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me. This was in 1952 when American buyers were very welcome there. I wrote a lot of letters and got responses from everyone. Henry Moore invited me out to the Hoglands at Perry Green, and he was very glad to see an American dealer. I went out to Cornwall and saw all the artists working there, and then on to London which was another world at that time. Some of the galleries were still much as they had been in the Edwardian era. I remember going to Henry Moore's dealer, the Leicester Gallery in Leicester Square, where you had to put a shilling in a little cast-iron turnstile to get in. But I did not see anything in the studios that I liked. 

Then I went on to Paris, and again, all doors were open. I particularly remember visiting Fernand Leger. he had a class going on in his studio, and he did not speak a word of English, but as soon as he understood I wanted to buy drawings, he hustled around and got out a big folder of drawings from the twenties and thirties. I remember that the black and white drawings were $75 and the ones with color were $125. I went around Paris buying things from artists and dealers, and it was amazing what I got with the $2000 which was the sum-total of my resources for starting up a gallery.  

I went on to Rome where I saw numerous sculptors and younger painters like Alberto Burri and Piero Dorazio. Alberto Burri was very poor and making his burlap collages in a tiny little studio. I showed those the first season. It was in Rome that I met Matta-- an important moment for me. I went up to his apartment in a modern high-rise with a balcony overlooking all of Rome. He was married to an Italian movie starlet who was like nothing I had ever seen before. He was very enthusiastic, full of energy, very open. He gave me a lot of names to look up, including Joseph Cornell in New York. Matta became a kind of mentor for me. When I met him he was forty years old, and he seemed to me the most alive person I had ever met, as he still does. I bought some things from him, and that was the start of my involvement with the Surrealists and Surrealism which became the mainstay of my early years in Chicago. The Surrealists were out of favor at that moment, but Chicago collectors responded quickly to the work, with the result that a number of important Chicago collections are rather weighted toward Surrealism. Not all of it was my doing, of course, but I really brought a lot of Surrealist and Dada things into the city in those early years. 

Q: So the gallery was European-oriented when you started?

A.F.: Not really. Right from the start I had a mix. The first year I showed Matta, Alberto Burri, Jeremy Anderson (from the West Coast), Hugo Weber (from Chicago), and Estaban Vincente, Nicholas Carone, Louise Bourgeois, and Joseph Cornell (from New York).

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Q: How did the Cornell show come about?

A.F.: On my way back from the first trip to Europe, I followed Matta's suggestion and looked up Cornell. I went out to the house on Utopia Parkway. In all the years I dealt with Cornell, it was the only place we ever met. There was a pattern to the visits. He would bring you into the kitchen to have a cup of tea. Then you would move to the dining-room where there was a big round table on which he had all his papers and dossiers. He was always very secretive, and he would have out only what he wanted you to see. I never got to the garage or wherever it was he worked. He was very polite, very erudite, and he took for granted a much greater degree of sophistication than I had. He would make frequent references, which went right over my head, to 19th century French ballerinas or impressionist composers. he was as thin as a rail, with a bulbous forehead, hollows instead of cheeks, and a shock of grey hair. Cornell had already had a career by the time I met him. He had shown with Julien Levy in the thirties, and then with Charlie Egan--the Night Skies and Aviary pieces. I came along after the Aviary show. He had a lot of work around, so I must have arrived at the end of a productive period, but his best shows, I suspect, were probably those early ones with Egan. He liked visitors. If I came in the morning, I generally did not get away till evening. We would stop and have a bite, but he ate like a bird--a carrot stick, a bit of cucumber. On that first visit we decided that he would have a show the opening season of the gallery, and he wrote me a letter suggesting how it could be done. (See From the Gallery Files, page 6). But the show was not done that way, and I can only assume he must have changed his mind. I had a relatively long association with him, and when MOMA did their Cornell retrospective, I was surprised at how many of the boxes I had had in my hands at one time or another. 

Q: When did the involvement with German Expressionism begin?

A.F.: Actually, the Corinth connection began soon after I started up in Chicago when Corinth's son Thomas walked into the gallery and asked if I would be interested in his father's work. Later I met Mrs. Corinth, the famous "Charlotte" of the portraits. She was living in New York on the Upper East Side. I met Mrs. Beckmann, the famous "Quappie" of the portraits, at Ellen Borden Stevenson's 1020 Art Center in Chicago. She had some out for the opening of a Beckmann show there. This was in the fifties when she still lived on 67th Street on the West Side in a brownstone where Beckmann had also set up his studio and which she kept much as he had left it when he died. On my second trip to Europe I went to Germany, and in my second season (1954) I had a show called Germany, Portrait of the Twenties: Max Beckmann, George Grosz, Otto Dix. 

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