, I felt. He wrote a mad letter of attack on me. That letter I recognized. There were three letters. One was done by one of their strongest young women in terms of the Marxist attitude, who had sat in on a seminar of mine briefly and left because it wasn't something she wanted. She said that I didn't give her enough time to consult with her—it was a very minor kind of thing. I felt that none of the negative letters—and I only counted three that they could dig up— really were valid. I could tell exactly whereof they came because I knew those people. They stuck out like sore thumbs—everybody knew about them. The rest of them were silent. There was nothing. I had very good rapport with students because they knew of my deep affection for what they were trying to do. Certainly my graduate students were deeply devoted to me because of the time I gave to them, not just on the student level, but far and beyond that on a professional level. Many of them were out in the field, and those were the letters that came in too, among those, from the people who were success stories. These were things they tried to dilute. You see, the way the system works is they're supposed to come to you and make an oral report, or it can be put into writing. Rubin came to my office after all of that. I was hearing what was going on, and Rubin was particularly hostile to me for reasons I really can't estimate, except that he blamed me for his lack of success and the fact that I took issue with his way of handling students, strong issue with that. He was supported by Werckmeister, who was certainly vastly responsible for making certain that he got his promotion, his tenure, when he really wasn't ready for it, and he was bounden for that. I certainly was aware of that: he was being used. It's a rather sad commentary on the system and what it does to people. But Rubin came to my office with blood in his eyes, I felt. I said to him, "Arnold, I—" He said, "Well, we've come through with your report, and I'm here to report to you." I said, "Well, I'm sorry that this has come to be your job." He said, "Oh, I don't mind." I said to him, "Well, in that case, suppose you just go and submit a written report to me." I got him out of my office as quickly as possible, because I felt it would end up not very happily, that he was looking forward to telling me a lot of things that—

GALM

So he was vice-chairman of the area, of the art historians?

BLOCH

I don't know what he was at that particular moment.

GALM

Or was he just perhaps the rep?

BLOCH

I think he was the representative at least. So they finally submitted a report to me that was I felt very vicious in its attack, diluting any of my accomplishments, which is very easy to do. They didn't care for my scholarship; I was too active in the community. It made very little mention about the Grunwald Center as an important part of the department, because certainly they never came up to visit or to confer with me or to be helpful. I would have to reach out for them and literally bring them in by force. They did not come voluntarily. They just didn't want to be seen there for fear of problems in the department. I guess that became sort of part of it. Then it was followed by the report from the chairman, which simply bore out everything they said. Of course, as I say, he had no ability to make that kind of judgment. I simply packed it up and put it away. I was supposed to rebut and I refused. Then Ray Brown inquired as to if I did rebut could they rebut my rebuttal. So I said, "This is useless." The secretary of the department said, "Oh, you're not going to?" I said, "No, this is a futile effort." I said, "I know what they're up to, because how can you defend the personal?" How can you? I mean, this was not based on any knowledge of my field. Certainly all the referees I knew and those letters I had seen were highly complimentary, people who knew my work and knew it well and who had done a thorough job. I didn't see all of them, but I doubt whether there was a single negative note. There couldn't be. I'm the one that's most self- critical of myself. I'm never satisfied with anything. So if anybody would have been the one to write the letter it should have been me, because I can be very self-critical. I'm never satisfied with anything after it's done. "My God," I say, "I should have done something else. " But you know there was nothing that they were doing that was comparable. The only one who was really producing heavily was Pedretti, in substantial proportions, the sort of thing none of us were doing quite like that. Just remember that I had to produce in a number of fields. But there was nothing that would say that it was strongly leaning on museums or whatever, although I think they seized on that area of my work. Even though, as I've told you, that was always clearly indicated as not being something I even cared to review. What I submitted to them was a kind of a review of what we'd done in the Grunwald. I felt I should do that. It was put out in a kind of scrapbook which showed the exhibitions we did, the installations, the catalogs, and that sort of thing. I felt that I couldn't just cut that out—that was part of the life I was doing in connection with the university. But I didn't claim that as my major thing. They had all the reviews of my books. I think what they did was kind of fascinating. They went through the reviews with a fine-tooth comb, looking to see where they could find one slightly negative note, and they found one where— I think it was Alfred [V.] Frankenstein. He was a music critic and an art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, whom I knew quite well and who liked my work. But he was not a scholar. What he wrote were things like After the Hunt and so on. They were sort of half history, half fiction. He tried very well, but he was more interested in that whole aspect of it. A charming man who had deep affection for American art. All he did, I think, was try to show that he had made a discovery that I had missed. It was not anything of any significance whatsoever, but I think that was the area that they associated with a negative view. It really wasn't. It was Alfred trying to show— I think it had something to do with [George Caleb] Bingham's use of red, white, and blue, and that maybe that has something to do with patriotism. Something as strange as that. That may not have been the specific one, but I remember that being something he thought he had discovered. Besides, he had found a Bingham under somebody's bed in La Jolla, and he wrote about it as his discovery. You know it was that sort of thing. But this had no basis in scholarship. He had no quarrel with me there because that was outside of his ability. He was a friend, and I submitted that review along with all the others. He was thrilled that the Bingham books came out. Well, they didn't like the scrapbook. I heard they didn't like that. They didn't find that suitable. I think, without proceeding to discuss this in any further detail, it was something that was planned well ahead of time. This was to be a time for a major attack. This is what Speroni felt. He was infuriated by the department's behavior. He knew by that time about the grand meeting and said to me, "You know, I couldn't attend because I wasn't invited." It eventually got back to the vice-chancellor in charge of this kind of thing to find out whether anything in this was illegal. He called in, I understand.

GALM

Is this [William P.] Gerberding then?

BLOCH

No, no, no. This would have been [Harold W.] Horowitz, who, after all, had to make the decision as to whether I got my promotion or not. It was a difficult thing for him to have to deal with as well, because it went to the ad hoc committee and the ad hoc committee felt negative about me. What happens in those committees, at least from my own observation, is that if the department takes a strongly negative stand, the ad hoc committee is inclined to go along with the department with the feeling that this is somebody who's not wanted. They don't care. They really don't know the situation in the department, and they do not make it their business to get involved in the political aspects of it. They will almost automatically take a negative stand and rather not recommend than recommend. You know, it can work in a whole variety of ways. On budget council I've seen situations where somebody had been turned down by ad hoc committees strictly on the basis of inability to produce. This is for a tenured situation. Then that person finds a bit of illegality in the way it was handled on the department level—and I'm speaking of a specific case that I remember at this point—and threatens to sue the university. This is the kind of thing that frightens the university, where they have piles of lawsuits against them on a whole series of things and most likely might overturn ad hoc committees with that in mind. I hate to say that, but those things can happen and have on occasion happened. The university gets bogged down in all of this kind of thing and feels it's not nearly worth it, that perhaps this is somebody who will pull himself together and go forward, but rather than face legal situations in something where the university just missed something, go ahead and take the chance. In my case, this was by that time well understood on the administrative level that this was a particularly difficult case, because never, never, never in all the years that I was at the university did I have anything but support. Regardless of whether it was a head of department who was not exactly a friend— And I'm not saying that was the case. I always had good relationships with all these people. It was the fact that I was doing two jobs. I was doing something nobody else had done. The thing was getting bigger and bigger, and I was going along with it, having been advised all along the line that this was a delicate situation, that it needed support. As long as my accomplishment as a scholar and as a teacher, those aspects of the academic situation, were clear and productive, they went ahead with it. They never got involved so much with the Grunwald, which they preferred to leave outside and so did I. I never used the Grunwald as a promotional gimmick, if we can call it that. It certainly was something somebody else would have leaned on very heavily in terms of how much work he would do as a teacher. I know people who work for the galleries and so on. They insist on half time or one course off and that sort of thing. I never did that, and that is a clear view as to my feeling that this was peripheral. This was my baby, as Speroni used to call it. Fine, just call it my baby, and I was glad to deal with it. I loved it, put in sometimes double the time I might otherwise. I was up there every day. I gave them my attention. I directed it. As long as I was getting some help up there in terms of staffing— And these were students in training. The whole thing fitted ideally into the kind of academic life plus that I always wanted to do, and that's speaking quite frankly. But even if I didn't have that, I felt I could stand very strongly on my contributions to scholarship in my field, which were very highly thought of. There was nothing really comparable among most of my colleagues in the department, who kept their so-called investigations going on year after year after year and nothing happening. It was only Pedretti that was the most productive and Badawy. The others were not that productive.

GALM

So what action did the ad hoc committee take?

BLOCH

Well, as I understand it, the ad hoc committee, because of the terribly negative department affair, were inclined to be negative at that point—I guess inviting me to come up again. I think what the vice-chancellor at one point had in mind was that they would give me a merit increase and that I would come up again the following year without further department involvement and would automatically get it. That was the way the university wanted to deal with an inflammatory situation. I refused. I said, "No way. I am not going to allow that thing to lapse that way." I was up for a promotion: thiswas the time for the decision, either or. So I received the promotion.

GALM

How did that come about then?

BLOCH

That comes from the vice-chancellor.

GALM

So in other words—

BLOCH

Those decisions are made at that level, and then the chancellor okays it.

GALM

So the vice-chancellor, in a sense, overruled the—

BLOCH

Oh, yes. Well, that happens all the time. There's nothing unusual in that.

GALM

I see.

BLOCH

I've just told you about a similar case where the fellow was constantly receiving that on many, many occasions. The person we're talking about as the chief mover in all of this, when he came to this university, was turned down by the ad hoc committee but was appointed to a tenured position without any previous teaching training or anything. That was simply because they wanted to fill this particular spot. It was a different reasoning there. But I remember that very well, because the person who was on the committee from our department was infuriated that this particular scholar, whom they didn't feel was a very good scholar, even though he'd been turned down on the basis of scholarship received the job anyhow. I have no way of checks and balances on all of these things, but there are always reasons why these things happen. The fact that I got it wasn't on a popularity chart. This happened to be, I think, the result of the university realizing that this was a very difficult situation and that my past history was very solid and that there was no reasoning behind this. Besides, Speroni made a strong pitch. I mean, he went back and forth on this. He was infuriated that this kind of thing would happen. Although he consulted with me on the different proposals, I said, "No, it's a point of honor with me. I'm not going to make this easy." It would have been easier for the university in a sense to allow this thing to calm down and then simply at the end of the next fiscal year to simply okay it. But I insisted on victory, if anything.

GALM

Was Dean Speroni's support crucial in the—?

BLOCH

Oh, yes. Absolutely. The dean's position has to be crucial in this. It's very pivotal at that particular point when it's so sticky that an ad hoc committee reacts to the department— And that, as I say, is not unusual, because I've been on such committees and I know how that operates. It then depends on the dean to either take a strong hand or to let it go. But I know how he felt about this. Speroni had worked very closely with me. He knew what I was doing because of his connections with the Art Council, which was operating, and he attended all our meetings of the Grunwald. He knew of my scholarship; he read everything I wrote. And he was a very good scholar himself, so 1 had no problem. With him, I knew I would get a fair shake. But I had never seen him so upset by the whole business, because he was having many problems with the department, art history. He was just at his wit's end as to what to do. This was coming close to his retirement. But he too was very happy that he finally got that cleared away.

GALM

Did this sort of complete your alienation from the art history section?

BLOCH

Well, it had been reached—

GALM

Certainly it didn't endear you to them.

BLOCH

Oh, no. The fact that I beat them was certainly regarded as a political setback—that's all I can call it at this point, that it wasn't made known that they could attack a full professor and wipe him out. In the past, you see, they forced Karl [M.] Birkmeyer out. He wouldn't come up for promotion, period, and he left the university—a great loss to this department. But he didn't play the game. "This is why I left Germany," I remember him saying. Others, the younger people, just left and went to other jobs. Only the handful that were left and formed the backbone of this whole problem—I mean, I insisted it was a problem—kept on. No, I felt at that point that I was better off. The museum program had died off. They weren't interested, and I could see that they were only leading me by the nose and not willing to really seriously get on with that, which was very close to my heart. I certainly didn't feel that after this defeat that they were going to then return to me and say, "Let's do this another way." To me it would have been much more appropriate. The door was never closed on my part. I never entertained any— I disliked what they did, but personally I felt I could get along with the devil himself if indeed they would come to grips with what the basic problem—that we were all state employees who had a job to do and that we jolly well better go on and improve the work we do together. But you see, they were fractioning off. They weren't getting along too well, I felt, individually. Those who were frightened had kept on going to the meetings and so on, but it wasn't a happy department. There was really a malaise that goes back—

1.31. TAPE NUMBER: XVI, SIDE ONE AUGUST 7, 1987

GALM

Professor Bloch, last time you spoke at length about the time that you came up for promotion to professor V [level] in the department. Can you place that by date, perhaps a little more specifically when that occurred?

BLOCH

My feeling is that the preliminary review by the department must have taken place in the fall of 1977, because the actual promotion date doesn't come before July of 1978. As you know, these are three-year evaluations. I think if my memory served me correctly, the preliminary meetings, which take place over a period of months, first began in the fall of 1977, which you remember is exactly the same year in which the review itself, the final review, had been submitted. There again I can't give you specific month, day, and so on, kind of things. I probably can if I go through my records more carefully. But I at this point tend to be a little fuzzy about the exact dates of this sort of thing.

GALM

I guess my question or thought is what influence do you feel that the review itself and what was happening had on sort of the orchestration of what was occurring to you then in the promotion process?

BLOCH

Well, let me say this. You must remember that the review itself went on for nine months—what I generally refer to as a full pregnancy. So it was building up. There was a lot of unhappiness in the department, number one, over being reviewed. That kind of a full review, administrative review, was very rare in the history of the university. The fact that it took place and the chancellor [Charles E. Young] had ordered it must have in itself created a great deal of suspicion among the art people that someone had promoted this. I'm sure there was some suspicion of that kind. I think I mentioned to you that [J. Bernard] Kester's leaving of his chairmanship— Upon his leaving the chairmanship in '75, he was summoned by the chancellor, as I remember learning, and one of the things he told the chancellor was that he could no longer carry on because of the attacks that were going on and the fact that the prerogatives of a chairman were gradually being dissipated and reduced. That was the signal that I think we mentioned has been continued from that point on. It's unthinkable to have a chairman on for more than five years. He stayed on three years. If you go back over the history you'll find very few chairman even stayed five years, but five was the limit. And here you have [Raymond B.] Brown coming later on for six years or more, so you know that this is not a healthy sign of a revolving responsibility on an administrative level in a department such as ours. But that's neither here nor there. So there was a buildup for this. I'm sure it came from other sources as well. I'm sure that Dean [Charles] Speroni must have discussed this; this must have been discussed on various levels. My problem certainly wasn't unknown. Because what I was doing was regarded as something rather special, something that should be carefully nurtured since it was an administrative service in addition to what I was doing as a teacher. This required a considerable amount of stress and strain to keep the thing moving on both levels as the programs kept growing, but that didn't bother me providing there was support. But with the support from art history drifting away, because what I was doing at the [Grunwald] Center [for the Graphic Arts] more than anything else, although my teaching reflected it as well— Connoisseurship, the more traditional mode of teaching, was not regarded as valid by the art historians, who felt that this wasn't important. They weren't interested in works of art per se. The students were: the student wanted to know what makes an art work tick. My classes were filled to capacity all the time, which was disturbing to them. But perhaps I'm going astray, because what you wanted to know was the relationship. The fact that this went on for nine months, and I went to various meetings of the art historians, because at the time I felt it was important. I was no longer on budget, and I was concerned, too, about art history and what was going to ultimately be said in terms of the review, and I did participate. I did go, but that became very, very difficult in itself. I distinctly remember one of these orchestrated meetings in which they were trying to find out who had been summoned to testify, because like all hearings, we were summoned, some of us, to talk. Now, these summonses I regarded as confidential. It wasn't up to any of us to come back and report to the department exactly what was being said, what kind of questions were being asked and so on. It wasn't a public hearing. These were individual things. I remember when I was finally called in, it was a very tight little committee made up of people from music and theater arts and so on, headed by [Blake R.] Nevius, who was the chairman. I felt these were confidential discussions meant to be quite truthful as to how things were. I can't remember exactly what I said, but I was very careful because I wanted to protect the department at the same time. They knew exactly, it seemed from the discussions, what problems I was facing. That evidently had been fed into it long since. What they were trying to find is how to improve the condition. I don't think there was any thought on the part of the review committee that this was going to be a bankrupted department. What they were looking for was how can we improve it. It kind of reminds me of the hearings we just passed through on the government level. You know, what can we do to check what is going on now and to improve the quality of the performance? Do we need additions to the faculty? You know, what is wrong? But even at the meetings I went to they were busy questioning each of us: "Have you been summoned yet? What did you say?" All this kind of thing. They were very nervous, very, very paranoid about what was to be expected. That kind of surprised me, because I felt that if they were so sure of what they were doing, they should have had a much more positive view of things. The fact that they were in such disarray alarmed me. I must say that now as I look back on it.

GALM

When you say "they," do you mean specifically art history people?

BLOCH

The art historians. I only went to the art history meetings. We didn't go to other meetings, and I don't know what the discussions were. I imagine that the representative of art history discussed certain things with the representative from painting—possibly. There never had been a great deal of unity. Each area suspected the other one; there wasn't a great deal of good fellowship. I think they drew on each other when they felt needed to; otherwise, they worked independently. But as I told you, they each had a different system. The painters would never at a promotional discussion bring in students, where the art historians would invite them all to attend—that kind of thing. What I'm trying to get back to is that there were all these many months and— That was prior to my coming up for promotion. When you asked me this question, I never thought of there being any connection. But suddenly I realize that there had to be some relationship in the long run. I think the fact that they were going through this troublesome situation only made the situation worse, as they began to suspect who may have played a role in this. I'm quite sure many of them were aware of the fact that I had, for instance, a good relationship with the chancellor's office, chiefly through the center. But that was necessary. I know they didn't like it when I became a member of the Graduate Council because they knew I'd be privy to a lot of the information relating to appointments in the department, that I'd read all the papers, and they didn't want that. I know that they made difficulty for me there because I found it was futile to even continue to work there. I felt there were leaks, and I felt there were problems that I couldn't deal with my colleagues up there because of the situation in the department. And they wanted me to report on all of those meetings, which is not possible. So I think you find yourself gradually, in a sense, being isolated. You get to the point where you say, "Look, I've got a job to do. I know what I have to do. There's enough stress in this anyhow. I'm just going to get on with my own work." Now, when it came to the promotional thing, I knew this was going to be difficult, but I didn't know. I knew there'd be a battle ahead, but I didn't know how much of a battle. I thought they'd take a certain amount of pride in the fact that one of their number was coming up for a professor V step, which had never happened before. I knew they'd made it difficult for people on the IV step, but I thought they would take pride, because there already were painters on the V step. There were never any problems on the painters: they supported one another. They understood one another, and they took a certain amount of pride in seeing their number progress up the ladder. After all, the system has many good points, as I've said, and if used properly there's nothing wrong with it. But misuse it and it becomes a problem, and that's precisely what they did here. So when it came to getting referee letters, I was asked first to submit ten, which was normal. Then it went up and went up and up, till there must have been twenty, and then they weren't satisfied. Then they got the students involved to read the letters. Those letters were confidential. They weren't supposed to see the names of the people who'd written them. They got the names and, from what I understand, they began evaluating the referees. I mean, really, these things got out of hand. It became embarrassing. I think I've told you of the meeting to which the many students came and that I had a real whiff of what was going on in the treatment of Professor [Alexander] Badawy, who was only coming up for IV step.

GALM

Do you feel that there was antagonism or resentment directed towards you as a result of the review report?

BLOCH

Maybe. Because as I think I mentioned to you, the review committee did probably what they shouldn't have done, but I felt they had good reason for it: they selected those members of each area they regarded as distinguished in terms of their performance. I was one of them, of three art historians. I'm sure once that was read— Because that became an inflammatory document as far as they were concerned. The painters rose up in rebellion, because they were more or less regarded as not doing a very good job and that none of them were terribly distinguished. I can remember when assistant chancellor [William P.] Gerberding came to a meeting and they literally attacked him verbally unmercifully at that point. I felt that was really inappropriate. I mean, why not sit down and discuss the matter? After all, professional people are used to being examined by their peers and evaluated. There are many painters who get torn apart and depressed; there are theatrical people whose careers had been thrashed in the press but then they managed somehow to survive and get on. The question is find out what's wrong and get on with it. I've always been of the opinion if my colleagues had sat down and said, "Well, we would like to see you do this." Or "We don't like the exhibitions. We'd like to see you do more of this." Or "Is there anything in terms of teaching? Can you emphasize something more or less?" Of course, I didn't review them. In the course of the review, they were coming in large numbers to my classes, somewhat amazed that there was such a large turnout of students. This they didn't care for at all. They were making what I considered kind of obscene gestures in the room, [laughter] making noises and shaking their heads and so on, which I could see. But being an old ham who is not easily diverted, I let it pass, because there was a job to do. But that was meant to be disconcerting. It was meant to be a problem. And it was the beginning of what they set out to do. I felt that this was part of it. I'm sure the fact that the review committee and people campuswide knew me very well, chiefly I guess through the Grunwald and the fact that I was very active on campus— Many of them were not. They had isolated themselves from all of that, except to take advantage of whatever political situation they could in terms of infiltration. Now, that word was not used by me, but other members of the faculty brought that to me. I wasn't really sitting down and evaluating them, except to be very unhappy with what was happening. What was happening to me was my attempt to involve myself more and more in a great many things, since I felt the department really didn't want me, that every time I'd come to a meeting it was an unpleasant experience and that I was gradually being isolated. So when the opportunity came— And that was shortly after that period. This was already '78, after I had already received the professor V. (I'll get into that in a moment. ) When I was approached to become the vice-president of the [Virginia Steele] Scott Foundation in Pasadena, I felt not only was the space just right, the distance right, but it was an ideal project for me, where I could meet with people who appreciated me and who needed me. It was an incredibly good experience for me. The problem that I did not really see coming at that point, although it was already there, was that I was overworked, along with being overstressed, and I was beginning to suffer the consequences. That was the beginning of that. That had already occurred within that period where I was trying to run to a community situation from teaching all day, from running the center and so on. What it would seem to me was happening was that "Okay, you isolated me. I will now fill that gap that I would have given to you with other work." And that's what I was doing. I went into community effort and to the Scott Foundation. That was a day-and-night affair. I'd get home at night and start working on plans for what had to be done. It was an enormous task I was faced with out there. It was not simple.

GALM

Do you feel that there were any conversations or any actions that you had with university administration that might have encouraged the review to take place?

BLOCH

No, I never suggested anything like that myself, as far as I can recall. I think the chancellor rather obliquely was referring to this when we'd have a conversation about something else, although he's always been very cautious about that. But I think the concern was— And I would get that from [Franklin D.] Murphy in the past. This was nothing new. This was a festering situation. When I said to you that the museum training program was important to the whole picture, that comes chiefly from the fact that Murphy said while he was still chancellor and afterward, "If we're going to do anything here in art history, it's going to be to develop such a program." As you know, Dr. Murphy's very museum oriented, very community oriented. The reason why we became such close colleagues was because we shared a common interest in the library, in the evolution of the Grunwald, which he grasped as an opportunity to do something constructive. You know what he did with the [Franklin D. Murphy] Sculpture Garden. I can name many, many things. All of this he felt had to do not with just a community demonstration. He wanted the community interested, and therefore he encouraged the [UCLA] Art Council for their support, but he saw this as being a kind of Renaissance approach to the study of art—not just in art, but involvement with all kinds of cultural ideas. So he wasn't too far removed from what they were trying to do. But they never once—I'm talking about my colleagues in art history— attempted to invite him into their midst to talk about what he has on his mind. There's nobody more articulate in this world that I've come to meet, in this professional world, than Franklin Murphy. Dr. Young is not that interested personally from a collecting standpoint. From the minute Dr. Murphy left, he called me in immediately to advise me and to assure me that he wanted me to continue what I was doing, and he was always very supportive. Although we didn't meet as frequently, because he didn't have the direct— He provided the budget. He came through with the support that I needed. I always knew there was support there, so we didn't need to discuss the department. That's ridiculous, in my mind, that that would have happened. It just makes sense. I can remember him once referring, you know, obliquely to the department as I was leaving his office on some other mission, but I certainly wasn't seeking him out. I think once when I really was becoming very desperate about my own situation, in the course of another meeting I mentioned this. He immediately withdrew, and I understand why. He felt that was a faculty problem and wasn't something that would come to him in this way, that it would have to come to him as a result of recommendations, various committees, the paperwork that needs to go into it. But I can remember feeling very unhappy at one point and actually endeavoring to place my own problem in front of him, but I realize now that that wasn't the way one worked. When you get kind of desperate you look for an ear that can understand. "Hey, what's going on here?" Do you know what's going on, what I'm going through?" But it never went farther than that.

GALM

What about Dean Speroni? Do you think he encouraged the review?

BLOCH

Well, that's something else. Dr. Speroni, as all of the deans were prior to [Robert H. j Gray, was very open. Their door was always open. You could easily reach them and you could always come and have a discussion. They, too, were very circumspect and very careful that if you came to them they would hear you out and try to advise you if there was some problem. But most of the problems that you came to them with were not strictly personal. I think that there were many members of the department who came to them with their private problems. I'm quite certain about that. Speroni, of all of the deans, I came to know very well. After all, Speroni was dean for twelve years, so that was really the heart of my major work at the university. He was deeply interested in art, very supportive. When we formed a friend's group for the Grunwald, he made certain that he came to every meeting, participated. He wasn't just a listener. He was very articulate and, as I say, supportive. He would find the additional money I might need if my budget was low and used whatever funds he could get after to do this. Always very helpful, interested in acquisition. His wife [Carmela Speroni] always extremely helpful if there was a Print Council [of America] meeting in Los Angeles (that's the eastern-based group, professional group). She would plan the luncheon and do things of that sort. I could always count on that kind of support, and, as I say, my own problems I could easily discuss with him. He certainly was well aware of the department's problems, and that makes sense. On that level it was up to— So if you ask me whether it was possible for that to happen I could see that that would have been the avenue. But I have no idea of how that was done, if indeed it did happen, whether it was by memoranda, conversations, or whatever. I have no idea what access a dean has to a chancellor on a day-to-day basis. These were not questions I ever discussed.

GALM

Was there any specific occurrence or incident that might have prompted it at that time rather than—?

BLOCH

No. I think what I mentioned last time was that when the negative vote of the department came through, which I said was also for Badawy as well as for myself— they didn't make an exception—it was so brutal and so hostile that I think he sensed that the climate and that the whole approach was very unprofessional. To actually say, as I remember specifically when he went through it point by point— For the chairman of the department to say that if I had in a sense behaved myself, whatever that meant, that they would have been—and this is the actual quote—more "charitable" in their evaluation of me, he felt that was decidedly inappropriate. That, I think, was what stimulated him to write his own strong letter. Ordinarily, he might have just said yes or no with a short note, but he was very concerned. I've never seen him more agitated than at that time. He told me that he had sat down and he had written a six-page letter on my behalf and then proceeded from that point to carry it to the vice-chancellor [Harold W. Horowitz]. Now, whether he went to the chancellor, I don't think so; I think he went strictly to the person who would have to make the recommendation to the chancellor. As you know, that's the way it goes. Even the vice-chancellor was concerned, because when you get departments behaving in a certain fashion, they simply go by the paperwork that comes before them, just as the ad hoc committee works that way. They don't select your friends—that would make no sense at all. There is a representative from the department. Well, in our department they would naturally have selected somebody. You know, what happens— I don't think you know, but according to regulations, the department makes the recommendations as to the representative from the department, which doesn't necessarily mean that the budget council will select one of those people, but I've never know them to select somebody else. They generally would select one of those people. I don't know who represented, who acted for me. I must say this, getting back a little bit. They were so concerned about—rather suspicious is probably the better word—about all these committees and what they were doing that one of the questions they wanted from me was to know every bit of business that went on there, which I refused to give them. At their meetings I simply abstained from casting any vote, because I felt that was the proper approach to dealing with it. I can remember that one of the art historians was a particularly grievous case to them. He had come up more than once and had been rejected by the ad hoc committee, at least the one that I remember, but I think there was more than one. The word that had come back to the budget council while I was on it was that they felt that I should not participate in judging this man's case because I had been the representative of the department in judging him before. It wasn't true. They just didn't know. They just made a stab at it. They had probably recommended some people who had not been in that particular instance, because it was a troublesome case, selected. And of course I was privy to the name of the person who had been a member of that committee, which they didn't know. I was in no position to report back to them, "Hey, you know—" But the budget council knew immediately that what they were saying didn't make sense, because I had not been party to that at all. It so happened it was somebody outside of art history, another member of the department. These are just the little symptoms I'm trying to point out to you which made my position rather strenuous, [laughter] to put it mildly. How do you defend yourself by reporting back confidential information? You just don't do that, so the situation worsens. So I can see a lot of that was difficult. Perhaps they suspected that I was having tea with the chancellor or something. It was absolute nonsense. The chancellor never discussed intimate matters of the department. The person who would discuss this would have been the dean. I can only assume that that happened, but I don't know. I don't know what the chain of command is in terms of getting information of this sort. Certainly the chancellor's office must have been well aware of some rather heavy problems, but they wouldn't have to get that from just one source. It's conceivable that the one area I mentioned when Kester resigned, which rather disturbed the chancellor, was probably the key in the door at that time. Obviously the chancellor's office was keeping its eye on this explosive situation, or whatever you want to call it. I'm sure Dr. Murphy was well aware of it through the Art Council and various other bits of performance that made all of their activity all too obvious. I don't know how much he knew, let's say, about the Rockefeller Foundation [Humanities Fellowships] award for American art, for instance. That was a very prestigious award, enabling some of our best students to get awards, and actually it was granted simply because I was here. Yet I was never asked to attend their meetings, not by the department. They sent someone else, who went to the meeting in New York and told the Rockefeller colleagues assembled there that "We really don't need your award. We have our own awards." And that came back to me. So all they did was to spread the word throughout the country, which I think accounts for the difficulty in filling my slot, which has been vacated since the fall of 1983 and they still haven't filled it.

GALM

So you feel that there were probably a lot of—

BLOCH

What am I talking about? Since the fall of 1981. We're talking about more than six years.

GALM

So the chancellor's office and the vice-chancellor's office were hearing a lot of complaints about the department from many sources.

BLOCH

Look, I know from the past that the chancellor is very well aware of a lot of things. The chancellor's office is well aware. I was always amazed to meet Chancellor Young at the elevator in Murphy Hall when I was on my way to a meeting of the budget council, and he knew exactly when my sabbatical was coming or whatever. I was very surprised at these things. These were not things we discussed, because we didn't see each other but maybe once in two years if something came up. It was a memo that I'd sent relative to the Grunwald or— My conversations with him had to do strictly with business, nothing to do with anything— Or something that he wanted me to do relative to design of the office, or whatever. I only had the comfort of knowing that if I really needed him, it was possible to do so. I saw much more of Murphy because of our close involvement in the actual building of the collection.

GALM

What was your personal opinion of the membership of that committee?

BLOCH

Well, I think the choice of Blake Nevius was ideal. Blake Nevius has always been selected because not only is he willing to do so, he's interested in art. So he's familiar with not just painting but all the other areas too. He's interested in theater; he's interested in dance. He has a familiarity and a sympathy for all of these things, besides being a very fair individual, as I have said. I've come to know Blake very well, and I knew him really much better since that time. When it came to nominating another member for the Scott Foundation board, I nominated him, in fact, along with Speroni at that time, and he's still a member. He's very forthright. He's very fair. He really took nine months out of his life, including giving up a much needed sabbatical, to do that job. The university almost always turned to Blake when they wanted somebody who was substantial and articulate and able to administer such a difficult task. But he'll never forget it, I can judge. It was a very bitter experience. He was attacked too. So were the outside members. A member from Harvard [University] was attacked at one of the College Art [Association of America] meetings by a member of our department for having participated. I mean, what is this? I can't remember all the members of the committee, but I knew there were people—

GALM

Here's the list.

BLOCH

Let me see if I can remember.

GALM

It gives a little description of them also.

BLOCH

See, I never met up with Seymour Slive. These were people who came from the outside, and they were, I think, advising. Whether they sat in on any of these special meetings with faculty, I really can't answer that. But I knew [Henri] Lazarof and I know Allegra [Fuller] Snyder and Eugen Weber. Some of those people were at the meeting I attended.

GALM

So you had no special relationship with any of the outside reviewers?

BLOCH

No. I mean, I knew Walter [W.] Horn, but we never had any contact at the time of this review. They were simply called in to evaluate it, and those were good people. Is that all they had? I thought there were even more. No, I guess not.

GALM

Were you summoned then at some point before the committee or part of the committee? How did that work?

BLOCH

I was summoned to a private meeting. That was the way it was done. A group would call you in and then they would ask you for your opinion and that sort of thing. When they were reviewing the dean, for instance, they had similar committees. That is the way it works. They call you in for a half hour, something like that.

GALM

It seemed that in the report itself that the committee had invited members of art history to speak with them and there was sort of a general reluctance in art history to respond. Then it was only towards the end of the review that they decided that indeed that they did want to speak to the committee.

BLOCH

Well, that's par for the course. I think what I told you is that they resented the review in the first place, and once it was on its way there wasn't anything they could do to stop it. I can understand why they would feel, "We're not going to respond." That wasn't something they spoke to me about. What you're telling me is understandable, because they felt that they were doing the right thing and therefore they didn't need to defend themselves. I didn't know anything about that when I was finally called in. I went, that was all. I felt it was a summons to participate in something that hopefully would be constructive.

GALM

So you didn't feel threatened by the committee or their charge?

BLOCH

By the Blake Nevius committee?

GALM

Yes.

BLOCH

No, no, not at all. I felt they were charged to do a job. I felt in my heart and soul that perhaps the review would be a healthy thing; that we were heading down fast, that there was a spiral, and that we weren't really recovering, that we weren't absorbing, at least in art history, the new directions, as they called it. My feeling was that they were becoming so intransigent, so unwilling, so rigid, so unable to accept a composite mix of philosophies in their department, which is healthy, allowing the students a certain amount of freedom, that indeed this should be brought to their attention. But it wasn't philosophy, as I remember, that was discussed in any of those meetings. The meeting I had was fairly brief. I think people knew exactly where I stood and what my problems were. I didn't have to explain it.

GALM

What do you feel the review committee actually accomplished for the department?

BLOCH

Well, it depends on which way you look at it. As far as from the emotional side, it only caused further suspicion, further fractioning of the department. They began to suspect one another. It wasn't a happy kind of department meeting to go to. It became increasingly difficult to manage affairs. First of all, my feeling is if the university had gone through all the trouble of initiating a review that took nine months and then finally report, that they should have acted on it promptly one way or the other, whatever it was they would have to do, whether to put a manager into the department to bring it into some kind of order, or whatever. But they didn't. They hedged. They did nothing about it, while the department waited nervously to see what was going to happen. We were all put into that kind of position. No word was coming out of them. Gerberding, who was supposed to be the one who would make the decision and whom we understood from behind the scenes was prepared to make some kind of a decision in restructuring the department, did nothing. He resigned and took another position. Then there was a period of wait until they hired another assistant chancellor, and that one said—this was Dr. [William D.] Schaefer—that he was going to do something and take the review into consideration. As the months went by, it became very evident that very little, if anything, was going to happen. This was still being discussed when Gray came on the scene, because I think he was questioned about that. Finally nothing was done. The people who had gone through all those months of work felt that it was all in vain. What was this all about? All it did was stir the pot some more without coming to any conclusion. Whether the department felt it was victorious— All they could do was heave a sigh of relief that they were going to be allowed to go on. But there was always the feeling, well, you know, you've got two more years to go or you've got another year or you've got another this and that. That's what I was hearing even fairly recently. There was another review, but not on that level. It was kind of a departmental review that occurs every few years, every five years or so. I read the report, but it wasn't a very conclusive one. Again, it wasn't terribly flattering. I must tell you that the big review itself was not an attack. It was a kind of evaluation: the painters could do better; the design people are doing okay. The art history people need to flesh out their area, and there was some discussion about the political situation in terms of philosophy, really. But I always felt it was a very gentle review. It was not the kind of thing one might have expected, which would have said something like "This department should be culminated." There wasn't anything like that. All it did was say to the department, "Look, you can do better. " What I would have liked to see them do, the sort of thing I would have gladly accepted for myself—and which I did on my own, because I constantly evaluated myself—was "What is it that we can do? Okay, you've reviewed us. You're not very clear as to where we are. What is it that we can do better? How can the painters improve? You say we're not doing a very good job. What is it? Will you support us? Will you give us the slots to bring in distinguished professors? We think we're doing okay. What is it that we need to do?" There was no self-examination. "We are okay. You're the one that's attacking us." And that was the wrong approach. There wasn't a meeting of minds. I've always felt that there was somebody who should have, instead of debating with them, simply said, "Look, all this means is that you've got a certain spread of time now to evaluate yourselves. We want a separate evaluation individually; we want to see you what you can do about it." That they did not do. Then when the thing sort of fell away, I think there was a kind of relief. "Now we'll just go on as usual." And what went on as usual is what you can see—improper, inept administration of the department. There was scarcely anyone on any level— Now, I'm not speaking about faculty, but you can go into personnel, who had very little respect for the administrator of the department. It was an ongoing joke.

1.32. TAPE NUMBER: XVI, SIDE TWO AUGUST 7, 1987

GALM

Professor Bloch, we were talking about the review committee's report and the general reaction to it.

BLOCH

Let me go further from just what I said at the end of the last tape. I began to feel, now that I recollect this thing, that I was really responsible to administer my own responsibilities first of all to the students. The way the art historians constantly changed the rules every year- There was some change in the way a Ph.D. would be evaluated or the M.A.level was considered, and so on. I stood apart from that regarding the master's degree, as for many people, a terminal degree, and therefore it should be respectful and respected and they should be proud of it, but it was gradually being reduced to rubble. I said, "It's a thesis"; they said, "It's a paper." It was incredible that I had to deal with problems of this kind. So I found myself—you talk about isolation—really being isolated even on that level. I can remember one student, who was sort of a favorite of the group upstairs, who was doing an M. A., and I only knew it to be an M.A.I read the paper after having read that they had already approved it for the degree without asking me to read it, and I was a member of the committee. I overlooked that, and I read it and advised the student that I didn't think that— Because this approval for the M.A.was only a kind of transition. They weren't that interested in the M.A.—it was approval for the Ph.D. So they had already approved her to go on to a Ph.D. without my even having read the master's thesis and getting my opinion, and it was an area in which I knew something. I can recall reading it already disturbed that I had been overlooked. The student realized it and apologized, realizing that this wasn't appropriate. She had never consulted me anywhere along the line because, more or less, I was being left out. That again is disrespectful. I read the thesis and found that there was some weaknesses in it which I felt could be improved upon. I said even at that late date I would sit down with her and I would work it out, discuss at least that chapter so it could be improved, because the basis of what she was trying to prove was not valid and not strong enough. I said I'd even go so far as to spend my time during the summer to do this with her, so she wouldn't lose any time, and that I would, in a sense to try to make up for that, even encourage her to do an article for publication based on that chapter. In response, the student wrote me a most hostile and insulting letter saying she had no intention of doing this, because, you see, with what was going on in the department, there was no reason for her to accept that. I know it was dictated by someone else, and I'm not going to mention names. It was an incredible— I kept that document for a while until I just felt— I didn't want to have anything to do with it. I had indicated in my approval that it was an approval with qualification, contingent upon her doing this additional work. Well, after this big attack— I mean, it was incredible from a student, especially since I was offering my time. She was telling me her time was valuable. Mine wasn't, you see. I know from whence the direction came. There was a lot of unpleasantness over this, both from the student, her colleagues, faculty, and all that sort of thing. I could see the way the wind was blowing. So finally I thought it all over and I said, "Look, it's futile business. She doesn't want any help. She doesn't need it—she's being supported." They were going to give her a scholarship and all this sort of thing. I removed that qualification and let it go on. But that's the kind of thing. My concern was for the students, and it had nothing to do from whence they came. I was really happiest when dealing with my own students whom I could guide, who were very happy with me and willing to work as much as was necessary, and who have done very well, incidentally, in the field. And to guide them in their careers beyond that, which wasn't happening with some of these others. I need not go into some of the serious problems that the department faced in terms of some students, even to a lawsuit. These are things that I was somehow almost drawn into in terms of defending the students involved, in some other cases. Students, in a sense, were being used in a way I did not appreciate. I had to administer the Grunwald Center, and I was always frightened that some of the problems of the department would find their way into the Grunwald. But it didn't. We managed to administer that very happily, very successfully. I must say that the young people who worked for me were incredible young people [with] hardworking, professional attitudes. That kind of help that I got was not only important to me, it was important to them too. They've applied [it] in their lives. They weren't involved in all the political quackery that was going on in the department, which could have very, very sad effects if you carried that into your career. I knew of some of those people who in fact were using some of the rhetoric that was used in the department when they went out on jobs. Well, they didn't last very long. You can't carry on that way. I had all of that plus the Scott Foundation, so I tended not to hear very much more about it. It calmed down. There was nothing more being done. Mr. Gray came on the scene, and they were already evaluating him. They wanted a dean, they said, they could handle. They didn't like Speroni because he could take a very firm hand when he wanted to with them. They couldn't get away with all that they would have liked to get away with. So they wanted someone they felt they could handle. I felt that the new dean was going to have a very difficult time, and indeed he did. But how he dealt with it is another story.

GALM

One of the recommendations that the committee did make was the majority of the committee felt that art history should be an autonomous department. How do you feel about that?

BLOCH

I think that was only one of the—

GALM

Right.

BLOCH

That reflected, I think, what probably some member of art history must have promoted. They've always felt that they should be autonomous, and they still feel that. They're speaking about that right now, with the demise of the College [of Fine Arts] and the idea of putting them into [the College of] Letters and Science. They again have revived that old thing as to whether they should be autonomous or not. No, I do not believe that they're ready for autonomy. If they had constructively created a department that represented all philosophies, all the way from aesthetics to political-social thinking to traditional ideas— Not just the philosophy. Maybe that's not even basic. But a department that showed a clear-cut representation of all areas of art history, a really well constructed department, instead of cutting out the baroque or cutting out something and getting all involved completely in one area because it was fashionable—you know, getting involved in very small, minute areas and ignoring the major phases of art history. I don't think that represents a department that's able to administer itself. Nor was there anybody, apart from [Otto-Karl] Werckmeister— Who simply assumed that he was a leader, and indeed he was their leader. I think that idea must have originated at that time, that we have a leader who could run things. He certainly was the person they turned to, whether out of fear or out of respect, maybe a combination of things—I don't know. But he did have the ability to give them the confidence of leadership, because he didn't hesitate to get up and fight through on something that he believed in, whether it was right or wrong. He didn't hesitate to speak out against the administration if he felt it was suitable. He did represent them in terms of the Dickson scholarship [Edward A. Dickson History of Art Fellowship], which the university would have liked to handle on its own through a committee, a campus committee. He was certainly instrumental in getting hold of the will and pointing out that it did have the loophole that allowed the art historians to handle that themselves. All of that, I think, created a great deal of respect for him among his colleagues. Now, whether it was respect for his scholarship, respect for his administrative ability, fear— Maybe a combination of all of those things. It's difficult to say. I must admire the fact that he did get that, but as far as I could see, even at that time, that wasn't the way to go.

GALM

Well, I know the committee certainly recognized Werckmeister as being probably the strongest member of art history at that point and saw that as not a positive element.

BLOCH

No, because it wasn't—

GALM

And hoped to bring in other strong leaders that would represent other ideas and approaches.

BLOCH

Yes, I'm sure that's what they would have liked, but that couldn't have happened then. I think that was wishful thinking. No, they recognized his strength and his potential: that was certainly true. It was quite evident as the meetings were run that he was in command. But I don't consider that a specifically admirable quality for the department to be given its autonomy, not in that particular instance. Just remember that some of us who might have assumed some leadership were being gradually reduced to rubble. It was an incredible amount of pressure. I think in the course of our conversation you've noted that there were times when I might have been asked, or was asked, to assume a certain amount of responsibility. Those were not times that I could do this and still get on with all the rest of the work I had to do. I was at one time one that voted for Dr. Werckmeister, when I thought that the department was faltering. Certainly we needed a strong person in art history, particularly, I felt—we needed [a strong person] in the department. We were moving into vice-chairs as well as a chairman at that particular time after [J.] LeRoy Davidson left, because he was acting as vice-chair as well as chairman. I mean, he was the representative of art history as well as being chairman of the department, and we were moving from that to specifically vice-chairs and a chairman who would represent the department, two different people. As I told you, I was one of those that was asked to assume this, but it just wasn't physically possible for me to do all this without giving up some teaching responsibility that I felt I wanted to do or neglecting the Grunwald Center. I didn't feel I could do any of those things and still run the depart-ment. We had heavy programs to do, plus the fact that I was trying to do my own work, so there never was the time. I think much, much earlier when I had not yet even received tenure— As a matter of fact, it began about the time that Gibson [A.] Danes left, that the department liked me because of my good relationship with the design people, good relationship with painting, that I might be the ideal person to run the department. But I didn't think that was the point. I had no tenure? I had no clout at all. The timing was usually off. Then as time went on, I became much more involved with responsibilities that had become rather formal, not just peripheral activities. They really became part of my everyday life. So I would have welcomed a good strong department member who could be supportive of what I had to do, enable me to comfortably interact with my colleagues and help build the department. I still could have done that. But that wasn't to be. They were already isolating people like myself for what I represented. That began very quickly at that time, at the time that Werckmeister began to assert himself. He didn't assert himself before.

GALM

Is there anyone now among the art historians who represents what you would like for art history for this department?

BLOCH

Well, first of all, my position was fairly unique. I had the strong link to the museum side of the department, and I felt that was a department relationship. I see now that they're separating the museum responsibilities from the department, separating the academic from what they call performance (hopefully, that this is only temporary), separating the gallery activity and more or less falling into the area that Mr. Gray first suggested before he came to the university in a letter, saying that he thought that the museums and the galleries should be a very separate, community-oriented affair with nothing much to do with the department. I took great issue with that because all the work I did had to do with that. I had a unique kind of position. That cannot happen again. I'm afraid that cord has been cut for good, and they know that now. They cannot—and I'm not saying this with any great degree of happiness—they are not able to replace me, nor are they trying to. What they've done is hired somebody separately for the Grunwald, and they're looking for somebody still to replace me in the department. They are thus separating that rather interesting kind of thing that was happening, where the students could get professional experience. In fact, the Grunwald is having just some students that come do part-time work, but the people who are doing the administration are no longer students. These are people who are employees, and that will probably become much more the state of the way it operates as they begin to think of themselves as a museum. Now that they have an affiliation on a museum level they're going to think more and more of themselves as a museum, with a developing acquisition program and so on, for which there is no validity really. In times like this when you can't buy anything anyhow and with all the museums proliferating in our community, who needs yet another activity of this kind? It should be linked to a program as they do in other universities, where whoever runs the gallery or any other aspect of the museum is actually a faculty member in art history. You'll find that at Princeton [University], Harvard [University], Yale [University], you name it. That's the way those have been run traditionally. But perhaps that's not what you were really reaching for. Am I wrong?

GALM

Well, I think philosophically too.

BLOCH

You were saying am I happy with what I see now?

GALM

Or is there anyone who somehow represents what you were— And I don't mean specifically as to position. As to perhaps attitudes and approach?

BLOCH

No, I really don't see that yet. I can gather from my conversations with some of my former colleagues who deign to speak to me that things are beginning to change slightly. They're rather happy that the old regime has disappeared, that the kind of rigidity of approach—which they now realize was not ideal—has passed into history. The seventies are gone; we're in the eighties now. We're getting to the nineties. There is some feeling, I think, among the colleagues that they are gradually trying to build a comprehensive department, that there's a little more air coming into the picture—at least that's what they try to assure me is happening. And there are some young people coming into the picture. Yes, I have a feeling that's it's a softening and a more open kind of a picture evolving. Perhaps I'm seeing this through rose-colored glasses, but that's the way I prefer to see it at this point. It's not the way it was. The disarray still continues, and until they know where they're going there will be an unhappy situation in the department. The idea that they're ready to be considered as an autonomous department is far into the future, perhaps some day when, as Dr. Murphy once said, they shape up and we know where they're going. Remember, there were tremendous opportunities available to art history opening in recent years, enormous opportunities with the [J. Paul] Getty [Trust] evolving, and their way into our picture was through a museum program. That was the basis of all the discussion. That was the one basis where we could start. Think of what they have: their research center, the ability to have money to support it, various projects. They've always been anxious, even more than with any other neighboring institution, to have ongoing relationship with the one that's just over the hill. They're in a position to bring in very distinguished scholars. They were beginning to do that in the days that I was around, but they treated some of those people so badly that I to this day think of those as some of the most difficult days I can remember. There were some very important scholars who were coming here as guest scholars and were being lent openly to UCLA to use to teach, and they were deliberately, in at least one case I remember particularly, treated so badly, left out, that the students were not encouraged to participate with them. I can't understand these things. They were so anxious to keep that little island unto themselves that they didn't want to let anything in.

GALM

Was it because they were also fearful of being more open to criticism, too, or evaluation?

BLOCH

Well, as I look at it now, certainly they wanted no criticism. They didn't want anybody on the outside to really know what they were doing. They were doing their own thing, and they felt that was what they were doing. They were moving in new directions, and they wanted no interference, certainly none from the source of the Getty. Although they allowed me to confer with them, then behind the scenes I was being attacked for conferring with them. We were talking about just minor things: What kinds of programs would they support? How can they participate in it? It was simply getting viewpoints. There were no promises at all. But I was immediately suspect and clobbered. I began to see that it wasn't just me: anything that might have come from over there, over the hill, was looked at with great question. "Who needs them?" and "We don't need them. We have our own. " When you talk about "autonomy," look what they would have done with autonomy. They would have created a little citadel in which the students gleefully participated, a certain group of them anyhow. It's incredible. Some of the brightest students were used for this. Well, students are easily caught up in these things. They enjoy the game: it's fun to break the rules. I need not again start to relate to the recent hearings [Iran-Contra congressional hearings], but some of those rang a familiar ring to indeed what can go on when you have a government within a government. They were trying to run their own little government. If they would have had autonomy, it would seem to me they would have tried to create their own little parliament removed from all the rest of the rules and regulations of the university. You can't have that. I worry about the word "autonomy." When I used it in connection with the Grunwald Center, this had to be within the framework of the university. I felt that the Grunwald deserved to be an organized research unit for what it was doing. That is about the only degree of autonomy I was talking about, that we would not have to be so tied to a gallery program that wasn't always in sync with our own. That didn't mean we wouldn't collaborate. We would have to do that, and our budget could remain with the gallery. It wasn't money that I was concerned about—I never wanted to even touch the filthy lucre. It was a matter of being able to produce a program that related us to other activities on campus, as well as to the department. A truly professional activity is what a research unit is doing. That was the degree of autonomy I had in mind for the Grunwald when I used that term. But when we speak about autonomy for the art historians, shall we say, or design, or for the painters, it can work in any direction. We're not talking about something that would move necessarily or could be controlled within the confines of university policy. It could easily move away from it, and indeed that's exactly what they were doing anyhow. They considered themselves more or less autonomous, and that's why I think that they wanted nothing to do with the Getty or anything else. They would accept their money, as they did from the Art Council, but they wanted no advice and they wanted no involvement. "Don't dictate to us." And so they lost out. If we talk about the current situation, I have a feeling the university was moving toward that very gradually. It was a slow-moving affair. But with the evolving Getty program and the fact that they themselves tend to be very remote in what they do— Yet without question they would need the university. Especially if they were to create or work on programs where there were degrees involved, they would certainly need to work with an established university, and they realize that. Neither side can win without some kind of relationship. You can't create two citadels side by side over the hill. What are we running? Feudal states? It doesn't make sense. And of course the possibility that Norton Simon waved in front of them— That kind of an incredible possibility, one of the truly great collections in our midst that might conceivably become a university collection, I think forced the issue with a department not interested and completely just wiping out even the tiniest little basic program that would have enabled us to have a basis of relationship with something like the Getty, which is museum oriented after all—they deal with objects. The Norton Simon, when that proposal came up, I really was just incredulous that this could possibly happen. How could the university support this if the department was going to take this kind of a stand? The idea that they might consider being autonomous— They would remove themselves so far from it you wouldn't see them at all. We're going to start another department? You see what I mean? I feel the university was faced finally with some kind of a decision, some kind of reshuffling. Remember, it's not destructive; it's constructive. I think their hope is that something could come of this. It's still to me rather complicated. I can't see where it's going, and perhaps we shouldn't be discussing that here.

GALM

In other tapes we've gone into considerable detail about your work with the Virginia Steele Scott Foundation, and I don't think we need to speak about that further. But what prompted your decision to resign as professor?

BLOCH

What prompted me to retire as professor was a combination of factors. First of all, I think I already told you I was overworked. I had taken on the Scott Foundation in addition to the Grunwald, in addition to the full-time teaching affair. I have admitted that the Scott Foundation to me seemed like a breath of fresh air that might be a good antidote to what I was going through, because I was so stressed that I was ill, and I felt that my health was suffering very, very visibly. These were in the days before stress was considered an illness. It was just considered— Nobody would talk about it. To this day I'm reluctant to talk about it. I was beginning to go to doctors during that period, who were looking for fatal illness and suggesting exploratory operations and whatnot. They couldn't find anything specifically wrong, yet this was very serious. I was ill a lot of the time and losing a lot of weight. I was coming to the point when I was coming up for promotion again in 1981, and I said to myself, "Must I now go through this all over again?" I spoke to Dean Gray about this to feel him out in terms of what support I could expect from him, and I made it quite clear how difficult it was. He was having his own problems in trying to make out what art history really was about. He was trying to adjust himself to it. I don't think he was really doing the most constructive job of it, but to give him some credit, I think he was trying hard to work with a whole variety of departments with many, many internal problems, of with this was only one trouble. He inherited a difficult situation when you talk about the art department, and he knew that. He told me about it and wondered where I could help, but some of those areas he expected I could help were just not something I could do effectively. Although we talked many, many times, I think he was emotionally disturbed about it all. I felt I was not getting the same kind of a judicial response from him that I could get from Dean Speroni. Perhaps I was too used to Dean Speroni, but I would never get the kind of emotional reaction— I'm not used to having tantrums thrown at me every five seconds. All I want is a straight answer and the ability to see how I can proceed. I told him quite frankly that I wasn't feeling very well and I had many things—I had to consider this. But he was more or less saying, [speaking sharply] "Well, make up your mind whether you're going to run for it or not, and of course I'll write a letter for you." But that was not what I really wanted. I wasn't quite sure what the answer was at that point. It was just "Must I go through this all over again?" I discussed it at home and finally said, "Look, this is twenty-five years. I'm coming to the twenty-fifth anniversary." (I'm one of these people who keeps aware of anniversaries, as far as that's concerned. ) "I'd like to make a clean break of it if it needs to be, but I'd like to do it on kind of an anniversary basis." And it was twenty- five years. I said, "This is time for me to reconsider it. Is it worthwhile to push for this step after what I had gone through three years ago?" Because I read in the minutes of one of the meetings that they were already discussing me and how they would deal with it. I felt that that was not only improper, it was perhaps illegal, because I had not yet made up my mind whether I was going to run for it. I brought that to the attention of the dean. I said, "Now, what is this? They're already discussing my case when I haven't even made up my mind." Well, he didn't want to hear this, for whatever reason. I guess he had enough on his mind. Besides, he was hearing all kinds of things. Whoever came into his office, I think, at any moment was hearing a different story and something else was happening. Besides, he was trying to settle the problem of the art gallery, and even that was becoming extremely difficult. He was trying to reorganize. I was only a minor problem in the midst of all of this. I finally decided that if this condition that I had was going to continue this way, what am I going to do? Write to all twenty-four more people? I think it was twenty-four the previous time. To go to those same people again— They thought this was a most impossible situation, and by that time they knew that even they had been investigated. How could I even go back to them? To me this was impossible. I wasn't worried about my production. I felt sure they would throw all of my museum- associated material into the wastepaper basket and would look for problems elsewhere. I knew it would become just a repetition, a reprise of something I didn't want to go through. I decided that I just didn't feel it was worthwhile. I did have a final discussion with the dean about just that. I just felt that he really wasn't all that supportive, that he really was kind of bored with the whole thing, and was beside that listening to all kinds of other things and wasn't quite sure on what side he was going to be anyhow, politically. I said, "I don't need this." I think my last words to him were, "This is not worth it". I went home and I wrote a letter to the chancellor. I decided that it wasn't a question of resigning from the department. It was a question that did involve the chancellor because of my involvement with the center, which did concern him, because there was no one to replace me there. I wanted to make it clear to him in a one-page letter that I was prepared to resign as of a certain day. I knew that he was concerned about it. I didn't hear from him for some weeks, and by that time I had really made up my mind. I didn't expect him necessarily to reply; I just wanted him to be aware. But I think by that time he had spoken to a couple of other people, and although prior to that, certain confidential letters of mine had been somehow made available to the department— I'm quite sure that word, maybe, perhaps was leaking out already, but I'm not sure of that, not through him anyhow. But he did confide in one or two colleagues of mine about his disturbance about this. In any case, I went ahead with the resignation, and the department came to know about it. I don't think they really knew the formal decision until the time that they got advised. Rather interesting. The first time I'd ever seen that they sent around an all-department memorandum informing them of my unexpected retirement—not retirement, resignation—which had not really happened before. Usually they were Saturday night massacres. This wasn't one. This was well considered. I think a lot of people were surprised, but as I say, I didn't want the chancellor to receive it that way. I did not advise the dean because I felt he was not that concerned one way or the other. He wasn't really thinking that way anymore. He had enough problems at that point. But what happened after that was rather interesting. I resigned from the department and was immediately recalled by the chancellor to continue with the Grunwald.

GALM

Had you offered to continue with the Grunwald in that letter of resignation or letter of—

BLOCH

No, I didn't say anything. I think if I said anything—and I don't have the letter in front of me—it was more or less my expression of concern and that I would be willing to be as helpful as I could. Something like that. I didn't want him to think that I was just pulling out and leaving everything. As a matter of fact, my resignation being in October, I was still teaching, so I continued to teach until January. Resignation in the middle of the year is not always a pleasant thing, but it had to do with my health and well- being. It was just not possible. I was getting worse and worse. The interesting part of it was that within days after filing the letter of actual resignation, my problems ceased. Ceased! Just like that. So it had to do with the occupational disease, which no doctor could advise me about. I wasn't crazy. I was having a physical problem. But I was immediately recalled. As I also recall, the dean had immediately set into work to use the director of the gallery to take over the Grunwald. Now, wait a minute. I was recalled to that. That was an eighteen- month appointment. Let's get facts in their proper order. I don't think Dean Gray was very happy about this, because he'd never heard of anything like this before and it wasn't something he had recommended. It came from the chancellor's office, so what could he do? He had to accept it. I had a call from his office before that happened, before he knew— Unfortunately one office doesn't relate itself to the other the way things happen on any level. I had a call from someone from his office saying he would like to meet with me to discuss my twenty-five years with the university. I said, "Why? I'm not going anywhere," which came as a great surprise, because I thought that they did know. I could hear the astonishment at the other end of the phone. So he wasn't happy about this, because he felt he had not been consulted, I guess is the word, on this matter. But that isn't a matter of consultation. I mean, I was willing to do it. So he had to sit down and discuss with me the arrangements that would enable me to continue for the next eighteen months. The next eighteen months was to be spent in finding a successor to the Grunwald, not to the department. The department was meant to fulfill its obligation in trying to find someone to succeed me. You know, it's a rather sad story all told, because what it turned out, what I could discover from consultations on the graduate student level, who had their own group who discussed future appointments— They also make their own recommendations; they have their government within a government. I was being discussed as someone who was being paid two salaries, and all of this kind of thing. I remember one of my assistants telling them that this was never so, but that's what they had been fed, that here was somebody who was really making a big pile out of the university. So my services, from that standpoint, within the department and within the way the students were seeing it as a result of that, was that here was somebody who was operating autonomously, flaunting his power and clout on all levels within the department—which cannot be. Certainly I was making my own decisions. I wasn't going to them: "Should I do this? Should I not do that?" I had a responsibility to do, and I was doing it. If it was something wrong, then I'd like to know about it. But they weren't interested in what I was doing. All they wanted to know was that I was doing this without their permission. What else can I estimate was part of this strange problem? What happened within the next eighteen months was that I continued with my students, and on to this very day I have graduate students who are still finishing their work. It's coming now to a conclusion. The dean established a transitional committee, a committee to consider the Grunwald, its relationship to the [Frederick S. Wight] Art Gallery and so on. He had already made up his mind that the art gallery should take over the Grunwald. Now, that was something I wasn't happy about, because I had been assured that we were already a research unit.

GALM

Organized research unit.

BLOCH

Organized research unit. That this was the way we were working. We needed that small degree of autonomy in order to interact with the various departments—something the gallery did not do. The gallery was strictly an exhibition unit. They did not involve themselves. Their employment was chiefly outside people; ours was strictly related to the department. Even the department knew that, because the students employed were people either in art history or from other departments on campus. But he [Gray] had made up his mind already, and so did the new director of the gallery [Edith A. Tonelli], who was anxious to have a museum affiliation. It turned out the gallery never was recognized by the American Association of Museums as a museum.

1.33. TAPE NUMBER: XVII, SIDE ONE AUGUST 14, 1987

GALM

Professor Bloch, last time when we ended the tape you were discussing this eighteen-month period sort of to wind up things for yourself and with the university and with the Grunwald Center [for the Graphic Arts]. Did you actually participate, then, in securing a replacement for your position at the Grunwald?

BLOCH

Well, what we were still talking about last time was the transitional committee. At the very outset when Dean [Robert H.] Gray suggested the formation of this, he said, "You will be the chairman of that committee." Then when the new director of the gallery [Edith A. Tonelli] came along, he immediately said she would be the chairman of that committee. He was wavering in that direction. I wasn't quite sure what my responsibility would be in helping to find both a new director and to discuss the problem of where the Grunwald would be going. So I insisted on at least a cochairmanship role. It seemed obvious, however, almost from the beginning that that wasn't really being followed. I issued several protests to the chairman that I wanted to be at least advised what the agenda of the upcoming meetings were, and I also insisted that they be taped so we had some record of where we were going. I was becoming a little paranoid at that point. My great concern was of course for, as I said, the autonomy that we had worked so hard for. Now, by "autonomy" let me amplify that slightly. It was not complete autonomy. It was meant to be semi-autonomy in the sense that we had our relationship with the [Frederick S. Wight Art] Gallery in terms of budget: all the budget would be held together for exhibitions. That I felt was a responsibility— Providing we were given a fair share of the annual budget. I had no reason to complain about that from [Gerald J.] Nordland's time. That seemed to work out all right. It was still an unknown quantity at the time Dr. Tonelli came along. She made it quite clear to me from the first time we met and talked that she wanted very much to bring the Grunwald under the banner of the gallery, which was something we had always kept very loosely related, because we were two different operations, two different intentions, two different responsibilities. I felt the director—and we fought for that term, director—had to deal with a completely different kind of audience often. Our relationships with other departments on campus and our relationship with the national community of museums, particularly print curators, my peers in the field— It was essential that we have some freedom of movement. There was nothing unusual in this. Even at the Metropolitan [Museum of Art], where there is a director, the head of the department—who in such a museum is called a curator—does have almost complete autonomy in managing a budget, in organizing shows, and all of that sort of thing. We didn't even want to go that far, except that the title of director was important in people recognizing in the community and elsewhere that someone was in charge and directing it. I wanted to avoid any personality conflicts, which were always out there somewhere, and it worked very, very well. We had struggled long and hard for this. Dr. Tonelli told me from the beginning that what she saw this as was a curatorial job, the new position. I said, "You really can't do that because it has already been guaranteed." My feeling was that at least as cochairman I could have some control at the meetings over presenting that side of it. If she was to present only her side of it, the committee would not understand all that we had worked for, because most of the people on that committee were representatives from the department who really had made it their business not to be terribly concerned about such details. Nor did I bother them with it—it was an administrative, purely administrative responsibility. But she, unquestionably directed by the dean, took a very firm hand in the procedure and tended to avoid discussing these matters with me further and simply presented the dean's side of the case. That was where her support came in, plus an assistant chancellor, whom she would not refer to by name until I made certain that she did. It turned out that that assistant chancellor, after all, said that he had no notion they were using his name—that they all use his name, but it doesn't mean anything. Which kind of startled me. It was almost like hearing the Senate hearings all over again, [laughter] but in those days we had other things to think about. Finally it got to a point where I really became very concerned, because I knew what was in the back of her mind was this question of building a museum. If you read the dean's original statement, even before he was on campus, the idea was that we should have a museum on this campus, not a gallery, and that it should be community oriented and not be concerned— From my reading of it, my interpretation of it—and I think that was [Charles] Speroni's as well— this was a museum with its own collections and with its own community connections and all of that. Which is fine for a kind of theater, a view of the world for the university, a showcase, let's say, to the community. But we had worked for many years to create an affiliation with the department, whether weak or strong. It was an area to which the department could turn to exhibit its own efforts on a yearly level, let's say of student work, which I gathered wasn't really what the new administration had in mind. From the standpoint of the Grunwald, it was for the fruits of our scholarly endeavor to be seen other ways than through printed articles and publications, which the majority of the public in Los Angeles wouldn't see. At least they could see through our shows the fruits of our endeavors, of our seminars, of a student's thesis. These were things we did in a variety of ways which had remarkable success. To this very day there are people who come to me and say, "I remember this particular show which had so much to offer." These were the shows that made us known throughout the country and which gave us the reputation we had. Ultimately what we were doing on campus in the last years, when we finally were able to make a strong pitch for a kind of communication with music, with English, with history, and with the various centers on campus— And we considered ourselves a center. Whether we were formally recognized or not, we were operating as an ORU [organized research unit]. So with all of that, which I'm possibly repeating, I felt it was important that we maintain a similar kind of autonomy, which didn't mean that we operated without any responsibility to anybody. The real crux of the problem was in this question of a director. When the center was created—it had originally been a foundation [Grunwald Graphic Arts Foundation]—the chancellor, realizing that this changeover contradicted the original agreement with Mr. [Fred] Grunwald in his life-time, and which Mrs. [Saidee Herz] Grunwald particularly liked because to her "foundation" meant money— It had a certain kind of connotation she liked, which didn't work as far as we were concerned because there was no money. We had to find our own support through the university and other sources. But when we formed the center, the next step was to create a firm understanding of a center with its own directors, as all other centers were on campus. Ultimately the chancellor in writing to the Grunwald family about the center did say that after Maurice Bloch's turn, there would always be a director of the center. He made it quite clear in the letter, which was his word that he would always guarantee the Grunwald family that things would go on very much as they are: there would always be a director and so on and so forth. I presented that document to the transition committee to make it quite clear that this is precisely what had been agreed upon. Well, it seemed obvious that the director had not done her homework in this regard. I also found it necessary to make the Grunwald family aware of the fact that we were having these discussions, because that was only fair. Mr. Grunwald's daughter, Mrs. [Lottie Grunwald] Talpis, was very, very much concerned about my leaving the university and who was going to succeed and that the integrity of the center would be continued much as had been promised. So I made her aware of our discussion. She's a strong person, very much like her father, and she immediately took it upon herself to see to it that these agreements were more or less kept. I was disappointed that there was such rigidity on the part of the new director of the gallery, such a narrow concern about the integrity of an institution that had been going on for so many years. She was brand-new to it with no previous experience about the climate of the university, about the community, and so on, which she didn't handle with great delicacy. I mean, her problems with the [UCLA] Art Council were already emerging. It seemed obvious that she had the complete support of the dean in all of this, to the point that one day we had a directive, in a sense, from the dean, more or less telling us what we were supposed to do and that there was no legal question involved in terms of the chancellor [Charles E. Young]'s letter and so on, all of which was brought to my attention one day. I was really amazed that he would take it upon himself a la [John] Poindexter to take the responsibility that really should have been discussed on another level. It seemed obvious that he just did this on the spur of the moment, having known his outbursts and sudden decisions, that here he was putting it in writing. Everybody was amazed at that meeting. As I say, I kept Mrs. Talpis aware of what was going on, and she decided to enter into it. She wasn't invited to participate at that point. I think later on she was invited to the committee meetings. She should have been from the very beginning, since there was a stake to bear and their name was on the center. She really got legal counsel. She didn't hesitate to do this, and she kept very firmly at this. All it did was, you know, create a further dimension which I was hoping would not happen. The chancellor was aware of it. Later on I think she had several meetings with him, although this dragged on for something like a year at least, and I was no longer around at that time. He finally agreed that certainly there always would be a director, so that when the announcement for my successor went out— Now, this wasn't going out while I was still there. The discussions carried on far too long, and that was caused by the stumbling block of this question of, I think chiefly, the title for the new person. He finally agreed that this would happen, so when the search really began— And I was not a member of the search committee. I was kept aware of it from other sources because I was concerned. It was a very awkward kind of announcement, in which they said they were looking for a director who would work under a director, which, as you know, doesn't really make sense. So they really were having, I feel chiefly due to that question— Because the people in my field, in the prints field, regardless of whether they work for a museum and are curators, they have to be assured that they're working under someone they can respect, that it will be somebody who will give them a certain freedom of movement. This wasn't to be the administration of the gallery under its new director, who immediately created a large network of departments and offices and whatnot— something we never had in the gallery— with all that that entails. A very large museum-management type of operation which we never had before—it was much more loosely structured, and that worked very well. But that's the way things move in this world today. So the fruits of the first run-through were not very bright. I can remember being at a meeting the chancellor had called to ask my advice on something. In the course of this, he asked Dr. [William D.] Schaefer how the recruiting was going for the center. He said that it was going apace. I immediately jumped into the fray and said, "Apace!" I said, "Have you seen that list? There's scarcely anyone that could fill the job and have the strength to carry it on. " People were somewhat wary of it. That was what I was getting from my peers in the field. They all said the Grunwald is a great plum in the museum world, but there was some uncertainty as to just where the head of the Grunwald would stand in terms of the present picture. Because no one really knew the new director, who she was apart from her prior experience, what she knew about this particular field, and where it would go.

GALM

How was it advertised, as strictly a directorship with a—?

BLOCH

A director who it would be understood would work under the director of the—

GALM

And no tie to the art department?

BLOCH

I can't remember that.

GALM

Or was that negotiable?

BLOCH

I can't remember. I think it implied that it was within a kind of departmental picture. I don't remember. You'd have to find a copy of that. Whether it referred to any kind of affiliation with the department— Because Dr. Tonelli is an adjunct professor. Now, what that means on a fiscal level is you get no pay and that the department can use you or not use you depending on its whim. This had nothing to do particularly with the new director. This had to do with when Mr. [Frederick S.] Wight left, who had been a tenured professor and who had not been a terribly effective teacher. As a director and as a head of department, he really had a certain autonomy he kept to himself. The department was very anxious that it controlled everybody, particularly anybody who had a museum connection. So when the time came—and I think I brought this out before—for Nordland, they said the new director would not have tenure. He might have an appointment to teach, but would not have tenure and could not get tenure. He could not be appointed as a professor—let's go that far. Which, as Mr. Wight felt, placed the new appointment at a disadvantage. But in the case of Nordland, he was not an art historian—he was trained as a lawyer—and these were things they were very concerned about. I agreed with them in that. I mean, they had real reasoning there. With Tonelli, of course, they did have the privilege of reviewing her qualifications, although they did also with Nordland. In that case they had the students doing their own surveys and making their own statements, which I'm sure Nordland was well aware of, all of which must have been rather alarming to him as to that kind of an examination of the candidate. But in her case they were brought in I think from the beginning to concern themselves with the kind of person they wanted, and the fact that she had an American studies degree rather than an art history degree fitted in with their general conception of social history and that sort of thing. At the same time, they were not going to give tenure. In fact, they went further than that in the sense that [she] only had an adjunct appointment, which allowed them to decide whether or not she could serve them. I remember even in the transitional committee, when that question was brought up in Miss Tonelli's presence, one member of the art history department said, "Well, that's up to us to allow her to teach a course. If we don't find that effective we'll never ask her again." Which rather surprised me that they had already discussed it along such levels. One would assume that the director of the gallery could always teach a course and that it would be a course that would relate to the needs of the department, possibly a museum-management kind of affair. I was always hoping that they'd develop some kind of a museum-oriented course, which the students really wanted but were very hesitant to express because of the connotation "museum" had with the department at that particular time. But Dr. Tonelli, she accepted that as perfect— She had her own work to do and her own aims, which were certainly not teaching, as far as I could gather. What followed with the center was of course the same sort of thing. Once it became obvious that the center would operate within the confines of a museum policy set by the gallery, it was obvious that they wouldn't be looking at the candidate as someone to really succeed me. That didn't mean that they didn't approve of me as a teacher or whether I was an effective teacher. They just felt that this was going to be a different kind of operation, as far as I could see. They saw it as one picture, and it would follow if you're going to say a "director" or it's "under a director," that person would also have some kind of adjunct appointment rather than something that would fit into their program. In going through most of the names, they found that they were not appropriate, so they went through one series of names and then announced the job again through College Art [Association of America]. This went on through two or three operations, and finally the one name that I even checked off— Because these lists were submitted to me, not for my approval, but simply for my education. The name of the young man [James C. Cuno] who's now director seemed to me the one who had the most useful background, having been connected with Vassar [College] as a teacher and who had some gallery experience at the Fogg Art Museum [Harvard University]. I felt all of that was fine and that he was young and curious and so on. It seemed obvious, from what I was reading and from what I heard about his personality, he would be certainly acceptable. I had my own thoughts about highly skilled professional people whom I knew, but since I was not being consulted—much to the surprise of my peers in the field—I did not offer any suggestions, nor was I asked by the administration to do this. So I wasn't on that committee at all. Once I had retired from the Grunwald, I was simply not consulted at all on any of that, nor did I really expect to be, judging from the way the, quote, "political situation" was operating both in the college and in the department. I thought it was wisest not to attempt to intrude upon that. The Grunwald family was concerned about the integrity of the promise that had been made to them, and I felt that was important. And the chancellor was certainly honoring that. But the way it was twisted—certainly not within his understanding, as far as I can tell, the implications of it, that is—that new director would not be able to replicate what I was doing. That is certainly true as of now. He's able to do a program and, thanks to his agreeable personality, is managing to survive in a somewhat troubled atmosphere.

GALM

Is it a full-time appointment?

BLOCH

Yes, that's the difference too. The adjunct appointment, which is adjunct assistant professor—and he's been asked to teach a course or whatever—is without pay. His is a full-time appointment with salary—and a generous salary. Once they found that he was the man of all of the candidates who would fit best, they gave a very generous salary, so that's agreeable to him. Remember, that mine was never salaried. Mine was an administrative service. My salary came from being a professor in the department.

GALM

This is sort of a reverse situation.

BLOCH

Absolutely reverse. So if people say is there continuity, it's only, as far as I can see, in the vaguest sense. In my feeling, some of the magic has been lost. Maybe that's not exactly the right term, but the magic that I felt, which had to do with the ability to build a great collection, to create a kind of atmosphere in which students could participate if they wished— My idea of a museum course was not the rigid kind at all, but simply something that might be appended to a master's degree as a certificate. So that if students wanted to use it somewhere along the line in developing a museum affiliation or, as it exists in many cases, go off on a teaching position where they expect them to occasionally do an exhibition in a university gallery, they could say yes, they'd participated in something, they were familiar with it, had reached some contact with original material. The whole purpose of the whole thing was the same experience that I had when I was a student, only we didn't have a collection at hand. We had to go to the museums for this and work out exhibitions and that sort of thing. But it was an incredibly live situation which added a dimension to my life that I felt was important, and this was all I was hoping to do in that period. I feel that now, as far as I can see, there's some slight communication with students, using them occasionally for some research work or whatever. I'm not sure how deeply that is involving— I know one of my former students is acting as conservator there, but that's a professional kind of thing. Some of those things that I had done have not surfaced again. Indeed, they're trying to create a kind of museum along the line that Dean Gray first proposed. He was rather obstinate in his pursuance of that kind of ideal, which was done without real knowledge of the way that the university had operated, of its history in working or of thinking about museums. Even today I don't think—apart from the Museum of Cultural History, which operates differently—that the university is still cognizant of the responsibility, if they're thinking about a museum as against the kind of thing that Franklin [D.] Murphy and I conceived of as a working museum, as a laboratory for the students.

GALM

How much is the collection used by scholars?

BLOCH

I can't give you statistics, but in the past we had a clear record of wide usage by scholars from all over the country and abroad. Because the Grunwald gradually became very well known, not just nationally, but internationally. It wasn't anything I really worked for, but in terms of our exhibitions and so on I was amazed at how many people knew exactly what we were doing. In a sense, we made ourselves an entity which people were aware of, and I think that was due to the fact that we had some independence to create that. The gallery itself operated quite differently. It had a reputation for some of its major shows, but the print exhibitions reached a particular scholarly audience. We did have that reputation.

GALM

So what have been your ties to UCLA since then? Are they mainly social or—?

BLOCH

Well, I think like any professor emeritus, I'm available if the university needs me. I don't live too far from the university. I certainly have my scholarly relationships with my colleagues—that is mostly outside of the department, people who were my peers in other departments are friendly. As I say, I'm always available for anything constructive. But I do not involve myself with the Grunwald's affairs unless they really need me. I am, again, available, and I think the present director knows that. But I don't believe, and never have done, in interfering in what they do. I don't offer advice unless I'm asked. My relationship with the [Henry E.] Huntington [Library and Art Gallery] is fairly similar, although it's much more active in the sense that they want me to do exhibitions. The Grunwald hasn't become aware yet— They know what I'm doing on the outside, but have not come to me to participate with them in any ongoing shows or that sort of thing. So that's their decision or their choice and not mine. The door is never closed, but it has never been my policy to hover over an institution I have left. That was true at Cooper Union [Museum for the Arts of Decoration (New York)]. All the years that I have left Cooper Union— which is now the Cooper-Hewitt Museum—they know full well that I would always cooperate with them. But I haven't gone back there in the thirty years that I've left. I just don't do that.

GALM

Do you occasionally give lectures?

BLOCH

If I'm invited to do so. I haven't been.

GALM

I thought you had mentioned some activity at USC [University of Southern California]. What is that?

BLOCH

Yes, that's interesting. In the past few months particularly, I've been invited by USC to do a couple of lectures. There's one coming up soon relating to certain areas of my expertise. I'm also cooperating on an exhibition to open there in January, and as I pointed out, I'm doing the three exhibitions for the Huntington. Other museums, like Laguna [Beach Museum of Art] have been in touch with me to participate in producing exhibitions for them. No, I'm very active. I don't actively seek this kind of opportunity, because I do a lot of consultation work and I have my own writing to do. I made up my mind many years ago that I would put all these things on the back burner. They're now moving onto the front burner and these are works that have to be done. The last [George Caleb] Bingham catalog [The Paintings of George Caleb Bingham: A Catalogue Raisonné] came out only last November; there are several book contracts underway; plus a lot of lesser things, many things that I had to put aside because of my work and other problems that are only now being done. That's the continuing performance. So many people in the teaching profession only work when they're producing for a promotional purpose, but that's never been my life. Whatever was happening was part of my professional procedure. The Grunwald was peripheral. I think I told you that all the publication work which my colleagues took so seriously was never taken seriously by me. I even ran it under a different name. That wasn't the name I used for what I considered material for their consumption. It was their choice to concentrate their attention on the museum publications, not realizing that that was part of the educational procedure—which should concern them because that involved their students. But they evaluated it as my performance and so got mislead in their own evaluation. But that's neither here nor there as far as I'm concerned today. It was always very clear in my mind what I was doing, and it's still clear in my mind. But as far as UCLA's concerned, that's my first and last love, I guess. I am always available in case I'm needed to make a contribution.

GALM

Well, thank you for your contribution to this program. It's been a very important contribution. Thank you.

BLOCH

Well, thank you.