Oral History Interview with Ann Wilson, 2009 April 19-2010 July 12
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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 www.aaa.si.edu/askus 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.