Oral history interview with Ann Wilson, 2009
April 19-2010 July 12
Funding for this interview was provided by the Terra Foundation for American Art. Funding for the digital preservation of this interview was provided by a grant from the Save America's Treasures Program of the National Park Service.
Contact Information
Reference Department Archives of American Art Smithsonian Institution Washington. D.C. 20560
Transcript
Preface
The following oral history transcript is the result of a recorded interview with Ann Wilson on 2009 April 19-2010 July 12. The interview took place at Wilson's home in Valatie, New York, and was conducted by Jonathan Katz for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
This transcript has been lightly edited for readability by the Archives of American Art. The reader should bear in mind that they are reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose.
Interview
ANN WILSON: [In progress] "—happened as if it didn't come out of himself and his fixation but merged. It came to itself and is for this moment without him or her, not brought about by him or her but is itself and in this sudden seeing of itself, we make the final choice. What if it has come to be without external to us and what we read it to be then and heighten it toward that reading?
If we were to leave it alone at this point of itself, our eyes aging would no longer be able to see it. External and forget the internal ordering that brought it about and without the final decision of what that ordering was about and our emphasis of it, other eyes would miss the chosen point and feel the lack of emphasis.
It is often at this point that courage comes in because with every picture with enough technical facility, we can play it safe at this point and conclude it without actually making it safe. Our decision about it, like the president issuing a no-statement statement, or we can take the chance of our full sight and burn it in or out. You can do that all along too.
Then sometimes that sudden seeing of itself comes first, foremost, because you have begun. Then is the chance for a big one on and it's more like running track to keep up with the bursting of it, the fireworks of it. But like midnight ideas and phrases in dreams, the conclusion of these sparklers often has the effect of rain. They or you or both are not up to the effort catching on, hooking in," and that's about painting really.
"I think the things called masterpieces are the result of steadiness and structure, pursued pretty relentless. It indicates a staying power or an obsession on the part of the painter about the world, the galleries, the private public of other painters and the special seeing people and the large public of degrees of success, there is first the being accepted by the private public.
This is most painful I guess to always be in the wings watching the other dancers, many younger, and your youth and strength starting out to sea and away from potential.
Then the galleries, which mean some support, a way of physically continuing the more expensive and expansive ideas, and which mean some evaluation of where you are and where you are going, to see your work in that cold interior to somehow be in your own eyes a professional. But there are other desires, a kind of monarchy or anarchy of emotion here arises.
This much pride, this much vanity, this much aggrandizement, this much avarice, this much completion and where the first are intellectually and financially useful in part, the second are nothing but a drain and absolutely the worst of all of us.
Having the shows, too, brings about cataclysms of emotion better reserved for life which pursues enough with real pain." So that's my thinking as opposed to Bill's. But we did have a dialogue.
JONATHAN KATZ: Right, right. Yeah. So let me—because we'll— ANN WILSON: So that starts. That's a little bit on critique and on making art and this whole thing I have to type. JONATHAN KATZ: And this whole thing we can— ANN WILSON: That's in the '50s. JONATHAN KATZ: We can talk about—there may be a way that I can see if people at the archive might be willing to do this. So we can talk about that.
ANN WILSON: I have to do my writing because I still write by hand. JONATHAN KATZ: And your handwriting is— ANN WILSON: I write often on computer but you think better, you edit more by hand, for me, for my generation. But I do write on computer.
JONATHAN KATZ: And your handwriting is hard to read? ANN WILSON: [Laughs.] JONATHAN KATZ: Okay, fair enough. So let me begin, if I can then, with a little background. ANN WILSON: Okay. JONATHAN KATZ: So we can sort of—so if you would, where you were born, what year you were born, what your early education was like and something about your family.
ANN WILSON: Okay. I was born in a very ordinary blue-collar family on the way up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1931 and it was the Depression, of course. So that mentality among the adults, which is similar I think to what must be going on now about who's going to lose their job.
JONATHAN KATZ: Yeah. ANN WILSON: I think it's a very similar time, not similar because this is not the Great Depression. However, that economic fear is around at the moment.
JONATHAN KATZ: Were you from an arty family? ANN WILSON: My mother—my grandmother did embroidery and I will show you this incredible French convent school embroidery. Her friend drew flowers and wove flax and she did French needlework on them. My mother was an artist, studied with Sam Rosenberg at Pittsburgh at Carnegie Tech and was an abstract expressionist, but always painted. We would go out together and paint.
My mother had been a librarian. So there was a lot of—and my father, both of them—unusual for Pittsburgh, both of them read a great deal and valued the written word and reading. I had five maiden aunt schoolteachers, two of whom were high school principals. So I came—that was from the German side of the family.
I came from for what in Pittsburgh at the time would have been people who were educated beyond their class in a way because the other people were out bowling and drinking beer in that time.
JONATHAN KATZ: Sure, sure. ANN WILSON: I went to Our Lady of Mercy Academy, a convent school, and then I went to Carnegie Tech for a year. I had a scholarship because I won 17 gold keys in the National Scholastic contest and got a scholarship and so went to Carnegie Tech and studied Bauhaus design.
JONATHAN KATZ: Wow. ANN WILSON: A senior at Tech at the time was [Andy] Warhol and Philip Pearlstein were at Tech when I was a freshman.
JONATHAN KATZ: And you knew them? ANN WILSON: I knew them from Pittsburgh, PA. JONATHAN KATZ: Wow, my God. ANN WILSON: Of course, they got out of there the minute they graduated. [Laughs.] JONATHAN KATZ: And moved in together apparently. ANN WILSON: Well, they were friends. Philip Pearlstein was not gay. JONATHAN KATZ: Right. ANN WILSON: And Andy was. In fact, Andy Warhol was possibly the only student at Carnegie Tech that wore a baby blue corduroy suit to graduation.
JONATHAN KATZ: [Laughs.] So it was not a secret to people at Carnegie? ANN WILSON: It would have been because Pittsburgh was oblivious. People just thought "Oh, he's an artist." Andy's father was a mill sweeper. Andy also had a scholarship to Tech and his mother never spoke English. He brought her from Pittsburgh to New York to live with him. So it was Andy came from poor people.
JONATHAN KATZ: Yeah, yeah. ANN WILSON: So he would have been the first in his family to go to college. He was Andy Warhola and it was a Polish family living in a Polish section. Pittsburgh prior to the war, there were Irish sections, Polish sections, German sections, Czech sections. It was a very international town actually and these were all people in the mills and the Scotch-Irish ran the place.
JONATHAN KATZ: Yeah. ANN WILSON: The Mellons and Carnegies and they weren't too fancy themselves. JONATHAN KATZ: Really? ANN WILSON: Well, they would build an opera house. They would build a college. But that was millionaire's guilt. It really—I mean, [Henry Clay] Frick came to New York and made the Frick Museum. I don't think he sat around looking at art.
JONATHAN KATZ: Yeah. Right. ANN WILSON: I mean, he was a guy who built mills from Scotland. So the town of Pittsburgh was a very working class town. It wasn't—although it had the Pittsburgh International, which I went to with my mother. So I had this sophistication from probably eight years old on with going to the Pittsburgh International with my father.
JONATHAN KATZ: So you felt fairly apprised of what was going on in New York even in Pittsburgh? ANN WILSON: No, no I knew that New York was where you went, to Europe where Picasso was, where you could be an artist. That's how innocent I was. I'm sure there were some, maybe Philip Pearlstein or Andy weren't as innocent. But I was a convent school who went to college and until I left Pittsburgh, I had to be in at 11:00 at night if I went on a date and my parents were waiting.
It was another—you don't—somebody in your generation cannot understand that I call Pittsburgh the outer Midwest. You can't understand it. There were good girls and there were bad girls. [Laughs.]
JONATHAN KATZ: Yeah, yeah. So in college, you majored in? ANN WILSON: I was at Carnegie Tech just for the foundation Bauhaus year. I had straight Bauhaus. I studied color and became quite a good colorist. Really, that became my métier. Color is the thing that I live for.
I studied typical Bauhaus. You move the squares this way and that way—for a full year. I then went with a friend who was going to Tyler [School of Art, Temple University], talked my parents into letting me go to Tyler because I wanted to get out of Pittsburgh. I didn't want to come home at 11:00 at night anymore. [Laughs.]
JONATHAN KATZ: Sure, understandably. ANN WILSON: My motives were not pure. [They laugh.] I just wanted to get out of Pittsburgh. So Dick Levine said it was a lovely school, it was an old estate because Tyler was out in Elkins Park in Philly. You know Elkins Park?
JONATHAN KATZ: Sure. ANN WILSON: And those gorgeous old estates. I went to Tyler which was clueless about Bauhaus. Tyler was run by a guy named Boris Blai who was a Russian and all of Philadelphia in the '50s, which this was prior to '54. It was '50 to '54. They were still —it was still as if Eakins taught. It was draw from the model, draw from the plaster cast, learn techniques like etching. I actually learned Vermeer's technique of underpainting with powdered pigments and egg yolk.
JONATHAN KATZ: Oh, my God. ANN WILSON: And I copied Memling in the Philadelphia Museum [of Art]. Now, it's curiously turned out good because when I got to New York and met the Black Mountain [College] people, I thought I had missed the train [laughs] big time.
JONATHAN KATZ: Yeah, I bet. ANN WILSON: However, to have had that, I had both the Bauhaus underpinning in design, which I understood, and then I had classical technique training, which allowed me to understand things about art that the Black Mountain people never understood. So I bridged the classical past and the contemporary present.
As I went on in life, that for instance—behind that light there—is a paint-—I glue autumn leaves. I'm working with the seasons, the flowers now, bark in the winter, leaves in the fall. That is a Vermeer technique painting behind that.
JONATHAN KATZ: Yeah, sure. We're talking about a painting— ANN WILSON: Behind the lamp. JONATHAN KATZ: Yeah. ANN WILSON: That is underpainting and glaze. But with me, there's a little bit of irony going on in that in that I use that technique.
JONATHAN KATZ: To different ends. ANN WILSON: To different ends and I also then use collage technique to get my form and I paint on silk because I studied with a Chinese master in silk painting. So I am playing around with different techniques and different ends and I'm glad I had that technical training. Now, many of the young artists now are getting it. They're going back to that.
JONATHAN KATZ: To the basics. ANN WILSON: Well, what they're doing is they're reprising the old masters. They're repainting them because I think what they came up with—after Abstract Expressionism, where could you go? I think they lost motive with mode.
So the young ones are realizing they can't continue being Pollock. But without the kind of education that I had, I don't know their realization is going to be really an innocent American take on the old masters, which is okay. But it's kind of like coming out of Kansas and looking at a [J.M.W.] Turner and wanting to do that.
JONATHAN KATZ: Right, right. ANN WILSON: Without any idea of how it evolved or where, you know. JONATHAN KATZ: Yeah. Now, after you got to Tyler— ANN WILSON: Yeah, there I met Lowell [Nesbitt]. JONATHAN KATZ: There you met Lowell, okay. ANN WILSON: Yeah, yeah and Lowell was—Lowell had his eyes on the prize from the beginning and he had studied with who? Well, it was the Bouguereau of his time he'd studied with and you'd have to look up the background of Lowell.
But he had studied with a big New York painter in summers in Maine [at Skowhegan School of Art]. So he had— he was way ahead of the others in technique. Then he hit upon the flowers later when he got to New York.
JONATHAN KATZ: At this point, was he somebody that you identified then as somebody who was going to make it? He seemed—
ANN WILSON: He was somebody who'd take me to the prom because the other guys weren't interested in something that was nearly six feet tall that didn't know how to dance. [Katz laughs.] He was gay. He was a safe date. [They laugh.]
JONATHAN KATZ: That's great. ANN WILSON: Even though I had a date, he had to pretend to be straight. JONATHAN KATZ: [Laughs.] Everybody won. ANN WILSON: Everyone won. It was a win-win. [They laugh.] JONATHAN KATZ: Then through Lowell, you met Bill [William Wilson]? ANN WILSON: Lowell invited me to his parent's house in Maryland. He said, "There's a wonderful woman artist, May Wilson. You have to meet her," and he took me out to Freedom Hill and Bill happened to be there. Bill and I connected intellectually from minute one. He said something, I said something and that was it. It was over.
JONATHAN KATZ: Then you graduated. Did you stay in Philadelphia? ANN WILSON: No. I graduated. I went back to Pittsburgh for one summer and sat around painting the mountains with my mother and I had my—
JONATHAN KATZ: Now, can I stop you for a second because you said your mother was an Abstract Expressionist. ANN WILSON: Yes, studying with Sam Rosenberg at Carnegie Tech. JONATHAN KATZ: So why are you doing mountains when your mother, who's a generation older, is doing— ANN WILSON: No daughter is going to do what her mother does. JONATHAN KATZ: Got it, okay. ANN WILSON: Are you kidding? I was going to upset her as much as I could. [Katz laughs.] "For this we sent you to art school?" [They laugh.] Anyway.
JONATHAN KATZ: Bravo. ANN WILSON: But I was interested in the—it wasn't quite simplistic mountains. It was like a little Henry Moore shape with a lot of—I have always been interested in the colors of nature. My journals are full. I have an exact description in here going to see Emily Dickinson's grave of the color of each blade of grass leading to it. Nature, color, light, I just—it's all in here.
So then I went to New York and as I told you the story and Ray met me because Bill knew Ray and Bill said that I was coming to New York.
JONATHAN KATZ: We're talking about Ray Johnson here. ANN WILSON: Ray came to the Greyhound bus, fetched me to the Greyhound bus. JONATHAN KATZ: You had not yet met Ray? ANN WILSON: No and he said—but somehow we had signals of who we were and I had a big black portfolio and he took me immediately to Sidney Janis, that story.
JONATHAN KATZ: So tell that story because we weren't recording that. ANN WILSON: All right. Ray Johnson, who was a wicked one if ever there was, I said I was on my way to Paris, which is where Picasso and the artists were. Ray said, "Well, you should consider showing in a gallery in New York," and I said, "Are there galleries in New York," [laughs] and he said, "Oh, well I will take you to one," and he took me immediately to Sidney Janis.
Sidney Janis, I opened my little portfolio with the mountain paintings and Sidney Janis put them all on his velvet viewing stand and very kindly looked at each one and then said, "You are a very young artist and the young artists are down on Eighth Street."
I went to Eighth Street to the Tanager [Gallery] and all of those galleries. Well, those were the bullsier Abstract Expressionists. Women were to sleep with. They were not artists in the mind of those guys. So that's dear old Ray, anyway.
JONATHAN KATZ: So did you then become friends? ANN WILSON: Well, because Ray knew Bill, he would—well, I was fun. He would take me to parties in which everybody was stoned and sitting around the edges of a room and I was probably in black and white saddle shoes with little plaid skirts and little matching sweater set with the pearls [Katz laughs] and I would say things like, "Hi gang," from Pittsburgh. [They laugh.]
JONATHAN KATZ: So you were getting the feeling that perhaps this was a different universe. ANN WILSON: It was a different universe and I thought, "How do you talk to these people? They're always staring into space." [They laugh.] JONATHAN KATZ: Now, at this point you're not yet married to Bill? ANN WILSON: I'm not yet married to Bill, no. That would take three or four years. But we were corresponding constantly. We wrote volumes to each other because he dated a woman named Terry Howler who was a neighbor with Freedom Hill. But Terry did not want an academic.
She wanted a businessman. She was a sensible girl and Bill—you read Bill's letter. That maybe wasn't what she was thinking of going on a date.
So he was first engaged to Terry for about three months and he dropped Terry and I was on the next train to Yale because I knew that's who I wanted. So he was at Yale finishing his doctorate.
JONATHAN KATZ: He was doing his doctorate in what? ANN WILSON: At Yale in the geodetic grammar and Chaucer's "House of Fame". JONATHAN KATZ: I'll be damned. Wow. This I didn't know. ANN WILSON: Yes. JONATHAN KATZ: All right, so then you're in New York. ANN WILSON: I was in New York living. I first stayed in the Y [YMCA] for a week and just serendipity and I think I had several goddesses on each shoulder. I was wandering around in the Village looking for an apartment, which in those days was $30 and $40 a month in the East and West Village. I got to Patchin Place and I said, "Oh, it's like Pittsburgh. It has trees." I went into Patchin Place and I knocked on a few doors and they gave me a phone number and I got an apartment in Patchin Place.
JONATHAN KATZ: Just like that? ANN WILSON: Just like that, right across from e.e. cummings and Djuna Barnes was down on the end. JONATHAN KATZ: Oh, my God. ANN WILSON: Just like that. So I had a floor through in Patchin Place. JONATHAN KATZ: And what were you doing in New York? ANN WILSON: In New York I was teaching at Pratt [Institute] and I was painting. By this time I figured out that mountains weren't where it was at. So I was attempting—I thought with nature colors, which I continued. I was pretty consistent.
I would make abstract paintings and what I did was there was no money so I got paper rolls of watercolor paper, tacked them on the wall floor to ceiling and I would do color shifts and then I'd take a sponge to them and the water would roll down and merge those color shifts. That was cool in those days and I'd wipe things with the sponge. I was very into it.
JONATHAN KATZ: And they were fairly large scale then? ANN WILSON: They were floor to ceiling, watercolor, not to be framed, to be tacked on a wall. But again you're talking about things like the Tanager Gallery. You're not talking about Sidney Janis.
JONATHAN KATZ: Right. ANN WILSON: So I was on Patchin Place, I was teaching at Pratt and I was working for Harold McNeil, who was quite a fine painter and I was—the library had forbidden the art school any books because—particularly the teachers because they tended to take books back and the books never got back to the library.
So I was sent in as a decoy to say that I was in the engineering school. I would take out the books that Harold McNeil wanted and take them to him. It was the devil to pay to get them back to the library because it was on my library card. So that was my job. For that, Pratt paid me. Then I taught drawing at Pratt. I taught foundation drawing.
Annie Olveris [ph] was there at the time. I got to know her. I was teaching at Pratt and I was gradually getting into the swim of first meeting Johanna and Stan and though Johanna and Stan I met the entire Black Mountain group.
JONATHAN KATZ: We're talking VanDerBeek? ANN WILSON: Stan VanDerBeek and Johanna. They had just had their first child. They lived in a loft down on Spring Street.
JONATHAN KATZ: So we're talking '53 probably? ANN WILSON: Probably '52, '53 and Ray took me to meet Stan and Johanna, who as I remember had a bed on the floor on the ceiling on chains that they would bring down at night. Then they had the first baby, August. I called her August Moon. So through Stan and Johanna, I met Merce [Cunningham]. I met [John] Cage. I met everybody from Black Mountain, that whole—Karen, M.C. Williams, Karen Karnes, the whole lot of them.
JONATHAN KATZ: And did you like them immediately? ANN WILSON: Well, I was literate and they were literate. There was no—and I was an artist. If you were an artist in those days, you were immediately accepted.
JONATHAN KATZ: Then you're still on Patchin Place at this point? ANN WILSON: I'm on Patchin Place and the Coenties Slip group—Bob [Robert Indiana] and all of them—had something called the Coenties Slip Drawing School. Bob Indiana and Jack Youngerman taught—people would come and pay to do drawing, Wall Street wives I think. I'm not quite sure who they were that made it down there.
But part of that drawing school was to show slides at night of other artists who had visited places like South America. So somehow through somebody because you just were—the Judson Church was a big center then. Somebody said about this drawing evening, all people showing slides. I wanted to meet more artists.
So I went down to that evening where Bob Indiana took a shine to me. He really liked me, I think because we were both Midwestern. We spoke a similar language. I think at that time I was also starting to do the quilts.
So there was a marriage of interest between the sign painting and what I was doing and Bob liked me to begin with. He said, "There's another loft building opening up down there." By this time I'd forgotten about Paris, once I found out that there was art in New York.
He said, "There's a woman moving in and you'd better grab off a loft—because Ellsworth [Kelly] was already in the building." So I went and I got the loft above the bar, which was at that time was huge. It was $40 a month.
Then I got Terry as a roommate because she was Bill's fiancée at the moment. Then later I had a succession of other roommates. So that was living on Coenties Slip and then from then on in it just mushroomed. I knew everybody in town in about five minutes.
