Oral history interview with Kenneth Callahan, 1982 October 27-December 19

Transcript

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Kenneth Callahan on October 27, November 21, & December 19, 1982. The interview took place in Seattle, Washington, and was conducted by Sue Ann Kendall for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Interview

[Tape 1; Side 1]

SUE ANN KENDALL: To begin, I think we'll go back to the beginning. We know you were born in 1905.

KENNETH CALLAHAN: 1905, yeah.

SUE ANN KENDALL: Can you elaborate a little on your childhood and where you lived?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: We were in Spokane for a very short time. I don't know just how long, but it wasn't long enough so that I have any memories of living in Spokane. But that's where I was born.

SUE ANN KENDALL: And you moved to Montana?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Well, not right then. I think we moved to Montana when I was about, let's see-- the war was in 1914 -- oh, I was about six years old. We lived in Montana then for a number of years.

SUE ANN KENDALL: I understand your mother drew some while you were in Montana and you also saw paintings by Russell there?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Well, Russell was a friend of my family's. I can't say that he was a friend of mine, because no adult is a friend of a child only because he was a friend of their parents, but he used to come by our place occasionally. He often had his things in his saddlebag on a packhorse. Some of these things were painted on cheesecloth, I think, and they'd get wrinkled. I remember my mother dampening the back of them and ironing them so they would be flat. These were things that he would-- oh, roping steers and hunting wolves and various things -- all Montana cowboy stuff. And he'd try and sell them to saloons, I remember.

SUE ANN KENDALL: And you were interested in looking through those, I assume?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Oh, I was very interested. I was interested in painting from looking at those. And there was a half-Blackfoot Indian, Ralph Breckenridge, whose mother owned the livery stable. Ralph was interested in
painting and he would use the tack room in the livery stable to paint. He let me watch him and I'd try to paint.

SUE ANN KENDALL: Did your parents encourage this?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: My mother did. I remember that. My mother did some drawing, but how well or badly I have no idea, except she had some interest in it as an amateur. I'm sure there was no thought of anything [from her point of view].

SUE ANN KENDALL: Were you an only child?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: No, I was the middle of seven. There's Benjamin and Frederick and James and Pamela, and myself and Dorothy and [Charles William].

SUE ANN KENDALL: Any other artists?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: No. None of the others were.. . One of my brothers [was in] small _____ for a while.

SUE ANN KENDALL: Mostly your family remained on the West Coast?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Well, my mother died when I was 15, I think, and my father when I was 17. And already, at that time, my two older brothers and my older sister were dead. Anyway, the family was kind of broken up [after] my mother's death.

SUE ANN KENDALL: When did you leave Montana, then?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: I think it was 1918.

SUE ANN KENDALL: And came to Washington?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Yes, Raymond, Washington. I was there for about two years. And then we came to Seattle.

SUE ANN KENDALL: Was there any other influence that you can think of in terms of your schooling, say in grade school or high school, that influenced you to become an artist?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: No, it was really the Ralph Breckenridge and Charlie Russell paintings, primarily Ralph Breckenridge because of the proximity with him. Also, he was a bronco champion in northeastern Montana in the fairs, and he painted, and I could paint and I wouldn't have to fight with all the kids to prove I wasn't a sissy, except that Ralph, being a bronco champion, they accepted he was a painter. And those that knew Charlie Russell also accepted him as an artist. So, it made it respectable for me to paint.

SUE ANN KENDALL: Was it partly because of being a man and being a painter? They were good role models for you?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Oh, yeah. Anyway, from then on, I was always interested in trying to be an artist. But for a long time, up until I was 16 or so, my only idea of being an artist was trying to be a cartoonist or illustrator. Everyone I knew had a job and I knew I had to make a living, so I tried to be an illustrator, a cartoonist and all kinds of things. My idea of being an artist was having a job and doing-- making art of some kind like illustrations or cartoons. But it never worked. I never like to do that. Along in 1926, in San Francisco, I did a lot of illustrations for a children's magazine, The Treasure Chest, and that's when I thought maybe that would be a way of making a living. I always had wanted to be an artist, but I changed [to wanting] to be a painter when I was 18 or something like that.

SUE ANN KENDALL: Did Charlie Russell's experience at making a living as an artist influence you?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: No, I never thought about that. He didn't make a living. Later on in San Diego he did; he became an illustrator. But at that time he was just a camp cook and a roundup cook and kind of a roustabout and wrangler.

SUE ANN KENDALL: What about Raymond? Wasn't there a high school teacher that somehow influenced you?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Well, yes. She said that she thought I could be an artist if I wanted to. That was a great stimulus to me because she was the only adult who, in a semi-official position -- at the time I looked upon a teacher as such-- and whose opinion was valued (I mean an adult's opinion was valued in reference to being an artist because of being a teacher). Anyway. ..

SUE ANN KENDALL: What happened when you came to Broadway High School in Seattle?

KENNETH CALLAHAN Well, I went there for about a year. I learned later -- I don't remember anything about it myself-- but in Raymond, they put out a paper, the Southwesterly Review, or something like that, Northwesterly Review. It had a story and it said that I graduated from high school within three-and-one-half years. Well, I did leave high school with my diploma at Christmas time. I didn't know until I read that, that this was a matter of three-and-a-half years in high school.

SUE ANN KENDALL: Did you take art classes in high school?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: I took art classes, and at Broadway [High School, Seattle--Ed.] while I was there, I did the illustrations for the yearly publications. What do they call them in high school?

SUE ANN KENDALL: Yearbook.

KENNETH CALLAHAN: The woman that really influenced me there and who I had great respect for was Tillie Piper at Broadway. It wasn't a very long time that I was at Broadway but she was the art teacher. She was a very unusual teacher for a high school teacher at that time because she thought the use of nude models was an important thing and good training for artists. Well, before that, any suggestion of that would be just encouraging the looking at a naked woman. That was the whole purpose of it, many adults thought.
SUE ANN KENDALL: Were there life drawing classes?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: No, there wasn't a life drawing class because they wouldn't permit that, but she did have some of these cheap Greek sculptures-- plaster copies of classical nudes that we'd draw and that was very liberal at the time.

SUE ANN KENDALL: Like the academies in Europe, almost? Drawing from the plaster casts?

Did you feel that it was respectable to be an artist -- to be taking those classes-- by the time you got out of school?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Well, it never came to mind that it wasn't or was. As far as I'm concerned, I wanted to be an artist and that was that. Whatever that meant, I accepted that completely without thought. Whether it was right or wrong was of no. ..

SUE ANN KENDALL: So you were very determined, yourself, to go that route.

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Well, if you say very determined, that sounds like, "My God, I'm going to do this or die," or something. But it was nothing whatever of that. It's just simply the only way I can conceive of living. That's the way life was: I was going to be an artist. And so, there's no declaration. There's no nothing. I didn't arrive at that at any particular time or anything. It just always had been so. It's like how tall I am. There's no point in arguing about it.

SUE ANN KENDALL: Right. Then you attended the University of Washington for a short time?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Yeah. I went out there when I got out of high school, winter session. I was there for just a month or two and then I quit because I realized that that wasn't what I wanted as an artist. I wasn't getting anything of value to me.

One person I found very important there was a painter who just came from studying in Brussels, no from Paris: John Butler. He was teaching there. He wasn't a very good artist, but he was a person that made you feel that nothing was more important than art. He made you feel that painting was an important thing to be doing. And I think he was very stimulating to students from that point of view. I don't think his ideas amounted to a damn, and I don't think his work ever did either.

SUE ANN KENDALL: He was an American, but had studied in Paris?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Yeah. He was a local fellow. And he had that capacity to make you feel that art was a very important thing. I think that still is very important in any teacher of art. That it's not a hobby; it's not a casual thing. It's a serious part of life.

SUE ANN KENDALL: And so you left the university and went where?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Well, I went to San Francisco with a couple of other kids. I had a Model-T Ford.

One of the things that encouraged me at that time was that I got a prize in the Northwest Annual-- or else it was the exhibition that preceded the Northwest Annual. I got a second prize in black and white for a drawing and that pleased me very much. That was the first exhibition I ever got an award of any kind.

SUE ANN KENDALL: That was while you were in high school or right at the time you were at the university?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Yes. I was working for the Chanticleer Cafeteria half time and going to the university when that show was held.

SUE ANN KENDALL: Was that the drawing of the waterfront?

KENNETH CALLAHAN Well, I did exhibit many of those at different times, but this one-- I don't know what it was of. All I know, it was in black and white and that it was with an exhibition for adult artists; it wasn't for kids. So that's what pleased me, even if the award was of no consequence whatsoever. It probably wasn't a very good drawing and it certainly was of no consequence in the field of art.

SUE ANN KENDALL: No, but it meant something to you to achieve that, of course.

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Yeah.

SUE ANN KENDALL: Then you took off for San Francisco.

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Yeah. Lived there for several years. While I was there, I did these illustrations for The Treasure Chest.

SUE ANN KENDALL: That was in the early twenties?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Yeah. We don't have it here, but one Christmas for a present, Beth got this from the state library in Sacramento; they had copies of this magazine and so they sent us photographic copies of the pages and different issues that had these various illustrations of mine. This was just a few years ago. I hadn't seen them since I was down there. So it was kind of fun to see them.

SUE ANN KENDALL: What was your reaction?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: That was in 1926 that magazine was published, so that's when it was. Also in 1926 in San Francisco was the first one-man show I ever had. It was at Schwabacher-Frey store on Market Street and there was drawings of Yosemite. That summer, I worked up in Yosemite Valley as a busboy and did drawings of the Yosemite Valley. Mountain range, big ones.

SUE ANN KENDALL: And then you went out looking for a place to show them?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: No, I was living in San Francisco in the old Montgomery Building and it was filled with artists and sculptors and poets and stuff. And somebody I knew -- I don't know who it was-- knew of the gallery and interested them in having this exhibition. Just who it was or just how that exhibition came about, I don't remember. I remember having it, and seeing it.

SUE ANN KENDALL: That year also marks another important event for you, does it not? In your seeing the works of the so-called Blue Four?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Yeah, but it wasn't '26; that was '27. That was really a very important thing as an artist, because up until that time, my work was essentially realistic. Madame Galka Scheyer came from Europe; it was one of the very few instances, I think, in this country, where anyone came from Europe bringing European contemporary work, artists of consequence, who didn't go to New York first. For some reason, she came to San Francisco first and someone brought her up to the studio. She had a big folio full of Kandinsky, Klee, Feininger and Jawlensky. We spread these around the room and.. .

SUE ANN KENDALL: Were they oil paintings?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: No, they were just a few small canvases, unframed, by Jawlensky. The rest of them were gouache and watercolor-- drawings -- Klee, Kandinsky and Feininger. It was a huge folio, thick; she had a great many. So there were many many of these around the room and I can remember so well that I thought Klee and Feininger were like cartoonists. And Kandinsky-- they were kind of silly paintings, too. And Jawlensky -- I didn't like them. Even then I considered Jawlensky just a strong-armed German painter. But anyway, she was there for many hours. Howard Rutzel, I think, brought her in. _____, and Mrs. Jackson and myself and my partner, Jack Finn, who lived with me-- he was a chemist and writer. We had some wine and cheese and some bread and these things spread around. I really saw them, studied them, and then the next several days, walking out on the beach around the Presidio and Chinatown and North Beach, thinking about these works, it made me realize that these were not just cartoons. These people had created images that had a positive existence as images and that each one was an individual. I didn't like these things but I had to admit that they were important, that they had an infinite importance and it was no consequence whether I liked them or not. Because, they did exist, and that made me realize right then that one thing that I really wanted was to have an identity of my own like them -- to make forms that would have a convincing existence and come from me only. From then on, I was never concerned with the degree of realism, of projecting naturalistic readable images.

SUE ANN KENDALL: Was that your first contact with original works from Europe?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Well, probably not the first, because San Francisco's museums had some, but this was my first direct contact, face to face, with a number of works. I had seen isolated paintings of Van Gogh or Cezanne or Picasso or something in an exhibition at the DeYoung Museum or Legion of Honor or Palace. It would be easy for me to dismiss because these were just a single painting and there'd be other realistic paintings and _____ and I'd respond to and these I'd ignore. But I couldn't ignore these because there they were. And I saw enough of them at the time that I really got into them and they really reacted on me. It was a very great and important development in my life, about as important as any because it was-- oh, I don't know. Up to that time, there were certain paintings that, you know -- people like the British school of watercolor, Russell Flint-- they were the kind of things I was very interested in. And the more realistic people were artists that were of consequence to me. Well, then immediately after that when I'd think of Russell Flint, I'd realize that these were just empty, pretty decorations. And these other things, the Blue Four, had in feeling what I wanted. In appearance at that time it wasn't what I wanted, but. ..

SUE ANN KENDALL: But the impact. ..

KENNETH CALLAHAN: The impact that I wanted.

SUE ANN KENDALL: Who was Madame Scheyer? Was she a gallery person who was selling these? Why did she come?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: She didn't bring them to my studio to sell. I never have really known or tried to find out, but as far as I gather in memory, she was representing them and working out an exhibition circuit. From San Francisco she did go to Los Angeles and then to New York So, I think she was working out a tour of these artists' work which were not well known in this country. There would be a few New York artists that knew of them but they were not well known at all in the United States.

SUE ANN KENDALL: Was that in the Montgomery Building?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: The exhibition?

SUE ANN KENDALL: No, when she came to see you.

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Yes, that's where we lived; that was my studio.

SUE ANN KENDALL: Can you talk a little bit about what it was like to live there at that time?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: It was four or five stories, as I remember, maybe six or eight, but I think it was four or five and it was left over from the fire, previously a business building. And at that time, 1925, it was filled with poets, painters, and sculptors, and writers, and so forth. Mostly painters. At that time, you couldn't walk freely around the city in San Francisco if you had raggedy clothes and you didn't have a job because the police would stop you and ask you questions. And if you didn't have any money and you didn't have a job, they'd run you out of town or else put you in jail overnight and then [of course you would] leave town the next day or else spend the day working on the streets for the city.

And you couldn't go through a respectful neighborhood on the way to the beach, walking through there, without the police stopping you because you were in dirty clothes or old clothes. There was no such thing as "hippy" type clothes being acceptable. And so, whenever you were invited to dinner anywhere, if you didn't have a clean shirt and you didn't have a tie or shoes that were suitable, you'd just go round from person to person in the building and find out anybody that did have, and you'd borrow them for the evening. So you could go to dinner and go to respectful places. There was a camaraderie-- _____ _____.

SUE ANN KENDALL: Sure.

KENNETH CALLAHAN: But the fact that you borrowed somebody's trousers to go somewhere and later they'd borrow yours, wouldn't necessarily make you a friend of theirs. This went on in the building whether you knew the people or not. We all did that because nobody in the building had any money. Among those, you'd make friends but a lot of them you wouldn't make friends; you'd just [be] on that exchange basis.

SUE ANN KENDALL: Were there conversations among artists and poets and sort of cross influences that happened?

KENNETH CALLAHAN Oh, yeah. You know, sometime later, a matter of 20years or so ago, about '55, a woman -- she was an army colonel and a collector. _____ _____ _____ _____. She was Evelyn Roberts and she was retired from the army and lived in San Francisco. She'd been buying paintings of mine for some years. She had a considerable collection. And she heard a half-hour radio broadcast by a San Francisco writer about San Francisco in the old days. It was about me as an artist there. It was how I'd lived in the old Montgomery Building and I'd introduced him to the "inner sanctum" of San Francisco's Bohemia. And that he'd met in my studio Henry Cowell, the composer, doing one of his compositions on a washboard and sitting on the floor. And he met Sadakichi Hartman, the poet, there and several other people. Well, she went to the studio and got a typed copy and then she sent it to me. Until I read that, I didn't know that these people were.. . I knew their names. If somebody said, "did you know Sadakichi Hartman and Henry Cowell and so on when you were down there?" I said, "I think so, seems to me I remember their names but I can't be sure." But then I remembered it, it all came back to me. Oh, and it said how he'd met so many beautiful society girls from the East Bay at the studio. Well, I didn't remember these beautiful girls being there but, anyway.

So there was an exchange, perhaps that made me think of this when you said, "Was there an exchange between people in the building?"

One of the things that made them noisy as hell at times was that the building was built around a center well, like so many office buildings are. And, so people at parties would throw chairs and things out the window down into the well because it made such a terrible noise echoing when they'd crash in the bottom. And so occasionally, it'd be kind of noisy at night, but that wasn't all the time.

SUE ANN KENDALL: And there were other people that you could mention that were there? Say artists or poets?

[Tape 1, side 2]

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Well, I can't remember. You see the only reason I know those two names is because they were in this radio transcript. So many people, artists, would be in there for a short length of time, so many months or a year, and then they'd go away and another one would be there. And, I haven't maintained any of the old friendships I had from those days. The people are either dead or gone or dispersed. Jack Finn is dead.

SUE ANN KENDALL: You started taking freighter trips and coming and going didn't you, at that time, so the friendships would be kind of fluid?

KENNETH CALLAHAN Yeah, I did work in the merchant marine-- trips to get places and see things. It was another one of those things, I was trying to find some part-time way of making a living so that I could have time to paint. But there was also the romantic motivation -- fascinating and getting to places and see what things are like in the world.

SUE ANN KENDALL: Where did you go in the late twenties?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Well, I returned to Seattle in '28. I got back to Seattle then because I was working on a ship out of San Francisco to Australia, Sydney. And I got into a fight with another crew member-- I think it was about four to five days to Honolulu from San Francisco on this old freighter, old rust bucket. .. But anyway, we got into a fight and the skipper -- well, it was really the head steward, I think-- gave us a choice of going to jail in Honolulu and insisting on our wages from San Francisco, or else being just dumped there; we'd just leave the ship without our wages. If we insisted on our wages, we'd go to jail in Honolulu. Except neither of us wanted to go to jail, so we didn't. So, then I was there for a while and then I got a "work away" from there to Portland.

SUE ANN KENDALL: You came back up to Seattle from Portland?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Yeah. Playing cards with a crew I made some $3 and something, so it was enough to get me back to Seattle from Portland because I didn't make any money as a work-away.

SUE ANN KENDALL: Right.

KENNETH CALLAHAN: I understood that. It was the way things went in those days. You see, the steward signed me on from Honolulu to Seattle as a waiter because as a waiter I'd make more money for the trip. So he collected more money having me work-away as a waiter than if I'd worked as a mess boy. I didn't think about it at the time, but there were a lot of sailors who were professionals. That was their living and I was just chiseling on their living. The union-- the Sailors' Union of the Pacific -- which I belonged to then was absolutely of no meaning. As soon as you get a job on a ship, you're a member of the union.

SUE ANN KENDALL: Automatically?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Yeah. It costs a dollar or something. But it was strikebreaking as far as serious guys who were trying to make a living, with a wife and family and something.

SUE ANN KENDALL: Did you draw while you were on these trips?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Yeah, all the time. One way I found out I could do, and it worked very well: First night aboard, we'd sit around playing cards and I wouldn't be playing. I'd just be sitting and watching them and keeping score. And I'd take my pencil and just make a sketch of one of these guys and as soon as they'd: "What in the hell is that you got there, Callahan?" I'd say that I was just making a drawing of him. And he'd look at it and: "Jesus, it looks just like me. Can I have that? I'll send it to my wife." Or "Send it to my girlfriend." Or something. So somebody else would ask me to do it. So then from then on, I could draw all I wanted to because I was a sailor that was drawing, not an artist. You know, that made a difference.

SUE ANN KENDALL: Made it okay.

KENNETH CALLAHAN: I'd have to fight every guy in the crew to prove that I wasn't a sissy, under other circumstances. And I never would do such a thing as admit that I'd never been near a university. I mean that would be thumbs down. But that's the way I got back to Seattle.

SUE ANN KENDALL: Was the influence of the sea-- do you sense that had any impact? Because that's a very early contact you had with the sea, and of course you've moved back to the ocean now.

KENNETH CALLAHAN: I don't know. What interests me is interrelationship of man and nature in one sense-- the rhythm of the wind and the wind currents and the patterns in the sand and the rhythm in the waves and the bloodstreams in human beings and animals and everything. And, you know, the glaciers do move. Visually, they're stationary, you can't watch a glacier moving, but by God, you go away for a year and you can come back and see where the glacier has moved. So these rhythms underlie everything and part of the unifying thing of everything -- that moves in life-- it has to be the basic movement. I've always been interested in that and it's very apparent in the wind and in the sea. And in the sand on the shores and in the mountains and trees -- form of trees and animals.

[Interruption as KC mentions a person he sees from the window--Ed.]

SUE ANN KENDALL: Okay, you got back to Seattle and you had a show here in 1929?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Yes, '28 or '29. It was probably the same year. [Some discussion with Beth, his wife--Ed.] Well, yes. It was shortly after that. Dave Hatch was the director of the Seattle Art Museum-- Art Institute of Seattle it was called at the time -- and he's the one that gave me a show.

When we were in New York early last month, I had one of my regular shows at the Kraushaar Gallery and Dave Hatch and his wife were at the opening.

[Beth: Had you met Margaret then?]

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Oh, yes. Dave brought her up to the studio. She was an associate editor of the Town Crier, a weekly magazine in Seattle, and Dave brought her up to interview me when he picked out the show. Margaret was my first wife, who died in 1961. Yeah, obviously before Beth and I were married.

SUE ANN KENDALL: And so you met her and had a one-man show?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Yeah.

SUE ANN KENDALL: Then you settled here for a while?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Well, yes. No, I left here again. On, no, I got mixed up about this. I just thought of this now: I came back here to Seattle and then I didn't stay, only a couple of months or something, and then Earl Fields and I left and went to San Francisco and to Los Angeles. I don't know why, but we just did. Then we bummed our way-- hitchhiked; we use to call it bumming -- up to San Francisco, and that was when I shipped on the Malola to Honolulu. And then came back here and stayed on from that time. That was when I had this show. While I was living there, several years, I also made some trips.

Earl was something wonderful, kind of shy. We separated around Santa Barbara because we couldn't get any rides together. So I was sitting up on a bank-- the road came along and curved under a railroad bridge -- and I had some oranges and I was eating one. And down the road came this figure of Earl. He didn't see me. And he'd been so shy he could hardly put his hand up to get a ride when we separated. And as these cars would go by, he'd hold his hand out like this [gesture]: "Son of a bitch, son of a bitch." (laughs) Anyway, he came up there and he had a loaf of bread so we had a good meal of oranges and a loaf of bread.

SUE ANN KENDALL: But, then you sort of settled down and got married? And worked here?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Yeah. Along in that time the museum [Seattle Art Museum--Ed.] being built-- the money had been given -- and I wrote on art, about the museum being built and so forth, for Margaret. This Town Crier job of hers as associate editor-- well, she was actually the editor and did everything. She did all the reviews and everything and whatever she could get -- people donated for her. Well, I decided I'd write on art just to save her from having to do that, too. Fuller, who was president of the Art Institute-- the Seattle Art Museum, when the museum opened, he employed me as just a museum worker. It was a part-time job, half-time job. And then I gradually as time went on was given more responsibility and so on. But, it remained a half-time job. That was excellent for. ..

SUE ANN KENDALL: Money?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Yeah, making money.

SUE ANN KENDALL: Now you actually became a sort of curator?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Yeah, assistant director and then curator. But it was still half-time.

SUE ANN KENDALL: At the same time you were writing occasionally for the Town Crier. Did you use a pseudonym?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Oh, I did at one time. I was writing for the Times, a regular Seattle Art Museum column by Kenneth Callahan. And then the Town Crier wanted me to write for them occasionally and rather than using the same name in the magazine, I used Larry Cross. My mother's maiden name was Cross and so I just used Larry Cross as the reviewer in the Town Crier so that the Seattle Times would have a reviewer and that the Town Crier would have a different reviewer. Because at that time, there was nobody else writing about art in Seattle and I thought it was better for art to have apparently two columns than just one.

SUE ANN KENDALL: Was the writing for the Times originally part of your museum job?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Yeah, for several years. It was just called the Seattle Art Museum column, a weekly column, and it was part of my job at the museum.

SUE ANN KENDALL: So it was all about museum news then?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Yeah, only exhibitions at the museum. But very soon after that, why I don't know, anyway. When I was fired by the museum, I went to ask the Times managing editor if he'd be interested in an art column for pay, and he said he was. So I was paid $35 a month for a weekly column.

SUE ANN KENDALL: That was after 1953 when you left the museum?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Yeah.

SUE ANN KENDALL: How long did you do that for the Times?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: I did it for a number of years at the museum as part museum work and then I did it for another-- well, I wasn't doing it when I got the Guggenheim in '55, so it must have been before that. [Discussion with Beth--Ed.]

SUE ANN KENDALL: It seems like that was a lot for one person. You were painting and you were also working at the museum and writing?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Well, you see, it was just a half-time job at the museum and the writing was done in the morning as part of the museum work. So, I was completely free after.

SUE ANN KENDALL: Did you feel like there was some conflict of interest by being both one of the main painters in the area and being a person who could organize shows and also write about them?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Well, I couldn't write about myself and I didn't. I didn't try to be analytical, especially, or anything else. I couldn't avoid giving opinions at times, but essentially it was just news about art. Because, the papers, if I hadn't done this, the only people they had writing about art were the girls in the society department of the paper. And with all good will in the world, the girl working the society department probably knew nothing about art nor was interested. She couldn't write very intelligently about it, through ignorance, not stupidity.

SUE ANN KENDALL: So you viewed yourself more as a reporter than a critic?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: A reporter, yeah, and not attempting any idea of being a critic at all. It was just a matter of information. But, I couldn't avoid giving an opinion, and as a result of that, some of the national art magazines would get caught up with this and so they'd occasionally ask me to do things.

SUE ANN KENDALL: Can you talk a little more about your work at the museum and your responsibilities there?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Well, I did arrange shows and.. .

SUE ANN KENDALL: Shows of local work?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Local and national, whatever we had. And I did some restoration of Chinese and Japanese objects in the Oriental collection we had. And when Fuller was out of town, I'd have to take people visiting the museum-- involved in the art thing -- through.

SUE ANN KENDALL: Did you have some control over what shows were mounted?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Well, yes, from the standpoint.. . Fuller would ask me-- he was thinking of getting some exhibition -- what I thought of it and we'd go over it and analyze it, whether it would be good or not to have it. So I acted as an advisor to him. But he was the one who was in control. And when he wasn't there, I was in charge of the museum in that sense. I substituted for him when he was away.

SUE ANN KENDALL: What were the circumstances surrounding the firing?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Oh, that wasn't anything special. It was just that I was on vacation and he wrote me and said that he thought that I was more interested in my own work than I was museum work, which was actually true, and that I never made myself an expert in any particular field of art, which was also very true, because I was not interested in it. Anyway, in general it was [that--Ed.] I was more tied up with my own work than museum work. That was absolutely true. So he sent me an extra check for a month and I was not to come back.

And it was long time since I quit. I should have quite before that, on my own. Because at that time, I had already had a very successful show in New York and a number of museums-- including the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney and the Guggenheim and, oh, the Brooklyn Museum and a lot of other museums in various places bought paintings -- and many collectors, name collectors, and so on. And I had a dealer in New York, the Maynard/Walker Gallery. But I was always afraid, a little afraid, of depending on the sale of my work to make a living for fear I'd be influenced, by the necessity of making money, to copy my own self. Because, you have a successful show in New York and so a lot of paintings are sold. Well, the dealer, obviously, makes money on that as well as you do. So then two years later the dealer will have another show of yours, and there would be a tendency, with many dealers too, to encourage you to do things that are like your first show because that's what the people liked and the museums liked and the galleries liked and so on. I also knew that as far as I was concerned, that copying yourself is no better than copying somebody else. I mean, if I try to copy, the first time I can do it again pretty good and the second one won't be quite as good and third would be less, and pretty soon it would be nothing. And so I was afraid of depending on the sale of art influencing what I did in painting. So that's why I kept the job as long as I did. But it was long since time that I quit. However, it was a number of years before I could make a living just selling paintings.

SUE ANN KENDALL: Were there any shows of yours at the museum while you were working there?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: No. I would enter the Northwest Annual, but other than that I didn't have any shows of mine.

SUE ANN KENDALL: What about the museum's policy for showing local artists during that time?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: It was a very good one. I mean, we used to have regular exhibitions of local artists and I always encouraged that as much as I could. And Fuller was very interested in that. Almost every month we have a show of some.. .

SUE ANN KENDALL: I know Margaret Tomkins didn't feel like she could have a show there because of museum policy-- I think that was during the fifties -- and I wondered if you could illuminate that?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Well, my differences with Margaret Tomkins were personal differences and there were things.. . This is one thing that happened, just to give you an idea. There was a man, Dr. Newmeyer, a German, who was teaching at Mills College in Berkeley, and he wrote me and asked if I could get together an exhibition of local artists for Mills College. He sent me a list of names of those he wanted. I got in touch with these people and packed and sent this exhibition to him. And, well, Margaret Tomkins and Jim FitzGerald, her husband, were not included in the list. So Margaret Tomkins saw me and wanted to know, very militantly, why she and Jim were not included in this exhibition. I said that I didn't have anything to do with selecting them. Newmeyer sent me a list of names of those painters he wanted and those were the ones I asked and those were the ones I sent. "Don't give me that," she said. So she believed that I deliberately had left them out. Why, that wasn't true at all. But there were things like that created a.. . Well, this wasn't the museum policy.

SUE ANN KENDALL: No, that was outside of the museum's domain.

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Yeah. No matter who I was, or what was at the museum, that list of paintings would be exactly the same number of items and the same items would be sent to that show.

SUE ANN KENDALL: I suppose misunderstandings like that are somewhat inevitable when you are in.. .

KENNETH CALLAHAN: They are inevitable. And apparently, there may have very well been several reasons that caused her antagonism, because to this day she feels very antagonistic toward me.

SUE ANN KENDALL: And it's over the lack of shows she had at the museum?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Well, I don't know what it was. It was something to do with me. It could very well be a personal dislike. I just spoke about that show of Dr. Newmeyer's as an example of one thing I know that made her very mad.. . But it shows I had nothing to do with selecting.. .

SUE ANN KENDALL: Do you think it created any other antagonisms between you and other Seattle artists?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Oh, I'm sure I did. I don't remember any other specific ones, but I think that anybody who's in a job as a curator or assistant director of the only art museum in a city and at the same time was the only one that was writing an art column in the city-- well there's bound to be all kinds of antagonisms and cross things coming up. I know that a number of people felt that I had great influence over Richard Fuller and that all I needed to do was say, "Now Dick, I think this is what we should do," and Dick would do that. That wasn't true at all. He was absolutely in authority at all times. The only times I had any complete authority was if he was away and I could state what the museum would do about a specific thing. But otherwise, he was entirely in charge. He asked my opinion very frequently on things, and I'd give an opinion and he would do the opposite.

SUE ANN KENDALL: But it put you in somewhat a difficult position to ride the fence between the museum and your colleagues.

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Yeah. I couldn't write and say, "This isn't my fault that we had this exhibition. This is Fuller's fault." So a certain amount of antagonism with a number of the artists developed.

Oh, one of the other accusations was that I lost the good will of the Seattle artists. It was one of the reasons for my being fired. And

SUE ANN KENDALL: And there were other people that you could mention that were there? Say artists or poets?

[Tape 1, side 2]

SUE ANN KENDALL: You started taking freighter trips and coming and going didn't you, at that time, so the friendships would be kind of fluid?

SUE ANN KENDALL: Where did you go in the late twenties?

SUE ANN KENDALL: You came back up to Seattle from Portland?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Yeah. Playing cards with a crew I made some $3 and something, so it was enough to get me back to Seattle from Portland because I didn't make any money as a work-away.

SUE ANN KENDALL: Right.

SUE ANN KENDALL: Automatically?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Yeah. It costs a dollar or something. But it was strikebreaking as far as serious guys who were trying to make a living, with a wife and family and something.

SUE ANN KENDALL: Did you draw while you were on these trips?

SUE ANN KENDALL: Made it okay.

SUE ANN KENDALL: Was the influence of the sea-- do you sense that had any impact? Because that's a very early contact you had with the sea, and of course you've moved back to the ocean now.

KENNETH CALLAHAN: I don't know. What interests me is interrelationship of man and nature in one sense -- the rhythm of the wind and the wind currents and the patterns in the sand and the rhythm in the waves and the bloodstreams in human beings and animals and everything. And, you know, the glaciers do move. Visually, they're stationary, you can't watch a glacier moving, but by God, you go away for a year and you can come back and see where the glacier has moved. So these rhythms underlie everything and part of the unifying thing of everything-- that moves in life -- it has to be the basic movement. I've always been interested in that and it's very apparent in the wind and in the sea. And in the sand on the shores and in the mountains and trees-- form of trees and animals.

[Interruption as KC mentions a person he sees from the window--Ed.]

SUE ANN KENDALL: Okay, you got back to Seattle and you had a show here in 1929?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Yes, '28 or '29. It was probably the same year. [Some discussion with Beth, his wife--Ed.] Well, yes. It was shortly after that. Dave Hatch was the director of the Seattle Art Museum -- Art Institute of Seattle it was called at the time-- and he's the one that gave me a show.

When we were in New York early last month, I had one of my regular shows at the Kraushaar Gallery and Dave Hatch and his wife were at the opening.

[Beth: Had you met Margaret then?]

SUE ANN KENDALL: And so you met her and had a one-man show?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Yeah.

SUE ANN KENDALL: Then you settled here for a while?

SUE ANN KENDALL: But, then you sort of settled down and got married? And worked here?

SUE ANN KENDALL: Money?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Yeah, making money.

SUE ANN KENDALL: Now you actually became a sort of curator?

KENNETH CALLAHAN: Yeah, assistant director and then curator. But it was still half-time.
SUE ANN KENDALL: At the same time you were writing occasionally for the Town Crier. Did you use a pseudonym?