Transcript
Preface
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Speakers are indicated by their initials.
Interview
An Interview with Ruth Vollmer, conducted by Susan Larsen
New York , January 30, 1973
SL: Mrs. Vollmer, how many years have you been associated with American Abstract Artists?
RV: I am not an old member, I joined around 1963.
SL: Has the group changed from its original character? I have noticed that quite a number of young artists now in their thirties are exhibiting with A.A.A. How did that come about?
RV: It was Leo Rabkin who accomplished that! He asked many young people to join those who were friends and knew each other already. Also many we did not yet know.
Of the younger generation there is Bob Ryman, Robert Mangold . . . Mangold I'm not sure, but I think also Jo Baer. Actually this painting of Jo Baer I had seen in an American Abstract Artists show and fell in love with it. It didn't occur to me it could be here because it was different from all the ones that I knew. And finally at the end of the show I looked to see whose it is. And it was hers.
SL: She had taken a new direction?
RV: Yes, that was it. I am very happy to have it.
SL: I'm trying, in looking at the later members and their work to see if there is any continuity of outlook between older original members and those younger people. Perhaps it isn't a good idea to try to construct parallels.
RV: It isn't hard, I think. You mean, along with this young generation? There is, they all are friends, they are aware, they talk together. They know each other, they pull on the same string.
SL: Just as happened in the thirties with the original group?
RV: Yes, the abstractness is not their theme. That is, so to say, self-understood. I don't know actually where their meeting comes. Maybe in the mathematical, the rhythmical, the rhythmical repeats. In the importance of line and drawing.
In this one, Ryman's white painting that is taped to the wall, I asked him what gave him the idea. I saw it in his studio with a much higher, a square one higher than this. An enormous one that he painted with a brush that was about this big. And he also had an enormous taped one on the wall. The same thing. It was white and the white was put on like this, in directions, only it was a little clearer than here.
Then I asked him, "What about this track?" And he said, "You know, there is a painting by Seurat in the Museum of Modern Art where he continued the painting over the frame." It was loaned to the museum for an exhibit. I remember having seen the painting and it was a surprise that it was really that way. He had continued the painting over the frame. And it was so alive!
The Italian Renaissance I don't get. Because I am so disturbed that what I am looking at are fragments of paintings that I can't get together. But maybe one has to have a guide.
SL: Some of the works, I'm thinking mainly of sculpture or frescoes that have been damaged through time, are so beautiful that you can get a sense of the spirit of the whole.
RV: The Giottos also. That I get.
SL: In looking at this painting by Ryman I notice the direction of the brushstroke plays an important part in separating one area from another, even though they are all white. Ilya Bolotowsky does this in his paintings, particularly the later ones, I spoke to him about it.
RV: In general, Ryman always paints white paintings. Because he is interested in things like the edge of the painting, like what the painting is painted on, on steel, or on masonite or on something softer. Soft, more fluid paint, how do you put the paint on and then the edge. All of these things interest him, but then he has started to work on a show for the Guggenheim of enormous paintings. They are also white. It was a painting that a top, or tops, there was some article in Artforum with interviews.
(Mrs. Vollmer showed me a sculpture by Sol Lewitt together with several Lewitt drawings, an Ad Reinhardt cross composition in black and black-brown, also work by other artists in her circle of friends. She also showed me two Klee etchings, some small plaster figures by Giacometti and several early Greek figures in clay.)
RV: Some work goes with writing. This lends itself perfectly for writing. In fact I just had to write it to see really what it is.
SL: Is that Art International?
RV: Studio International.
SL: (I discussed my previous conversation with Ilya Bolotowsky and some of the early activities of A.A.A., mentioning Mr. Bolotowsky's article in an edition of Leonardo magazine.)
RV: What does he say about his work? Is it geometrical or . . .
SL: He says it is not geometric, because a geometric shape on a canvas tends to break apart from the totality of the picture plane. I'm trying to paraphrase him. Likewise, something that relies on saturation points of color or linear configurations that change through perception, also is an image because it detaches itself from the picture plane. He would rather work with this flat surface and keep all of the elements together at all times rather than having one thing detach itself from the rest.
RV: Then he would say that he wants it static?
SL: No, I think it can be dynamic.
RV: Dynamic without moving?
SL: Or without considering one element apart from the others. We were discussing Hélion's work and Léger and Picasso. And he was explaining to me what he saw as the differences between their work and Neoplasticism.
RV: Oh, yes, there is pull. The pull front and back.
SL: Especially in the American work from the thirties, where so many artists were learning from Cubism and Neoplasticism, it is sometimes difficult to sort out the various influences.
RV: But if you learn from the Cubist tradition, you don't need this. Because it's there anyway, although you have to learn it in the sense of construction. I really shouldn't talk about this, because I don't really understand painting the way a painter does. I have always done sculpture.
SL: And I have always had difficulty with sculpture because I love painting so much and the instinct toward the two-dimensional is basic to me.
RV: I like to look at painting more than to look at sculpture.
SL: Oh, you do? That's fascinating.
RV: In general, in general. . . . There are very few really great sculptors. Outside of Brancusi who is dead. There are really very few compared to the many painters who are very interesting. The sculptors immediately are not interesting at all.
SL: I agree with you, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
RV: Yes. I notice in the sculpture books, I often don't like a thing. And I ask myself when I look at the illustrations, "What has that got to do with anything?"
SL: Do you think that sculpture is harder, that it is harder to do a fine work of sculpture than to achieve a similar success in a painting?
RV: It has nothing to do with it. But, you know, hardness usually makes a thing better. If you have to try harder, you apply yourself.
SL: You get down to business?
RV: Yes.
SL: Do you think in the American Abstract Artists that there are generally more painters than sculptors? Some people have written that, I thought I should ask you since you are one of the sculptors.
RV: Much more painting, but that's not surprising. It is always a mix. For example, Betty Parsons always had too many artists. There was always the trouble that there were too many people who wanted shows. And she got all nervous and didn't know what to do because she felt bad if she couldn't give them all a show. So she threw out all the artists and said, "Nobody come in!" But she didn't throw out the sculptors because she said they don't produce enough anyway to count! And I was concerned and asked why not but I learned that she always handles it the same way, and it all works out.
But the idea is true. Because those sculptors who do large sculpture and have to pay for it before they sell it, or can't pay for it because they can't ear.. anything while it is in progress; these are unsurmountable problems unless you can afford to do it. Only since I'm old I can afford to do the sculpture, to some extent. It's terrible, transport alone . . . in the making of one piece without which I could not have done that sculpture I got some help. They made that piece and did not charge me a cent out of sheer niceness! So you understand . . . I did not even know them.
Some people said, "Call up Grumman Aircraft, they do so many experiments and they may have something that they threw away that you can use. Ask them!" So I did and they thought they had something and I went there. I got a truck to pick it up. The truck cost $105. Even though Hicksville is very close to New York because it has to be a truck that goes down very close to the floor, because otherwise it cannot go under the highway bridges and there is no other way to go. So all right.
And they cut it the right shape and they wrapped it. And they stressed it and they said we have an old man who can still do the hammering. We will have him hammer out a piece for you. And he did. One piece had to be connected to the other and I wondered how it would work- They said we have a way. When I did not see it too, they said all the engineers have figured it out and that of course it would be right. But I was right, the piece doesn't exist anymore.
SL: Did it fall apart?
RV: It could stand up, but it could not take transport and museum exhibits and so on.
SL: Their intentions were good but perhaps they didn't use the right material.
RV: Now, the future of these young people who show with us. They are all not so anxious to show because they are already very successful. Ryman also exhibits in Europe. Mangold is going to Europe to show for several shows. Lewitt constantly has shows in Europe and he is just back. So they aren't anxious to show.
SL: And that was the original purpose of American Abstract Artists. There wasn't any place to show.
RV: Yes. Well, we coax them from time to time and they do come. But by their own desire, they like it but it doesn't make too much difference to them.
SL: It is not an economic necessity?
RV: Yes.
SL: Do you go to meetings? Are they held often?
RV: We do have meetings. Sometimes they are very good. Betty Parsons spoke at the last one and it was very interesting. She is a painter, she is one of the older members, as I understand. Charmion Von Wiegand was there.
SL: How did you become interested in joining American Abstract Artists?
RV: Through Huelsenbeck, they are called Hulbeck here. They are old friends, he was one of the first Dadaists in Germany. I don't know if he was in Dada from the beginning. He was one of the founders of Dada in Zurich. Huelsenbeck and one other. Was he a Dadaist before he was a Surrealist?
SL: I think so, he wrote poems, I know.
RV: Yes, as a movement Dada was earlier in Zurich but in the art the Minotaur I think, was Surrealist. By the way if you want to study that period, Cahiers d'Art and the Minotaur would give you much.
SL: Mr. Bolotowsky was talking about Cahiers d'Art as an influence upon American artists of the thirties. They would read it and discuss it together, the illustrations especially had a great impact.
Often one would say to the other, "That looks like something I saw in Cahiers d'Art." And the other would say, "I don't think so." But it was true though, because they were all learning from it and from each other.
RV: Oh, that's very nice. I didn't know that, it is interesting. I have a beautiful thing in the original, not a letter but a text which when it was published in Cahiers d'Art was signed by Giacometti. But in the original it is handwritten and it is by Breton who was the director of the Surrealists. And Giacometti was a terribly good pupil. It's ridiculous how he was anxious to do everything right!
SL: To be a correct Dadaist?
RV: Yes. But that is very beautiful, it must have started as an interview, where he was asked, "How do you do sculpture?" And then he says how he does sculpture, and it is so fascinating! He says that if he has it worked out in his mind entirely . . . entirely before he starts . . . it comes. His favorite word. That is the first part.
He then goes on to the second part which is a description of how he got that piece . . . do you know the one in the Museum of Modern Art? It is a wood construction. (Mrs. Vollmer brought out a book on Giacometti to show me an illustration of this piece which I did not know.) There are such strange things . . . there is a mathematical thing I found in here but I can't find anywhere else. I can't imagine it was invented by this book. He was a famous thinker. I have been told by people who should know that.
(Mrs. Vollmer then showed me some small white plaster figures by Giacometti, no more than three inches high. I asked her if they were studies for larger works.)
RV: No, no. That is the sculpture! It was cast in bronze because people refused to buy it. The Americans . . . they refused. And do you know, they also refused to buy the ceramic sculptures of Picasso. I remember I went to a show and I saw that the clay walls were of some beautiful pigeons, in places very thin. He had just squeezed them into shape.
SL: I am not familiar with these tiny plaster figures of Giacometti. They have not been on exhibit in any museum that I can remember.
RV: These are early, they come before the figures. And the figures at that time so few people looked at it, that those people looked at it and they didn't mind if it was a small piece. That is the way he makes a clay model and you constantly hope for bronze to cast it. They are not realistic figures. Though he worked from the model for I think, fifteen years. The first show was figures. And do you know I think all his life, ever since he was a child he worked in these small plaster ones.
SL: That is quite a difference, when so often one sees the large bronze figures, often over life-size. But the texture constantly plays on the silhouette, his forms are almost ethereal sometimes.
RV: Yes. And also this is like drawing.
SL: One does have that response to it.
RV: And the flow, the flow! Well, I think we have gotten off the subject.
SL: When did you join American Abstract Artists?
RV: In the sixties some time.
SL: In one book I have it said that you began exhibiting with the A.A.A. in 1963.
RV: That should be approximately right. Because with Betty I showed I think from 1960 and I had pieces in group shows before.
SL: Do the sculptors in the group get together more often, apart from the other members?
RV: I think Stanczak is one member I like very much.
SL: Richard Lippold is another sculptor in A.A.A.
RV: I like him very much too. Rabkin, now he belongs more to these people although he was there before they came. Jorgenson I like. Krisel, I like. Lassaw is very strange in that he never changes.
SL: His work from about 1935 to 1942 is quite interesting because it had two elements which worked together. Sometimes it was very clear-cut and sharp, structural.
RV: You mean, the structure then was really like that edge?
SL: Yes. There seems to be a development. There are two on display at the Washburn Gallery from that period. But after the early forties he does settle down into a pattern.
(Mrs. Vollmer had on her living room table a copy of the catalogue which accompanied Sol LeWitt's 1972 show at the Kunsthalle in Berne. It is entitled Arcs, from corners & sides, circles, & grids and all their combinations.)
RV: The numbers always stay the same and make these combinations.
SL: Is it mathematical?
RV: Rhythmic. It is all combinations of lines in four directions. Both the drawings and in the large room. All the lines there are these diagonals and the vertical. But here also he adds the arcs and then it becomes more complicated. And I think these are expressions of the arcs.
SL: So they are all the variables of a single theme and themes in combinations.
RV: Yes. You see here what he has to say is; Sol LeWitt, Arcs from corners and sides, circles and grids and all their combinations. Published in Berne. One: Arcs from corners and sides, from two adjacent sides, from two corners, from four corners . . and so on.
SL: All very logical.
RV: It is absolutely logical, but it makes very strange and different pictures somehow. And he has also done these things with boxes. Small boxes, flat boxes, with two screens close to each other making variations. And then he has put a chemical mass on a cardboard surface. He lights it with ordinary light and then when he shuts off the light it is still gleaming.
SL: And then it slowly dies out?
RV: Yes, it dies out pretty fast.
SL: I wondered if you know if it is true that Julian Stanczak studied with Josef Albers. There is a great fascination with color as well as with optics in his work.
RV: That could be. I was probably mistaken when I thought he was a sculptor.
SL: His work is optical, but it isn't tricky.
RV: Would you call this optical? (Referring to the LeWitt book.)
SL: It seemed so to me, but now that you have showed me the rationale behind it, it seems more serious. The end product may have some optical effects, but they are obviously not LeWitt's aim or primary intention.
RV: You mean because it makes a vibration?
SL: Yes, but this way of going about it reminds me much more of Mr. Bolotowsky's comment about having a certain number of variables and using them in combinations. Although LeWitt is more dispassionate and less conscious about the aesthetic aspect of the work while it is in progress, I think.
RV: Why don't you find out from him how he thinks about the process?
SL: LeWitt has a very interesting way of going about his work, it isn't so intuitive as it is logical.
RV: But you see, it is the same. Whether he does it there or here. (Referring to several catalogues of shows in which LeWitt showed drawings, sculpture and mixed media work.) He uses something else but it is every time the same variations he uses, the same principles.
SL: I am writing about the history of the American Abstract Artists so I am interested in the different kinds of work current members are doing . . . as well as the work of the thirties.
RV: You should find somebody who could tell you who has written about this because I don't know it. Strangely, because it's something that concerns me very much too!
SL: Is it because of the form that results that you and Mr. LeWitt and others use mathematical procedures? Are mathematical formulas and procedures seen as a surer road to something aesthetically satisfying to the mind as well as to the eye?
RV: I can't say I do the mathematical form because of mathematics. Mathematics yes, because of one point of view. But that's not the whole story. The mathematical form is so beautiful because it's so objective! It is not beautiful because it is made by a person, or looked at by a person. It is outside of the particular.
By the way, all of the mathematical forms that exist are all of the same kind of mathematics, a function of that mathematics. That is really the reason for it.
There is a textbook I found in the Columbia Library. Columbia has one hundred or over one hundred mathematical forms which are kept in a cupboard in the Low Library. The mathematics department is not interested in them any more. They are not interested in function mathematics, but in entirely different kinds of mathematics. So it has no meaning for them.
But for years and years I have been interested in mathematical forms, in geometry, and for a long time in mathematics. And somebody told me Columbia has mathematical forms. And everybody who told me I asked, "Where are they because I haven't been up there. And I went immediately when I was told where they were. Well, they had moved the mathematics department to a new building and the new building had no room for them.
SL: Are they models based upon formulas?
RV: On mathematical formulas, not on geometry! It is very interesting.
SL: Is that why you have the sea shells here? I notice this whorl or spiral pattern is common to all of them even though some are much bigger than others.
RV: No, the sea shells are . . . the mathematical forms I did for my last show just recently. The sea shells go way back into my life. I got these out at Betty Parsons' beach. Monday morning I got up and no one was there yet, and I went out on the beach. All week nobody had been out there. I didn't know it existed. And it was filled with these shells! And I got more and more intrigued. And I couldn't tell quite what it is that was in all of these shells the same. Until I finally got it. That it was the logarithm.
SL: That's what I meant, there is something about this shape that makes it appear over and over again.
RV: It's absolutely fantastic! You see this one, do you know what a cat's eye is? What is under the foot of the shell . . . and this is an enormous shell. This is just a piece that was under the foot of a big shell. A cat's eye is about the size of this, the usual cat's eye. Dick Tuttle found this on a beach, on a Japanese beach going south of Japan. It's on an archipelago of small islands. And one of them was all filled with these, but they were on the foot of a very poisonous conch shell.
SL: Are they the kind you listen to?
RV: No, no. They are so poisonous that in Captain Cook there is a remark that a native girl in picking up one of these shells and raising her arm, fell down and was dead. And the others, even bigger than this, had black goo on them so he didn't want to touch it. But I love this one. I asked my brother to take one of these small ones, to take one of these and to photograph it and enlarge it as much as he could. He is a photographer. And he did it and I will show you a picture of it. They have a strange thing, they always make like a pointed oval. See, here too. The shape comes from both sides and then becomes a point.
SL: It echoes and re-echoes itself. It looks like marble.
RV: Yes, yes. This here is probably polished over by the animal. Do you know, when the foot is the lowest end it is never visible. It travels on it, underneath.
SL: The sand polishes it?
RV: Here it is not polished, I think the sand would rather do that. But here by the animal it is. Where the shell starts, the foot sticks out unless the animal is scared of something. Then it pulls this in and that closes up the shell. So the aggressor cannot get to the animal. But not all shells have it.
SL: I have never seen that.
RV: Oh, the little cat's eyes you find everywhere. And where the shell touches the animal that is the point where the shell material is growing. On this edge of the animal grows the shell, the mantle of the animal this is called.
SL: I wonder what it is that makes that so perfectly beautiful.
RV: Isn't it! It just is that beautiful because it's alive.' That's the perfect moral.
SL: I wonder what stresses operate in nature, so perfectly calculated to make such a beautiful line and shape.
RV: That I would like to know too.
SL: And then, to do this again and again in different sizes and places.
RV: Always the same. I have never seen an imperfect one! Look at this one, it is a bivalve.
SL: It has two sides.
RV: But to make it fun, and a little different it is not symmetrical. The back here is left out. And this is charming.
SL: There is a certain expressive quality in some of them, and in others a kind of elegant universality in nature.
RV: And this here, this is a fossil much older than man. This makes me absolutely mad!
SL: Is it a fossil of a shell?
RV: Yes, sure. And this is similar to that. Isn't that fantastic! You should look at it through this magnifying glass, you will really see the material is so beautiful. This is close to 26,000 years.
SL: And there are so many points on it, so perfect.
RV: It is not so perfect anymore as it was.
SL: It has been knocked around through time.
RV: No, it is always in this cotton but it may be that they may have repaired it a little bit. You know, like the Greeks do by repairing these lines as they do in clay. They do it well. You see well these little effects of clay.
SL: You mean these little lines to fill in the cracks.
RV: Yes. You have to hold it so that light gets on the piece. And then the other one . . . usually very close to the piece.
SL: These kinds of things and the fascination with it, isn't very different from mathematics.
RV: That's what I think! It is not at all different. The fantastic thing in nature is that nature would not be possible unless it could reproduce these over and over.
SL: That is a very wonderful way of looking at the world because you don't feel foreign to anything. Have you read any of the essays of Irene Rice Pereira? She writes about science and art and how she sees them as both revealing truths, but through a different process.
RV: I recall only once seeing something of hers. I think it was in Saks Window. I remember being very impressed with it. Impressed . . . but also mixed up.
SL: Sometimes it is very difficult to link theory or philosophy with the production of art. The effort to put the two closely together often fails.
RV: If it is an effort it isn't any good. Isn't it surprising that there are not more artists in American Abstract Artists from the early years? I wonder why Pollock wasn't in it, but perhaps they never asked him. You know something, we forget that there were not very many people who were sure, sure about Pollock.
SL: Or about each other.
RV: Yes. It always takes a little longer. I know we got the Giacomettis because we were just absolutely in love with them! After the show at Pierre Matisse where the first figures were shown . . . I just couldn't believe what happened. I was terribly impressed with Giacometti long before that, from the time I saw the first one.
It was at Ullman, I think, I'm not sure where. I loved the show there. Somebody took me to about fifteen galleries mostly on Fifty-Seventh Street. The galleries which you know, the basic galleries to which I used to go, then changed so much because Berenson came in and I also knew Wunderlich. After the first two somebody took me to Peggy Guggenheim's gallery. I went there and there was a beautiful Giacometti. It was a very early one also in clay. And I asked her, "What was Giacometti done? Who is he? I know nothing about him."
And she said, "He has done very little and nobody knows much about him. And I know also, little about him. I'll show everything together if you like. I will get together everything I can find and I'll keep it here, then you can come back." I didn't know her then, I knew her much better later. She was terribly nice, and she did it.
I still have that somewhere. And she showed me everything that existed, there were very few catalogues. That was all I knew. And then I remember a show before the end of the war. I went to Peggy Guggenheim and there was Mary Callery. She had just come from Paris. Do you know who she is? Mary Callery is a sculptor, she was a friend of Picasso, possibly a lover of Picasso before the woman who wrote the book.
Anyway, I came in and I asked the same question again, "Do you know anything about Giacometti?" And she said, "Oh, nothing will come of him. Because he makes figures that are only that size (about two inches high) and if you handle them they become dust! I have a few of those." She said it, I don't. And they are really that bad.
SL: She wasn't exaggerating?
RV: She wasn't exaggerating. I have seen them. How she kept them alive is a piece of art. You may be able to spray them with something. And the next thing was this show in which there was a marvelous catalogue.
[Reprint with permission of author, February, 2004, via email.
From: Susan Carol Larsen, The American Abstract Artists Group: A History and Evaluation of its Impact upon American Art, Northwestern University, Ph.D., 1975, pp. 606-620.]
