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As a child I had been bored in that little town so either that was why I had a life of considerable excitement or perhaps it just happened that way.

[[strikethrough]] As [[/strikethrough]] I went to the Phila. School of Design for Women, later to become Moore College of Art. The method of instruction in those days was to start a student with drawing and then after the first semester if she drew well enough she went into Life Class. There was always a model there--usually nude, occasionally clothed. When I first went into life class, I remember taking a large canvas and the instructor telling me he was glad to see I was ambitious. Bloomsburg has many more facilities than the school where I went. There was no pottery and no weaving, nor was there the wonderful lecture with slides that Dr. Roberts showed this morning in his History of Art class. Rather there were the university prints, a rather dull black and white collection of the art of the centuries. Still to me they were wonderful.

The first time I came to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, I remembered whole rooms and all the paintings in them such was my hunger for art. Also at the academy in Philadelphia I would look at the portraits and feel that I could do much better. After graduating from the Phila. School of Design I married a Cuban and went to live in Cuba for a year. I had my first show there. He was also an artist and we painted all the time.

Then I returned to the U.S. and went to live in Greenwich Village. There when the WPA Art project began I was on the easel project. All the artists of that day were on the project. We had a gallery, an artists' union, and it was a way of life. Art did not bring the prices that it brings today and there were a great many artists who did "class conscious paintings".  

In the 40ties and 50ties abstract expressionism took over and the figure was not only not shown but also not understood. Only now is it coming back.

With Pop Art the division between commercial and fine artists was broken down as most of the successful Pop artists were commercial artists who simply took over the fine arts field. There was some rationale to this as they wished to paint the objects most seen in this era rather than the romantic wine bottles and fruit of other eras.

It was a period of social development and to get a book published one had to be at least a "fellow traveler".

In the early 60[[strikethrough]]ties[[/strikethrough]]'s there was a big show of Abstract Expressionists at the Guggenheim and shortly after John Canaday wrote his famous column called "The blue spot" in which he takes a blue scumble from a palette and blows it up a hundred[[strikethrough]]s of [[/strikethrough]] times and it becomes a famous abstraction written about by all the critics. In fact, for a number of years now, art has been written---the critic being a very important figure---or put afloat by enterprising gallery men whose effort has been to monopolize the art market.