ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

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AFFIRMATIONS

Following the revelations of what the Germans accomplished during the war years, I felt such a profound need to reaffirm, to say, "You did not exterminate us. You crushed all our blossoms, but our roots whence we derive our strength are there, beneath the scorched earth. You slaughtered them, but their terrible and profound hope lives on in us." And so I had to affirm life. My love for Lorraine;” was such an affirmation; having our children was such an affirmation, attempting to evoke a long-lost childhood landscape, a landscape never violated. A landscape that was remembered and therefore imaginary, here on this blessed hillside, our Woodstock, for some forty odd years.

ANYTHING GOES

Vienna in the 1930's was the capital of a vanished empire, a great cultural center in the very recent past, nurturing to Freud, Kokoschka, and Schonberg. But it was part of the past, like living on the side of an extinct volcano; or, even better, like living in London today, the capital of an extinct empire. America, by contrast, was the laboratory of the future. The Americans were collecting the best of European modern art because they weren't encumbered by the past. When I was young, America meant Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. It was a place where anything goes.

PICASSO

I like Picasso saying, in response to all the clichés about cylinder, sphere and cone in Cezanne, "All that interests me in Cezanne's painting is Cezanne's anxiety." I could say the same of Picasso. He and his kind energized and revitalized the art of their time. They returned to nature, to their own nature, thus saving art from degenerating into effete, bloodless academicism. Picasso: the whole pie, not just a slice or just a slice of life. From pandemonium and a celebration of life to the darkest brooding tragedy; the idea of the whole works, the whole world. Always I come back to Picasso, after the Middle Ages, after Giorgioni, after soaking up Van Gogh. Picasso exemplifies human wholeness. He would do any subject: skulls, goats, guitars, women or charnel houses. He was the last exponent of traditional Mediterranean culture, the last Renaissance painter. Picasso combines Northern and Mediterranean traditions. He has humor and mordant wit, but also the pathos that is the ingredient of all great art.

RUBENS

The first artist to make a deep impression on me was Rubens. When I was a child and saw his paintings, I didn't understand the perspective effect that was caused by my small size. I thought that Rubens painted people with small heads and large feet, like Picasso.

CONTRADICTIONS

From time to time in my seeing life I experimented purely with the formal elements of my craft. I tried a quasi-cubist experiment as far back as 1933 in Prague. The impact of Cubism on Czech painting was considerable between the wars. Culturally, Czechoslovakia was decidedly Western oriented. I tried modernist experiments at other times, after seeing the Futurists at the Venice Biennale in 1933, for example, when Italy was still under Mussolini. What I decided was that this formal playing around was too meager a diet for art, that politics wasn't enough either, that modernism wasn't enough. The tragic theme was not convincing enough, was only one side. The decorative in the best sense of the word was also not enough. If you aspired to make something that did not exist in precisely that form before, it had to contain everything. It had to be born of an inner urgency to express one's point of view, which would be the larger, levitating balancing act, containing all the hitherto uncombinable contradictions of one's experience in the world.

ON THE ABILITY OF PEOPLE TO LEARN

One of the measureless capacities of the human psyche is its fantastic capacity to resist knowledge about anything. All my life I have encountered the words of those who will not, by God, be instructed: "I don't understand modern art."

ON PAINTERS

All very good painters are very bright. Most of the bad ones are dumb. In order to do the little we can, we have to know far more. The intellect outpaces our creative limits, which I expect is as it must be. Otherwise we couldn't do the little we can, as was explained by the great Nabokov in one of those "interviews," carefully written in advance.

THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES AND THE WHOLE PIE

When I was very small I could terrify myself at will by surrendering to a state of reverie. This was long before sex and all those grownup concerns. Then, the deafening roar of an unearthly silence would invade my being, a sound which I took to be the sound of our earth turning in the terrible void of space. I both desired this experience and was appalled by it. I often experienced this state in my nightmares, and then it all ended upon my awakening; but I could recall it at will in all its terror and fascination. Later I was to do round paintings, tondos, and to this day I am haunted by visitations from this childhood apparition. Much later, in the downstairs gallery of the Museum of Modern Art, I saw a photograph of the earth hanging in space. And I thought, "I have lived to see someone taking a photograph of our earth, our home." Myoid, unconscious, dreamlike apparition from childhood came back. I was shattered by the sight, and while staring at it in terror, I heard a deafening clangor that was awesome; the monotonous, eternal sound of that silence of my childhood. In Charles Ives' composition The Unanswered Question, there was again the experience of no answer coming from space. I want, in each work, the world, like my countryman Mahler: the whole pie, not just one triangular wedge of it, but all of it in all its contradictions. Irreconcilable contradictions, paradoxes, ironies, unbearable sorrows, indescribable joys, tragicomedy, farce, pathos and drama, both authentic and fraudulent. The world, I say to myself, on which all this takes place simultaneously the world so incomprehensible, so dear, so much in need of our care, of our embrace.

ADVICE TO YOUNG PAINTERS

Do the very best you can. Find out by unremitting work what and how much is there in you. Don't be sidetracked by the new Easter bonnets in fashion and in art. Don't believe critical opinion, but read it. Don't have any extra careers, like teaching in an art department, professing art. Don't join anything. Do not attend any meetings. Choose your favorite company of loves and friends. Make a living so that the family doesn't have to pay for your resolve to sell yourself to "nobody, at no price at no time." Tell anyone who happens to be still hanging -; around that everything does not have a price. Slam the door and get to work. 

ONE-PIECEDNESS

A male-female affirmation. Not some premeditated positivist; not some Utopian hallelujah, nothing cerebral or calculated, but something like surrender to instinct. Obedience to the innermost voice of a longing, out of one's fragmented atomized self, for a one-pieced ness. Momentary fleeting experience of wholeness, which that unutterable fugitive experience attains only in that moment of supreme giving, in sex and in art, in the sexual or artistic experience; only to be replaced by intimations of a newly approaching disquiet, a trustless of yet another yearning.

THE GREAT SUNDAY BEACH

A Florida bacchanal, Poussin via Picasso, but still my own; consisting of asses, tits and noise, Sunday afternoon beach racket, the sound of the surf, the white sand and all that teeming life, the sea of coolers, the black of a bathing suit against the white or brown of thighs: a celebration, a free-for-all, a picnic, an apotheosis of wonderful and longed for vulgarity and youthful exuberance, beauty, pagan, unrestricted, lovely.

ON DRAWING BLIND

Now my drawings are premeditated and not the result of an open-ended search. The hand has lost its freedom and must obey commands from the soul. Now I can no longer use color to seduce the eyes of others. I have been forced to use only thin black paint. There is no control over appearances, but there is also no possibility of lying. The first line is of necessity also the last one, an act of extremity. But by the very fact of its being, each drawing is an act of affirmation of life; which I see as our holy task, our only duty.