Interviewer: Jesse Chen

Interviewee: Walter Feldman

October 10, 2003

In List Art Center, Brown University Providence, Rhode Island

JC: 1'd like to have you begin by talking about Lynn, Massachusetts, painting a picture of it for me through words.

WF: I was born in a small hospital in Lynn, MA in 1925. Now you have to know that I didn't grow up there. Just born there, but it's where my mother worked for a long time. It was at one time the shoe capital of the United States. It manufactured mostly women's and children's shoes. Now, all of those factories are empty, and it's changed completely. But I was, then, growing up in a small town next door: Chelsea, MA. And that was a mixed kind of place with all kinds of ethnic groups: Russians, Polish, Jewish, a lot of Irish, too. And we all seemed to get along pretty well. Pretty well. I stayed there until about, I was seventeen years old, and then I applied to Yale Arts School, because I had always been interested in drawing and painting.

JC: Before we go more in that direction, 1'd like to explore your childhood experiences. We could begin by talking about art.

WF: We could talk about other things as well. Well, the fact of the matter is I was a lousy football player, but I stuck with it, and I think that saved my life, because I was in very good physical condition when I got into the army. And I think it was a reflection of all the activity I had to put up with as a lousy football player.

JC: And that turned you on more to art?

WF: No, I had to do the football, because my peers looked with twisted eyebrows at me, that I was interested in art. So that you were peculiar if you were interested in art, so I had to play football, but I was a lousy football player.

JC: Peculiar in what way?

WF: Well, they thought you were a la-di-da, but you weren't a la-di-da if you played football, so I played football, but I was a lousy football player.

JC: So you played football first?

WF: No, at the same time. At the same time that I went to youth classes for drawing and painting, I played football. So in a very real way, the physical help that all of that athletic experience had given me, I think, really saved my life, because I ended up in the infantry. And that is a very physical activity. Let me tell you.

JC: Which position did you play?

WF: I was a guard, and probably the second-worst guard in the whole world.

JC: How did your team do?

WF: We were mediocre, and I didn't help them.

JC: I know you made your first book when you were around 12.

WF: Yes, I did. How do you know about that?

JC: And you did your first painting when you were about 8?

WF: Third grade. In the third grade, I remember that witch's... that witch's name. That teacher, She was a witch. Her name was Nixon. Oh, I remember that very well.

JC: Nixon spelled with an X?

WF: N-I-X-O-N. She was a bitch. And you know those little things that you write on. Little tiny memo pads. Well, I had those, and I had a cousin who was given a children's typewriter. You had to dial the letter and you'd punch the thing. You'd dial the letter and punch the button. Dial the Ie... well, you can imagine how long it would take to write any word. And I was always enthralled with the idea of the Vikings. I don't know why, but I was. So, I wrote this story about the Vikings, and I typed it up. I did an illustration or two. I don't remember how many. And then, I found an old window blind. You know, it's like cloth, and I used that as the cover of the book. So, it was a little tiny book, you know? I brought it in, and I was so proud of it, and this witch... She said, 'Where did you copy this from?!' And I said, 'No, I didn't copy it. It was my own. I made it up all by myself. Everything!' And she wouldn't let it go. She insisted that I had cheated. And that's how I remember her name.

JC: And that was your start into the bookmaking world.

WF: I guess. I guess. It's only a reflection, you understand, because it wasn't like a progression. I mean, it happened, and I think it could be purely coincidental. But it did happen.

JC: It was a part of your development.

WF: Yeah. But now, of course, I tell my students that it's perfectly all right to copy, to be influenced... Now I can see all artists have to have somebody that they admire, whether he or she is living or dead. None of us were ever born from Zeus's head. We all have to have something we can go back on and take from.

JC: When you look back on your early years, do you consider yourself, more or less, self-taught in different forms and mediums?

WF: A lot of it is self-taught, but on the other hand, I did have some very good teachers as well. So maybe it's not what they taught me but that they taught me to be curious, and to make questions, and to be proud of accomplishments. So I wouldn't say that 1'm completely self-taught, because...

JC: I mean, just early on, before your first show.

WF: I had my first show when I was 13 or 14. Well, would you believe that a couple of years ago, my first teacher had a show in Boston. He was 92 years old. And I went to see the show. He's still alive and still working. But he hasn't changed. That's the difficulty. He hasn't changed. You know, he looks a little different, but his work is the same. That's too bad. There was a friend of mine, an old friend, or at least I thought he was, who complained to a mutual acquaintance of ours that he thought there was something wrong with me, because I kept on changing. Well, I felt sorry for him, because he didn't change. How can you live a whole life and not change? How can you live with accumulated experiences and be the same? You have to be different. And an artist reflects that growth and experience, that difference.

JC: Did you bring that up to him?

WF: No, he never said it to me directly. He said it to some mutual acquaintances. And now that he's dying, he's dead. He died a couple of years ago. Then they said, 'Do you know he said this about you?' And I said, 'Gee, that's too bad. I feel sorry for him.'

JC: Because you probably would have told him?

WF: I would have explained to him.

JC: You could have explained your position.

WF: Of course, if it needs explanation. It's too bad. If you have to explain what you're doing, it's too bad. Recently, I had an exhibition downstairs [in the David Henry Bell Gallery], and there was the work of many, many years. An acquaintance of mine said he would like for me to go to the exhibition with him to explain the pictures. And I said, 'You've got to be kidding. 1'm not going to go and explain my pictures. lf you'd like, you should go yourself and have an open mind, and just look at them. That's what they are. They're trying to say something. But 1'm not in a position or want to be in a position where I have to make explanations, so he stopped talking to me, which is just as well, because I couldn't stand him either. So it's like a critic talking about your painting. He talks around it. He doesn't talk about it. He talks around it. Nobody can really explain it. It's too complicated. There are too many things that come into the making of an image, you know, if you're really a painter and you're not just a schmier. You know what a schmier is? That's the kind of thing when they put cream cheese on a bagel. That's a schmier bagel. Cream cheese. That's not what I do.

JC: How do you spell that?

WF: S-C-H-M-I-E-R. I would spell it that way. I mean, there are many different ways, 1'm sure. It's one of those words originating in Yiddish that has come to be used very often in American English.

JC: As far as your Jewishness as a child, was that a very strong presence in your daily life?

WF: Well, it's very interesting. Both my father and mother were Jewish, that is, they were born Jewish. Both of them were immigrants from Russia, and close enough so that it was Polish as well. From time to time it was Polish, and sometimes it was Russian. So they spoke both of those languages. My father really wasn't a very orthodox Jewish person. He very seldom went to a synagogue. So I was never brought up very strongly in terms of going and learning the very rituals. But I always the feeling of being proud of who I am.

And my father� when I came home from the army, there was a kind of rituaL.. I think it would be called a service maybe, where a son, a prodigal son returns from a dangerous place, and it's done in a ceremony in the synagogue. And he did it. My God, I didn't even know that he was so aware of all these things, but he was, because he had gone through school as a little boy, and he knew all about it. He conducted the whole service, and he did it beautifully. In the Jewish tradition, we have a cantor, who sings, chants, and he has a beautiful voice or should have, and all of a sudden, he was up there chanting all these gorgeous things, and I was so, so proud of him. And then when we were walking home... my father was originally a tailor... and he said, "I wanted to make something special for you with my own hands. 1'm going to make a suit for you, and every thread I will put in with my own hands. There will no machines on this. Any idiot can make trousers, but you have to be a great tailor to make a coat.' I had that suit for twenty years before it wore out.

JC: How old were you when you got it?

WF: Let's see. It must have been when I was 22, because I was in the army from being 18, more or less, for three years, so that's about right... But he died. He died, because we didn't have enough money. He had a severe pain in his belly, and they took him to a clinic, then put him in the hospital. And I was at school, when my mother called. She had a subterfuge and didn't want to tell me he was sick. Anyway, when I got there to the clinic, and he was a in a big room with a lot of people, I could see just as if he had been shot in the belly, because I had seen people shot in the belly, he was dying that way. You could see the blood going out, turning green, white. And that's exactly how it happened. He had been misdiagnosed my some goddamn intern, because we didn't have a doctor, and he was bleeding to death. He had ulcers and could've been saved, but they didn't recognize it until it was too late. He died that way. So I must've been 22 or 23, something like that in that time. So, that left a bad taste in my mouth. I don't allow interns to do too much to me to this day. If they touch me, I want to have the chief of the service.

JC: Do you see of yourself as pretty healthy so far?

WF: I always think of myself as two pods. The envelope and then the 'me.' My envelope is not always too good. For instance, I had this bad knee that was operated on recently. I had some problems when I was hit during the Battle of Bulge. I was hit in the small of the back, so I had about 7 or 8 operations that had to do with the spine. But me, 1'm very healthy. The rest of these things like that, the hand, the knee, the feet, the neck, spine, they are not so good.

JC: Those are non-art-related injuries.

WF: That's right. They're not me. Just part of this envelope that I walk around with... Right. Just as an aside, I find it very funny that people think 1'm a bloody cowboy, because I go around on what they think is a motorcycle, which it isn't. It's a scooter. But they think, 'Oh geez, look at that guy, he's...' I use it, because I can't walk. See, when I walk, it's painful, so I go in the scooter. Everybody has his own, you know, whatever they want.

JC: You were brought up by parents who were immigrants. Were you the only child?

WF: I had an older brother. He was much older. Seven or eight years older than I am, and we weren't too close. I loved him, and he loved me, but we weren't buddy-buddies. I suppose it's a little bit far in time for us to be close. We didn't have the same friends, we didn't have the same interests. He became an engineer, and his interests were mathematics and engineering, and I was not interested in that at all. So we had different directions that we went in.

JC: You seem to have been precocious at a very young age.

WF: I tell you, my wife said I never was a young man.

JC: What do you think?

WF: I think she's right. I was old very early. Or older. I think that happens to some people when you have a great traumatic experience, that you lose your youth very quickly, and I think that's what happened to me. So 1've been grown up all my life, or most of my life, ever since I was a soldier. Since I was about 18.

JC: Was that the first time you left home for an extended time?

WF: The second. The first time, I went to Yale for one semester. I was so goddamn naive that I applied to the Yale Arts School, and somebody said, 'Where else did you apply?' I said, 'It's the only place, because I want to go there. I want to go there.' But they said, 'You may not be accepted.' I said, 'What do you mean? But that's what you do. I want to go there, so I applied there.' And I was accepted, so I went there for one semester, and this was in the early part of the war, and I couldn't stay there. That wasn't right. You see, it was different then. Then, there was a purpose. To be patriotic meant to be really something special... Anyway, I left school. I went to work in a shipyard, because I couldn't get into the army. And they didn't need me right away. So I went to work in the shipyard for a couple of months.

JC: So you left school voluntarily.

WF: Yeah. I just walked out. Again, completely naive. I didn't know you were supposed to get permission. I left. As a matter of fact, I remember...

JC: Did they track you down?

WF: Yeah. [Laughter]. I think. What happened was, I was in a foxhole, would you believe, a foxhole in the middle of the bloody winter with snow all around me, and I got a letter. They'd come creeping along and they'd give you a letter. It was from Yale, and they were charging me for some fee. Of course, I didn't pay, but nevertheless, how can one be so goddamn naive, but I was. I was, but now 1'm not naive.

JC: You've changed.

WF: 1've changed and grown up. I grew up.

JC: When you look back at your development, do you think of your experiences around war as part of a crucial turning point?

WF: I think so. As a matter of fact, when I came back from service, during those days we had the G.I. Bill, which was a marvelous thing, just great, and it provided us at the art school with materials. It paid the tuition, you know, and I had a whole gamut of colors. And yet, every time I painted a picture, it was gray. I had red, I had yellow, I had all of those, but the colors always turned gray, and it must've been the way I felt, you see. I remember painting a self-portrait from that very time. Gray, gray, dark.

JC: Was your hair starting to turn gray?

WF: I don't remember. I used to have hair. So that's what I mean about color, you see. To a painter, of course, color is the way you express yourself. You orchestrate. Now, a musician orchestrates it with sound, a painter orchestrates it with color. That's the way I look at the world. I�m sure other people have their own way of working.

JC: So the way you started was by learning about the use of colors through painting?

WF: You mean when I really started? I started learning by drawing.

JC: Do you consider your formal training very academic?

WF: I was on the cusp of the change between academic work and more avant-garde work. Yale's school, at one time, was called the Yale School of Fine Arts, and their greatest reputation was that they had a painter named Savage, and he was a nee-Byzantine artist. That's the way he worked, and I think for some six, eight, ten years in a row, his students won the Prix de Rome, but this was very, very academic painting. Very academic. Figurative, sort of pseudo-historical. And while I was there, there was a change. Eventually, they brought in a very avant-garde artist to head it. His name was Josef Albers, so I was graduated from the academic place and with the new administration as it were, it became more avant-garde. Albers was a product of the German Bauhaus. He brought ideas primarily about color, and he was the author of all of those paintings that he called "Homage to the Square." It was a series of rectangles, one on top of the other. Some of them were oranges, some of them gray, some blue. He was playing with the quality of the color and how it interacted with its neighbors.

JC: Would you consider aspects of his painting academic as well?

WF: Well, no, because there are no subject matters in his paintings. All of a sudden, you have the question that a work of art can be itself. It doesn't have to re-present anything. It can present itself and only itself.

JC: If it does that, where does the artist find the inspiration for it?

WF: Inside. You always find it inside.

JC: It doesn't need connection to an outside source?

WF: Not necessarily. Not that you would be aware of. Everything is like a minestrone soup, you know.

JC: When did Willem de Kooning begin at Yale?

WF: Willem de Kooning was there in 1951 for only one semester. That's the only time he taught. I was a graduate student. He was a sweet man, very gentle, and yet his work was very brutal. But he himself was a very gentle man, quiet-spoken, intelligent, thoughtful, and he explained that even in the most emotional parts of the work, that it really had to be reflective. It was like a drip and that drip was wrong, he wiped it off and dripped it again, so there was no accidental drip. It was intentional and was just the way he wanted it, you see.

JC: Who among your professors would you consider the most avant-garde in relation to your work today?

WF: I think de Kooning and Albers were. The first time Albers came into my studio, he looked at it... and, remember, this was very shortly after I returned from the army. Very shortly after I had spent almost up to 10 months in Berlin in the army of occupation. And he came in, and he always had an accent. He said, 'Feldman, dein Werk is garbage!' I was not brought up to return that in a very violent way, but on the other hand, I wasn't some kind of schnook that was going to accept that kind of crap. That's what it was. You don't say that to a student. You don't abuse somebody that way. So I told him off. I would not be telling the truth if I said I remembered exactly what I had said, but I said something, and he was then very angry and he left. He wouldn't talk to me anymore. In those days, you only had one teacher, that is only one teacher would give you a grade. If he gave you a failing grade, you wouldn't get your degree. So my friend said, 'You've got to apologize to him.' I wasn't about to apologize to him. So weeks went by, and since we had no doors to our studios, he would walk by, ignore me, and go to the next person. And finally, my friend said, 'You have got to do something about that.' So I said, 'Okay, I think I have it.' So I knocked on his door, and he was very happy to see me, because he was upset, too. He said, 'Come in! Come in!' I said, 'Listen, I have to tell you something.' He said, 'What is it!' I said, 'In the tradition that I was brought up in, one didn't raise his voice to an older person, and for raising my voice to you, I apologize. But not for what I said.' He said, 'Wonderful, thank you very much.' And for the next couple of years, I became his assistant. He really felt good about my willingness to accommodate him a little bit, but also he had respect that I wasn't about to kiss his behind. Now, I guess a similar thing happened here, because after a couple of years when I taught there, it became clear it's not a good idea in my opinion, if you go to an institution or school and stay on. You're always considered to be a little bit, "not quite." Better to go someplace else if you're going to teach. The opportunity came to get a job at Brown. In those days, the first person you were interviewed by was the President of the University. I came up and was interviewed by Henry Wriston. He was a big man, vest over a big stomach and gray hair, and I think he came from Appleton, Wisconsin. We met and then about a week later, I got a telephone call saying they'd like me to come back and be interviewed again. So, I brought some work of mine, mostly work on paper, and the person I was supposed to see was the Dean of the College. His name was Barnaby Keeney. The art department was in the area where the Computing Information Technology building is now. I waited there, and it was delayed and delayed. Finally, they said to meet him at his house. I waited at his home, he finally came, and I showed him my work. He said, 'You know, this isn't... I don't like this stuff... I don't understand it.' So I said to him, 'Don't go there with that crap. You know something? You're blind, you can't see, you're an idiot. That is, you're an idiot in terms of art. So, what do you expect from me?' I thought I was going to be, you know... He loved it, because I was very honest, you see. So I was lucky that I had met an honest man, and not only was I hired, but we became fast friends, and if you go to the Rockefeller Library, on the first floor where there is the cafe, there's a portrait of Keeney that I did, and Keeney wrote me when I was in Mexico at that time that said, 'John Nicolas Brown doesn't like the portrait that you made of me. He says that it looks as if 1'm telling a dirty joke, so I just wanted to let you know.' But he did tell dirty jokes. But that's okay. They were funny. So I guess, you go through and you meet people that you can bond with in some way or other, and then there are others who... no. So, I was fortunate with two different kinds of people, which had an effect on my life, of course.

JC: Did you personally seek out a range of different professors when you were a student?

WF: A little bit. We had a lot of professors there, so I suppose it was just who tunes you in or who you get tuned in to. But I remember by then, I was no longer a kid. My work really was primarily at the museum. I used to look and look and look. 1'd go by everyday and look at the paintings. There is a very famous collection of modem paintings at Yale called Societe Anonyme, which was given to them en masse by a woman whose name 1've forgotten, and it had examples of all of the avant-garde artists of that period. Really avant-garde. That was a big influence, because when you are an artist, you are influenced by the things you see, and so that's how that came about.

JC: A lot of your early work was influenced directly by your experiences in war. And when you put that in perspective now, that's lasted for...

WF: Some of my friends say it's still lasted. All my life.

JC: When you got back from war, what did your parents think about you returning to art school?

WF: When I first went to art school, they had to pay for it, and I was very guilty about that, because they really didn't have any money. But in our tradition, there are little credit unions, so they borrowed money from them. Immediately after the war, my father said, 'lf you're going to be some kind of an artist, be at least an architect: which I didn't want to do. But when the war was over, with the G.I. Bill, no one had to do anything for me. I was independent. The government paid for my school and books and so forth, and I was a good student. I got a scholarship. In those days, you didn't have to show that your parents were poor or not poor or whatever. If you were a good student, you got a fellowship or scholarship, and I always got a scholarship. So I had a slip that said I had a scholarship. I went down to the bursar and said, 'Give me the money back: because the government had paid the money, you see, so I got it twice. I got the money in my hand, and I got the scholarship besides. So that's how I went along.

JC: Did you fall into a crowd at Yale that you spent a lot of time with?

WF: Two or three people, but I didn't keep in touch with them. One of them had a daughter who came to Brown, but he had already become a commercial illustrator, so I didn't have too much to say with him. One or two died early, and one that I liked very much didn't make it as a painter, so he began to make toys for children. I suppose everybody's got to eat. I'm lucky. I think I'm lucky.

JC: Meaning you got to do exactly what you had planned to do?

WF: Exa... pretty much. Pretty much. I'm very proud. All of the things you see in here are mine. I made them. Every goddamn thing I made.

JC: I think we could get more into what avant-garde is to you, what it meant at the time, what it means to you now.

WF: In 2003, it sure makes a big difference than in 1950, I'll tell you. Today, a lot of the people who talk about avant-garde are not interested in making anything with their hands. A lot of them are interested in computerization, digital shit, digital that, which is of no interest to me at all. So that's now avant-garde. I think everything changes, and even as we're talking, everything is different. I guess what one has to do is do what you have to do, and I'm not interested in making things on the computer as art. That's a question. If I do something on the computer and then sign the print-out, is that a work of art? I don't know. I have a feeling that 1'd like to have as an expression without that the image of the thing should not have to go through some mechanical weight. It has to go through me, because that's my expression. On the other hand, I'm not an aesthetician, and I can't argue about that. I can only tell you what I like to do, what I want to do, what I feel the need to do, and if you like it, fine. If you don't, that's your privilege, too... [Sigh] I tell you, I don't really give a lot of thought to this bullshit of the avant-garde. It really is to me uninteresting, unimportant, and it sounds very self-conscious that you have to do something and say it's avant-garde. I really don't give a damn if it's avant-garde or not, so I have no strong feelings about these guys who want to define it.

JC: Do you take issue with people who might call your press and bookmaking an avant-garde art?

WF: I don't give a damn one way or another. I don't any more than I would sit down and waste my time with abstract or non-objective things of that sort. That's for somebody else, some of the aestheticians or philosophers of aesthetics. They bullshit around for words and go on and on and on. I'm more interested in making things, and the other people seem to be more interested in talking about them. So that's good that we have both kinds. I tell you, the historian, the art historian, the philosophers of aesthetics, and all of these other people, what the hell would they talk about if there weren't people like me to make this stuff? There would be no stuff to talk about, so that's my interest in making it, and I don't mind giving you some observations, but I'm not in competition with the philosophy of words. I'm just not.

JC: The variety of media you work with has been exciting.

WF: I feel that as a professional artist, I can do anything and should be able to do anything, irregardless of the medium. Now the medium has to do with the intent for what the work is going to be. For instance, if the work is going to have an architectural significance, perhaps, and depending on the architecture, perhaps it should be a mosaic. Now if you have another thing that may be an architectural reference but has to have something to do with light, maybe it should be stained-glass windows. On the other hand, maybe if you want to respect the wall in an architectural setting, maybe that should be a mural. Maybe if you want to deal with having an idea that can be sent out to a multitude of people, maybe you want to make a woodcut. All of these areas, when I find an interest in something or another, that's what I do. For instance, if I want some people to hear something that I think of as very poignant, I make a book. It's all a part of it, you see. And if I don't know how to do that particular thing, I find out, because an artist should be curious, and he should be knowledgeable enough to know the questions to ask. I think that's very key.

JC: I want to segway into your bookmaking. When you acquired the press, was it around '85?

WF: Something like that, yeah. Now, you understand the press does not mean a press. The press is an idea. It's not a physical thing, although you have to have a press to do it. I have the machine, but it doesn't require a machine to establish the press. 1'll tell you how it happened. It happened, because I had developed some difficulties with this bloody envelope, and my shoulders still have problems, and one of the problems is bursitis. That means it's very painful for me over a period of time to lift and move my arms vigorously, so knowing that I always liked woodcut, because I like the smell of the wood, the cutting into the wood, and woodcut is a relief printing process. That means, you're printing from the surface rather than from the indentations, which are an etching. But when you're printing from the surface, it's called relief printing, and that's the way Gutenberg made his moveable type, which is set in metal of course but is printed from the top, from the relief.

So if you can print from the relief of the wood, you can then print from the relief of the metal type, but it became very clear that I could do an image from woodcut and then print from the metal, making it letter-press printing, so that's where the idea came from. Now, 1'm not an expert in setting type, so generally what I do is I have the type set in linotype. Now, setting type by hand, means you're setting each letter by itself. You also have to remember, setting type is backwards. Everything is backwards, so you have to learn to read backwards. In fact, you have to read backwards and upside-down, which is exactly what you learn from making woodcuts. Everything that you cut is going to be printed in reverse. Once you get over that simple idea, then you can go ahead, you see, because direction is very important sometimes. Like a progression, if you read better from right to left or left to right. It's a question, you know. It could be cultural. Certain languages are written right to left, others left to right, so you have to anticipate that in the making of your woodcut or whatever.

So, that's how it came about. I started to make woodcuts and then print them. At first, I printed all of those woodcuts by hand and that means by rubbing. This is the Japanese tradition, which is to print it by hand. That means you ink up the relief of the wood, put it on the paper, and rub with some kind of a stuffed leave, barren, and you can see it coming through. lf you travel in England, in some parts of France also, you see people doing rubbings of dead warriors from the Brass. Now they need to charge you for that. But it's the same thing. And so one thing led to another, and I started to make some type, and the type went with an image, and then I said, 'Oh my god. I have to learn how to sew it together. So sewing it together has to do with bookbinding.' And before you know it, I became a book artist. It's no big deal, you know, there are many, many book artists who have a different reason for being who they are than I do, but 1'm very happy to do what I do, because first of all, I can make more than one, so that more than one person or institution can have it. That's one of the reasons I decided to make woodcuts in the first place. Let me tell you. [Turns around and points to an image hanging behind him to his far left] That print is the first one I ever made. That one's called "Final Agony," and a friend of mine was going to New York, and there was an exhibition, which was unique in the history of the Metropolitan. And they had an exhibition of prints of drawings for which they were going to give prizes. The Metropolitan has not done that since. This was in 1952. So, I said to him, 'If you are going down, would you mind taking mine along?' He said, 'Yeah, sure.' So he took mine along. I got the print prize of the Metropolitan in 1952, so I was very, very pleased as you can imagine. I then took the same print and sent it to an exhibition in Texas and the same print to an exhibition in Seattle. The one in Texas rejected it. The one in Seattle gave it an honorable mention. Then I sent it to another place 1've forgotten now, because it was some years ago, and it was accepted, thank god. That's all: accepted. So the single print, you see, meant something different to all of these people, and that's the way it has to be. But, I was able then to have all of these venues with my work, with the same work, because a print is always the original, even if it's set for copy, a so called copy. There are 20 in the edition, there are 20 original prints. Totally hand-printed. They're from the same woodcut, not a reproduction of the woodcut, and they're all printed from the same metal type.

JC: It's your conscious choice to not print as many out as you could.

WF: Yes, because I want to get on to another project, so I print an edition of 20, mostly 20...25, at the most. I've done an edition of 100 for the 100th anniversary, some years ago, of women at Brown. So we commissioned a woman poet, very fine poet, Denise Levertov to do the poems for us, and I did the edition of 100 as a reflection of the 100 years. But generally, I do smaller editions, because I would much prefer to get onto another idea, so I do it in a limited edition. It's like a print. I don't do a print of more than 15 or 20. First of all, I don't sell more than that number, but besides which, what am I going to do, go into that business of selling. 1'm not in the business of selling, so I have to have dealers. Some of the dealers sell a lot, and some don't sell anything. Several of my good dealers died, unfortunately. I mean period, unfortunately, not because of me. 1'm saying it's unfortunate for me, but 1'm sorry for them. So that's what we mean by limited edition. I suppose from the financial point of view, that makes it more valuable, but that's not why I do it. I do it, because I want to get onto another job and another idea.

JC: There would be some people out there who might call your press avant-garde.

WF: I don't know, but as I said before, it doesn't matter. And I think that they would be wrong, because my work in bookmaking is very conservative. It's not avant-garde. I don't care by whose definition. It's very conservative. It's poetry, understandable poetry, emotional poetry, mostly. I did a history book, a short history of the Second World War, in two volumes. I wrote a short book called "The Pack of Letters," which had to do with my mother learning to read and write a little bit to send me letters while I was in the army. And I did another small book in prose having to do with a house I built in the country. Those are books that I made myself and wrote myself. Generally, I don't do that. I much prefer to do other people's poetry. And with that, I sometimes do poetry of living artists, living poets, and sometimes, dead poets. And I'll tell you, it's a lot easier working with a dead poet.

JC: How would you describe the relationship of the roles?

WF: Well, you know, the poet really is not attuned to visual things as the visual artist, but he or she has opinions, and sometimes those opinions are not exactly terrific from my point of view. But we work it out. It's always an interesting project.

JC: Has your preference been to generally work alone on most of your projects?

WF: I've had help but not collaboration. The difference is that I don't see how I can collaborate with ideas. The ideas that 1'm involved in are mine, but that doesn't mean I don't need some help. I did a big mural two, three, or four years ago in a temple here in Providence: a mosaic which was a big physical job. So we got the staging up and we started to install it, and I needed help, and I knew that, because I can't climb up and down and back and forth. You need to have a blue color down here, and you have to climb down, and so I had someone helping me. She was very good. She followed directions. She didn't try to make her own thing, if that's what you mean by collaboration. And I've had people helping me with printing, but it's still my decision how it's going to be. And each time a proof comes, I am the one who decides it is good, or bad, or different. I don't think that you can collaborate with the aesthetic. You can collaborate with the thing, like Michelangelo when he was doing the ceiling. He finally decided those goddamn people were driving him bananas, so he tore it all off and said, 'I'll do it myself, because 1'm the one I can talk to.' You can collaborate immediately with yourself.

JC: Well, let's... I don't think we need to review what we talked about last time.

WF: No, I don't think so. I don't think so.

JC: But just where we ended off last time was about where you were talking about...

WF: Let's see, where we left off...

JC: When you left off with the comment about individuality.

WF: About collaboration.

JC: Or, yeah. Or your experience with different types of collaborations, and I was wondering if that had to do with... I mean, today 1'd rather speak more about what you... Because last time I remember you emphasized the fact that whatever you see, whatever you experience has a direct influence on your work, and it has a great impact on the way you see things.

WF: Right.

JC: And I wanted to go into more details about what exactly that has such,... the things that have seen that have the most impact on your work today...

WF: All of the things that 1've seen?

JC: Well, not all the things, but last time we started chronologically, and this time, hopefully we can go back to your experiences in war, uh... move on from there through your experiences traveling in different countries,... or cities, just teaching at different schools,...

WF: Yeah.

JC: The types of extended stays that you've had...

WF: Well, I think it's like a lot of friends of mine think that they are great travelers. You know, they go to France, Italy, Spain for two weeks. So, they spend one day in Madrid and one day in Seville, and that's not really finding out about another country, another culture. You have got to live there for some extended period of time in order to understand it, and even then you don't really thoroughly understand it, but at least it gives you a clue, so that's one of the things that I was very grateful for... that I went to Italy for the first time on a Fulbright [Scholarship), and I was able to live in Rome and with all the difficulties. And there are many difficulties. But I also met the maestro who I worked with in making mosaics, and I was able to do my own painting as well. And during that time, I won an international aware for self-portraits that I was very uniquely happy about, because I felt that finally some of my work had entered into the culture, the Italian culture as it were. And I think some of the looking at different things, for instance I was very impressed when I was there. I was not only painting but also studying mosaics, and I spent a month in Sicily, and we drove into a place called Piazza Marina, which is actually in the middle of Sicily. And Sicily is a very frightening place. I don't know if it's frightening now, but it sure was frightening then.

JC: How so?

WF: Oh, you thought they that would cut your damn throat for a nickel. Two cents. Uh... I left the car to cross the street at what do you called it, the American Express. By the time I got back, they had stripped the car. Everything was perfect, didn't even break a window. They just opened it up, and there was nothing left. And when I complained to the police, they said 'you have the same thing in Chicago.' So the hell with that, you know. But that's all experiences, you know, and when we got to Piazza where we lived, it was dark and frightening. And we stayed at a little hotel called the Jolly Hotel. Jolly hotel... J-O-L-L-Y, all over Italy. I don't know where they come from or where they got that name, but they're all the same. You have a shower, a clean bed, and that was the only hotel in town, and the reason we went there was because there was a very famous archaeological site. I think it was Hadrian's Villa, or Summer Villa, and that's where the famous Bikini Girls are still, that is, their mosaic, dancing figures,... floor, pavements, and by god, they were wearing bikinis, and it's not an exaggeration. So that was our... when we got to the site, it was closed, because every other day in Italy, they have a strike, so knowing that, I went to the guard, and I said, 'Is it possible to see inside?' In my hand, of course, I had some lira. Always with sugar, it's very possible. 'Wait here a moment: and sure enough, we had a very nice tour, close-up tour of the mosaics that we had traveled thousands of miles to see them, and I thought it was worth a couple hundred of, or so forth, of lira. So, that was very, very interesting and also leaving a mark in my memory.

JC: This was after... This was in 1957?

WF: This was 1957. Yeah.

JC: Ten years after you'd returned from war?

WF: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and things had changed, but not... in the south of Italy not so much. They were still very poor and hadn't gotten too much. I think it's fairly safe to suggest that people in the north are different than people in the south almost everywhere. If you think about it, people in the north of America, the United States, are completely different than the people in the south. Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, they are different people! They talk differently, they have different culture than the people in New England, Maine, New Hampshire, Connecticut, you know, it's just different. I can't characterize it precisely, the difference, but it doesn't take long if you move from one place to the other for any length of time to see that there is a big difference.

JC: Right. What were some of the reasons you picked Italy?

WF: Italy, because I had never really lived there, you know, during the war I wasn't there. And Italy, of course, is the place where some of the great monuments and the great artists were. You know, Italy is a place where even to this day, you are addressed by the title of Pittore... mister, Senore... painter. If you are an architect, Architetto, you know, so that you're not... And here, in the United States, you're like a bum, you know, nobody gives a damn you're a painter! What the hell do you contribute?! So, you know, nobody pays any attention. That's different in Italy. You are really something, so Pittore, and the same thing is true in Mexico or in Spain, where the artist has a significant stature in the society and in the culture. So I like that idea, and of course, I always wanted to see the original monuments. For instance, I wanted to see Michelangelo's Last Judgment, I wanted to see the ceiling, I wanted to see the paintings in the Medici, and you can't see them through reproduction. Reproduction is really reproduction. It has nothing to do with the actual thing. It gives you a brief idea, but it's not the same. To stand in the presence of a significant work of art is quite different. Quite different. So that, of course, is one of the differences. And shortly thereafter, a couple of years later, I went to Mexico and to live, and that was even more, because I wanted to have a change, and Mexico is really a mysterious place... Very mysterious.

JC: Is that one of the reasons you picked that place?

WF: Yeah. That's right. And if people think that it's the land of Buena Vida and salvajes, they are wrong. If you had to make a color, a color, for Mexico, and you have to say it in Spanish, you say 'El color de Mexico es sumamente negro!' Black is the color of Mexico. People, up until, 1962 or around there, died at a very early age there, very little possibility of survival after '39 or' 40, '45. They really lived like, terrible in the countryside. So, and of course, the pre-Columbian sculpture. Pre-Columbian only means before the Spaniards came. And, of course, the Spaniards, when they came destroyed so many things, including the sculptures, the books. All of those things were destroyed by the Spaniards. But enough remained for me to become excited by the images, and in that time, which was like forty-some years ago, you could buy some of them, and it was perfectly okay to take them out. You can't do that anymore, so that I have a small collection of pre-Columbian objects that are for real, you know, not reproductions, which I really despise. So I spent maybe four, five, six years, at least, working through those images that were suggested by the pre-Columbian things. So that was also a very, an influence... an important influence, as you'd wished on what my work was.

JC: Have you ever thought about going back?

WF: We have gone back on three or four occasions. As a matter of fact, what we had, we had a muchacha, a young woman who was about fifteen or sixteen. She came back here with us for about a year, a year and a half, and my wife helped her learn how to speak English and sent her to school. And we got permission from her father for her to come with us, and then she went back, we kept in touch, and she went back to school there, she graduated with honors, and now she is a bilingual secretary for an international corporation. She's married to an accountant. She has two or three children. She has two houses, three automobiles. I mean, she's a real capitalist! And her daddy passed away a couple of years ago. And for the ceremony of their first daughter entering into adulthood, the fifteenth year, they have a big thing, big, big thing, it's bigger than a wedding. And we went to visit them at that time when we were invited, and I was the father, I was the one that was selected to stand in his way, in his stead, because there had to be some sort of ceremony held in the church, and in this magnificent banquet afterwards, so yes, she calls us two or three times a year, especially on Mother's Day. And she could never bring herself to call my wife by her first name. It was always Senora or Misses. It was very funny. And she's been told... she's a grandmother herself now! She could, in fact, use the first name, but she can't do that. That's the way it goes, you know. That's her attitude about her place in the world. So, uh, and then... what's to say.

JC: So if you had to put a color on, or a number of colors on display to represent Italy and Mexico. ..

WF: Well, if I had to do that, I would orchestrate each painting differently, because there are levels of reactions, you know. Like Mexico could be red, orange, and purple, and black. And Italy might be yellow and gold and orange and black. But a little less black. So now...

JC: What's your favorite color? [Laughs] Or if you had to...

WF: It's like to say, what's your favorite food. Sometimes, I like to eat this and sometimes that. I don't have a favorite color. If an artist has a favorite color, he's stupid, you know. You know, you orchestrate according to what the idea is, so sometimes black is my favorite color. Sometimes purple or red, you know, I don't know I don't have a favorite.

JC: And thirty-three years later, you returned to Italy as a visiting professor?

WF: Oh yeah, yeah. I don't know how many years it was, but I was a professor at the Studio Arts School in Florence, and I taught painting there. Painting and drawing, and I enjoyed that very much. Now just a few years ago, we took our granddaughter, and this had been nine or ten years previously that we had lived there, so we had promised our granddaughter to take her to Italy for a little visit. So we did, and we went to Florence, and there's a big market there. Food, by god, you never saw anything, it's gorgeous, you know. And right in front of that market, there was a little restaurant that I used to eat at, and I said, 'Gee, it would be nice if the waitress was still there: because, you know, sometimes it's a family restaurant... So I went in. Sure enough, this woman, you know, about five-foot-five, both directions, I said, 'Therese!' And she recognized me, too. And we had a marvelous lunch, you know. She sat us right down, we had wine, and she was so happy that I had come back, so that was a nice feeling.

JC: What were you teaching there?

WF: Painting. 1'm essentially a painter. People say, well why do you do the other things. I say because I'm a professional painter. I should be able to do everything. Like Michelangelo, he made paintings, he made sculpture, he did all kinds of things. Cause that's what we do, you know? Professional painter, not an amateur.

JC: If you were comparing yourself at all to your professors who taught you when you were in university, how much of an influence did they have on your teaching?

WF: Uh, somewhat, somewhat. I took the best of them, in my opinion. A single person could be both positive and negative. And the negative part, I eliminated. Good, by jolly. I have bought and kept the positive things. So what I have tried to do is pattern my analysis and critique on the positive things, as he did, only occasionally... because he is also very negative sometimes. And a psyche of a student is very delicate. You can't tear somebody apart and hope that they're strong enough to build themselves up again. So that's what I did. I remember what was said in the positive criticisms. The negative ones 1've eIiminated and thrown away. There was a very important artist named Motherwell, who came here. Robert Motherwell, he came here a few years ago, and in a conversation, one of the students asked if he could look at his work, and he said, 'No.' So, I was curious as to why he said no, so perfunctorily, And he said, 'No: because he had had an experience some years ago before and told something... it wasn't even important, to a student, and about ten, fifteen years later, he met the student, or the student met him on the street in New York and said, 'Do you remember what you said to me?' And he went, ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba... and, of course, that kid, now an older person, he had taken the criticism negatively, although it didn't have to be, but he did, and it remained with him all those years. So, I think it's terrible. Any teacher that doesn't understand that they are dealing with delicate membranes... should have their ass whipped.

JC: [Laughs] Like Mrs. Nixon?

WF: Yeah! Oh boy, 1'd like to chew her up, throw her into the garbage. Now, of course, she's long gone. What a terrible thing, huh?

JC: What a start to your career...

WF: Yeah. Yep.

JC: Or your pre-career.

WF: Nobody promised me a rose garden, either, you know. I know that.

JC: lf we could jump back to your time in war...

WF: Yeah...

JC: How, I mean... There are only so many ways to ask the question of how the intensity of all the imagery really affe-, really had a gra-, really had a hold on your psyche after that.

WF: Now you understand that only about, if I'm not... I may be mistaken as to percentages, but during that Second World War, only about ten percent of the soldiers actually fought in the war. Ninety percent were rear echelon. Now, so I am privileged, I know it sounds funny, privileged to have served in the army, in the war, in the infantry as a real soldier. Now, what that meant was that very often, it could be that you didn't wake up in the morning, that you were walking along the road and you could be blown to hell, or that there was a fire fight, and somebody shot you through the head, or the airplanes came by and dropped some bombs that you couldn't escape from. So every moment was like... delicate... profound... frightening, and at the same time, because of the fact that it was the second world war with all of its ramifications, it was a very positive experience, that you felt like you were doing some good. You realized you were fighting against the indiscriminate hatred of Nazis, and that was useful... and it kept me going, you see. I'm proud that that's what I did. I didn't, at that time, always want to do it, you understand. I tried to get into a map-making service. I thought, 'Gee, that'd be a good thing to fall back on someday: and they always promised that they would send me to that map-making school. The next place I would end up is the infantry. And then, after that, they said, 'Sure, we're going to send you to the map-makers: and they sent me to the glider infantry. I said, 'I have claustrophobia.' They said, 'So what, you're not going to be up there that long: so there you are. So, I was always there, and it's only in reflection that you can be a big shot and say, 'I got something out of it: which is true, but at that time, I was frightened to death. And it was very very hard, cold, wet, snow. We used to sleep in the snow with nothing to eat in a while. To this day, I don't eat chocolate, because they dropped the chocolate bars from the airplanes, cause that was a D-ration. That was called D-ration, and you ate a couple of those chocolate bars, and boy, your stomach was like one rock, so you went without it. But I could look back now and be a little bit proud of having to do with it. And knowing that I was one of the few, you know, not like the people who I was meeting... I was in the army when they stayed in some of the big cities, and they did quartermaster stuff, and sure, that's very appropriate. There's no question about that, but they were not fighting the war.

JC: Where were you sent off first?

WF: I went to Texas... Texas with the chiggers... God, those chiggers would get into your skin, and so hot...

JC: What are they?

WF: Chig-... Little things... that get into your skin, you know, little insects. They have a lot of them in Texas, and it was so hot there that you couldn't touch the rifle. You'd bum your hand on it. You had to put water on your hand to pick up the rifle. Then, I was sent to California for a while, sent to a Tank Destroyer battalion, which was inaugurated, and while we were there, we had heard that a tank-destroyer battalion had been sent to north Africa, and in the first day of fighting was completely annihilated, because the weapon and armory was so thin that... There was no protection. So they sent these Tank Destroyers, which were like treaded vehicles but only had a quarter-inch plate, and a bullet could go through them, never mind a shell. So they were completely annihilated. They said, 'Hell, we'll forrget this Tank Destroyer... stuff� and I was then shipped to an infantry outfit.

JC: In California?

WF: From California, I went to Oklahoma. They don't like to keep you in one place. Shake you up a little bit. At least, that was my feeling. So, I went to Oklahoma for a little while, and then from Oklahoma I was sent to Baltimore, and then went overseas, went to England. We did training in England, and then I went on to the continent.

JC: And it was finally ten months in Berlin...

WF: Yeah, after the war was over. That was when the war was over. We had been sent to Le Havre. I had graduated from Infantry School in Falkenberg, so I was a brand new Second Lieutenant, and they sent me to Le Havre, and then were going to ship us to the Pacific. So, we had all the equipment ready to go, and then orders came that they needed a hundred to-do-li-dos to go to Berlin, cause they needed what do you call them... aides... so I guess I was lucky that my name began with an F, because A-B-C-D-E-F, so that I was on that group sent to Berlin. It was not that bad for me, because I could speak a little German. I'd taken German in high school, and it's very close to Yiddish anyway, so I could get along pretty well. And I had some interesting things happen there. I was, one night I had a little too much to drink, and I wandered into the Russian zone, and the bastards arrested me, and nobody could speak any other language except Russian, and I kept getting prodded with their damn rifles, until I got way behind their zone, and some kind of an officer or sergeant, who could speak some German, came by and said, 'Alle Mann, ganz geh!' Okay, and escorted us back. The Russians already were vicious sons of bitches, and the American government, that is the military government, gave us ripped plates, to the Russians, who hadn't been paid for five years. For five years! And they printed all of this money. They printed the money. And now they had wads of money, which they could not take back. So they wanted to buy Mickey Mouse wristwatches. That was worth five hundred dollars. A Mickey Mouse wristwatch, five hundred dollars. A carton of cigarettes, a hundred and seventy-five dollars. And it was, you know, all our own money. And that first month, it was allowed that everybody there could send home their entire salary plus ten percent. So I suppose they thought you could play poker and win a couple of bucks. But then, of course, they realized that what was happening was that they were exchanging things for the Russians, and so that came to an end. But the Russians, of course, had cameras they would sell you... for cigarettes. That was the barter. Money was of no interest to anybody. Cigarettes. Now, cigarettes were very seldom smoked, but that was the money at that time... I did some paintings of that big plaza in front of what's the name of that... like the Arch of Triumph. It's not called the Arch of Triumph. I've forgotten the name. And there's a big, big piazza where they conducted black markets every Sunday. You could buy anything. Anything! I saw a young officer selling a birthday cake that got sent there for his birthday, and he sold that and got a whole bunch of money for that. And so I did several paintings, rather realistic of that. Subsequently, I'm sorry I sold them.

JC: There?

WF: No, no, no. Here. Here. But I wish that I had kept some of them, but I sold them. So I was kind of lucky.

JC: Where did you find the materials to... to paint?

WF: Oh no, no. Here, here. I didn't paint when I was there. No, no. I painted them here.

JC: How did you resist the urges to...

WF: Oh, I was too busy. Too busy. Too busy, yeah. There was always something you had to do. A goal. I couldn't paint. I spent a lot of time drinking. Yeah, yeah. Yep.

JC: Did that keep you somewhat inspired to go on to produce art later?

WF: Oh, I knew that was what I wanted to do. 1'm sure that the present President would have an ulcer, thinking that the government, if he had been the President, had given money to artists to make works like I am making, he would have a fit. His father would have had a fit. But we were very lucky. And Truman...Truman was one pisser. He really was. I met him when I was in Berlin at that time. And I had been sent to Brussels to buy some presents for his family, so I had a plane at my disposal, and I brought back a whole bunch of beautiful handkerchiefs, laced handkerchiefs.

JC: He sent you personally?

WF: Well, somebody sent me there, and I had to bring it to him. He didn't personally send me, but I was his... some aide told me what to do, and then I was told to give it to him, because he wanted to ask about... so this handkerchief, he said, 'How much is that handkerchief?' I said, 'It cost around seventy-five dollars?' He said, 'Seventy-five dollars to blow your stupid snot? No way! Take it back!' And I had to go back, and that was one of the things he didn't want to buy. It was too much money. But that was a pretty honest thing, wasn't it? Yeah, I liked that. I still do.

JC: At the same time, did you have friends who were from home, who went with you to war?

WF: No, no. I never did.

JC: Nobody from Yale?

WF: No, no. Nobody from home at all. Never met anybody. No. No friends. I made new friends, but nobody from home.

JC: What did some of your friends think when you decided to leave school?

WF: I never told them... You know, I just left... Never occurred me to tell anybody, you know? I had business of my own, which was that I wanted to go, to run off. I didn't have any close people, friends, that we exchanged confidences. I didn't have anybody like that. No. I had to go, so I went.

JC: Was that... did it seem an unusual choice to most students at that time?

WF: No, no. It wasn't. All my friends from high school did the same thing. Yeah, they all went... Of course, some of them were smarter than I was, so instead of getting into the infantry, they were sent to engineering school. And two of them never went into the army at all. They were always in the ASTP, the program, so they became engineers without having to go into the army, and they just spent all their time at school. Yeah... they were smarter than me�in every way...

JC: [Laughs]

WF: Okay.

JC: All right.

WF: All right.

JC: It's about time now.

WF: I've got to swing out. [Breaks into song] Swing low! Sweet Chariot...