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Clark's." Well, I couldn't swear by that. New York's a big city; it's a big country. Someone out in California might have done it, and I didn't know. Lawrence Campbell wrote in Art News in 1972 that I was generally considered to have made the first shaped painting. And yet, it was never really recognized.

Who would you say your influences are?

Let me answer this in a truthful way. Joan Mitchell, who was a dear friend and a great painter, hated it when someone said she was influenced by Monet, because she was going to come out and say, "Not me!" But the point is I am practicle enough to know that you can be influenced and not even know it consciously, you know. So I'm the sum total of my experiences. But she couldn't even say that; everyone else could see it, but she got her feathers up on that subject.

I take things from many sources, from Italian painting to Abstract Expressionism. Also, the Tenth Street painters. De Kooning is one of my influences, and some people see Rothko. I see three areas: de Kooning, Cezanne, and Nicholas de Stael. My biggest is de Stael, who is not really well known in America, even now. Back in the late forties, the Russian-born de Stael was considered the most important European artist, except for the Germans. During my time in Paris in the fifties, I became very much influenced by him.

How did he influence you?

I first saw his work in the Salon d'Automne in 1952. That's where I saw his painting about a football player. I didn't know it was a football player. It just looked like big strokes, and I really liked the surface. Later, I looked at it closely, and it said "football player." So that's what got me into those strokes. It was amazing to me that he could have that idea and mix it up and make you search the way he does. His strokes are not quite as frantic as American strokes, like de Kooning's have all this movement, but de Stael's stroke is more plastic. He had a big plastic surface, and his stroke looks different.



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