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In 1961 or 62 Sidney Janis had a show at his gallery on 57th St. and also rented a store front on 57th St. to show the most advanced art which included refrigerators that when you opened the doors set off a fire siren. It was a complete attack on art as it had been. Now just a decade later Sidney Janis has just had a show of paintings and sculpture of people and also landscapes and city streets--mostly painted photographically and blown up very large. So in a way, things have come full circle.

We have been in a period of transition and chaos. Everything is being questioned--"Why paint a picture? "What for?" It only clutters up the world. Have a conception that is sufficient. They questioned an artist on what he was doing and he answered"I thought blue all day". I feel that for a long time recently the movements were all essentially "anti-art". A museum in Toronto several years ago had a big pile of dirt with a few grass blades growing out of it--also incubators with eggs and others with hatched chicks. I asked the guard, a Puerto Rican, why those things were there and he answered: "Well lady, you see its a big museum so they have a hard time filing it" When everything is art nothing is art. The Whitney several years ago had a hay stack.

Now however, new things are going on. The N.Y. Times over the last week-end reproduced first a head by Frank Duvenek and then one by Thomas Eakins, both Americans by the way and artists are going back to 1836 to copy the vision and technique of Thomas Cole. I do not believe in going back like this of course. We are in a completely different epoch but I am glad that people, landscape and still life have come back.

Art is an effort to give permanence to our journey through life. There is an Egyptian Bas-relief in the Metropolitan Museum entitled "that he who runs may read". Drug addicts call LSD "a trip" and Pushkin wrote a great poem comparing life to a ride in a carriage.

We are now also in the era of mass movements: "Woodstock" was medieval in feeling and one of my paintings "Joey Skaggs" feels to me like Francois Villon's day. Youth does not want what it has inherited---the decisions of the dominating peoples are found to be empty and false.

In the early 1900's African art was a great shot in the arm for Western man. There has been often complete alienation--Becket refused to go to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize and his writing is the complete philosophy of dog eat dog.

I went to Europe for the first time in 1965 and saw a show of Giacometti in N.Y. before I left--then another show of his works in London. When I reached Florence, I saw the great David of Michelangelo and wondered what had happened to humanity that in those 400 years man had become an alienated and lost wretch.

Perhaps now humanism will return because we are threatened with so many terrible things and cannot afford to present nihilism and despair as the answer.

I think I have painted to try not to lose life---it seemed terrible to have things happen and disappear. I have tried to keep a record.