The Museum of Modern Art Oral History Project
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THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM INTERVIEW WITH: HELEN FRANC (HF) INTERVIEWER: SHARON ZANE (SZ) LOCATION: THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART 11 WEST 53 STREET, NEW YORK CITY DATE: APRIL 16, 1991 BEGIN TAPE 1, SIDE 1 SZ: This is an interview with Helen Franc for The Museum of Modern Art Oral History Project. It is April 16th, 1991, and we are at The Museum of Modern Art, which is at 11 West 53rd Street in New York City. HF: In case you didn't know [LAUGHTER]. SZ: It's for my transcriber, who knows also, very well. It's for posterity. Helen, tell me where and when you were born and a little bit about your family background, if you would. HF: I was born in New York City, on 100th Street, West 100th Street. My father was a lawyer from Toledo, Ohio, who got his B.A. at the University of Michigan and then came to Columbia Law School and settled in New York. My mother was from St. Louis, and when her father died and she was a young girl, she moved with my grandmother to New York and they lived with her older sister, my aunt, who was already married and living in New York. A rather amusing thing about that is that the house they lived in, from which my mother was wooed over a number of years and from which she was eventually married, was 235 West 76th Street. In the winter of 1962-63, I moved into the apartment I now have, which is 320 West 76th Street, so we've come sort of full circle. I was born on May 17th, 1908. I had an older sister, Ruth, four years older than I, who was very precocious, very bright and very pretty, MoMA Archives Oral History: H. Franc page 1 of 153 and always had her nose in a book. I was a tomboy, and the envy of my life was my sister's bright golden curls. I had obdurately straight brown hair, and who ever heard of a fairy princess with straight brown hair? My sister always had her nose in a book, and I taught myself reading defensively, because she wouldn't play with me. And I have a picture of myself standing up--I mean a mental picture--painfully working out words phonetically, so I knew how to read before I went to kindergarten. I went to a very small school, a little private school whose only advantage was it was two blocks away from where we lived. I went to kindergarten there and then first grade on, for several years. Because it was a very small school and they didn't know about these things that early, they kept pushing me ahead on the basis of my reading and writing. So, while I was reading like a whiz, arithmetic was my bête noire; I hardly knew that two and two made four. So I fell back on everything to do with mathematics, to this day. Always way ahead on the verbal things.... SZ: I take it that school doesn't exist anymore. HF: Oh, no, it was a very small private school. SZ: What was it called? HF: Delancey School. It was run by two elderly maiden ladies. Then my sister started to go to Horace Mann School. Horace Mann School, in those days, if you don't know this, was on the northeast corner of 120th Street and Broadway. It was part of Teachers College, which was part of Columbia University. In those days it was both experimental and college preparatory. And later, when Lincoln was started.... SZ: Lincoln School. HF: It became the experimental school. MoMA Archives Oral History: H. Franc page 2 of 153 SZ: Of Teachers College, right? HF: No, I don't know that Lincoln was part of Teachers College. I don't think it was. SZ: It became the.... HF: ...experimental school, and Horace Mann continued to be the college preparatory school, and the demonstration school: All the tests for reading and all the tests for arithmetic were tried there. We were the guinea pigs and we always had rows of observers from Teachers College sitting in the back room. Anyway, in the fifth grade I transferred there, where my sister was already in junior high, I guess. At that time, up to the sixth grade it was co-ed, and then the boys in junior high and high school went up to Riverdale, which much later became co-ed. It did have wonderful instruction. In the seventh grade, when you started the equivalent to the first year of junior high, you had the choice of starting Latin and taking it for six years or taking a modern language. If you took Latin in that year, you started a modern language in what would be first-year high [school], and vice versa. I elected to take Latin and started French in high school. The only proper French I ever learned was the very first year, when we had a very charming youngish professor and it was direct method, no English in the class. It went downhill from then on [LAUGHING]. In my class there were two other Helens, and this French teacher decided that that was two too many. You know, kids at that age love to change their names, [but] instead of saying "What would you like to be called, Helen?"--I would have chosen something like Solange or Mélanie--she christened me Babette, which is a name I would never have chosen. The result was that when she called on me, I wouldn't react, and they'd have to poke me and say, "She means you." I was wonderful at sight-reading; I was bored with grammar. So I always got through on the reading. SZ: But you liked school, obviously. MoMA Archives Oral History: H. Franc page 3 of 153 HF: I adored school, it was a wonderful school. History was done by the project method. We had a very dynamic teacher. We had a wonderful Latin teacher. The only math that ever made sense to me was geometry (in spite of the fact that I didn't like my teacher and she didn't like me, because it was visual). I loved all the apparatus of it, the protractor and the compass, and I liked the sort of compulsive thing about dividing into two sides with a vertical line with a statement on one side and the theorem it's based on, on the other, and then finally, Q.E.D. (Quod erat demonstrandum). It was logical, it built up logically, whereas algebra, to me, for all they say it's great training for the mind, I really don't believe it, because it's straight memory. The formulae derive from higher mathematics from what you have had; if you mix up an "a" and a "b," you're lost. SZ: Did you go to museums when you were a kid? HF: Well, yes. My family was not at all art-oriented. I would say we were music-oriented; I mean, my mother was more than my father--opera and concerts and things like that. But I had a best friend, Katie Wiehe, in high school, who later--we'll continue with this college story of getting together with Alfred Barr and the rest--and she used to come down on Sunday afternoons just as we were finishing dessert, and we would go out and explore around town together. Very often we'd go to the Metropolitan [Museum of Art], just as a sort of playground, and just wander around looking at things. And I remember that the Morgan Collection in those days had up on the balcony above the entrance hall a great watch collection, and I remember being intrigued by watches made in the shape of banjos and things like that. In those days, also, before the Havemeyer Collection came, most of the paintings were kind of dark and gloomy [LAUGHING], so my very favorite painting in the museum was the Renoir, Madame Charpentier and Her Children, which was not only bright and cheerful, but of course, it had two children and a dog--irresistible. But, the other thing is that we were a great newspaper-reading family, and in those days New York did have newspapers. MoMA Archives Oral History: H. Franc page 4 of 153 SZ: A lot of them. HF: And we got in the morning the New York Times, which my father took off with him to work; and...I forget whether it was the Herald or the Tribune in those days; and we got the evening Post, which was quite a different paper in those days; and the evening Sun. And current events were very much discussed in our family, and also, very much at school--we were very into that kind of thing. SZ: There were two girls in your family. HF: My sister was four years older, and very precocious. SZ: Your parents obviously were interested in your education, wanted you to be up on current events and all that. HF: Well, it wasn't that...they were in that sense. For example, we used to go down to the Jersey shore for the summer, and my father always had a map; we always followed the route on the map. Saturday mornings--in those days people worked half-days on Saturday--about twice a year I would come down in the middle of the day to my father's office, which was always down on lower Broadway, the Cunard Building or the Wall Street area; and he would take me out to lunch and we would go to the Battery, which in those days had the Aquarium, or we'd go to the Mint, or we'd go to Trinity Church or something.