Ivonna Veiherte`s interwiev with Gertrude Stein in September 2018 in New York From the left: Vita Birzaka, Ivonna Veiherte, Gertrude Stein, Daiga Upeniece. New York, 2018. Photo: Rafael Vostell No!art is not imaginable without you. Can you please tell us about how you started working in art? Did your family collect art or was it involved in art in any way? We had pictures around, my family collected Bauhaus1, but we were mostly a political family. A political family? What do you mean? We were very much involved in fighting prejudice, in working against anti-Semitism and helping Israel, in helping war veterans – we did a lot of that sort of work. 1 The Staatliches Bauhaus commonly known as the Bauhaus, was a German art school that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicized and taught. The Bauhaus was founded by Walter Gropius in 1918. 1 Did you study art? I studied art and literature, and then started out as an artist. I started collecting very early, and opened a gallery pretty early, right around the time I met Boris2. The March Gallery, which he ran, was very exciting and very inventive and I became very much involved with the people he worked with and in the kind of art he did. We got together and opened a gallery on the Upper East Side that showed NO!art only. How did you meet Boris? What was he like as a person? How did he live? I met Boris through a great friend of ours, Elmer Kline, a writer and poet. Elmer mentioned Boris to me one day and I said that I had seen some of Boris’s art at a show and was very interested in it. Boris was in Milan having a show at Arturo Schwarz’s gallery. Elmer wrote to Boris, who he flew back to New York and met me. We were immediately compatible, and we opened the gallery together. He was a brilliant and caring person, with a refined intellect. He received funds from the German Holocaust Fund as a survivor of the Holocaust, and his father owned apartment buildings. Boris always lived in empty apartments that his father couldn’t rent. Then the apartment would get rented and Boris had to find another place. This is how he lived from day to day. How old were you then? I was in my early thirties. Why did you find this art attractive? The word “attractive” does not apply to NO!art. It was an informative, impressive, and powerful social statement. Please, tell me about the social and political aspects of NO!art? What political orientation did they have? Are NO!art works political works in your opinion? We were an aesthetic movement with political commentary. We were not connected to political movements, but everything is political anyway. We were anarchists, attached to no one group but worked with every important cause, any good cause, on a one-to-one level, because we wanted no boundaries. 2 Boris Lurie (1924–2008) was an American artist and writer. He co-founded the NO!art movement which calls for art leading to social action. 2 Where was your gallery and when did you open it? It was in a basement, on East 81 Street. We opened it 1963 and I had it for 7 years. But did you already have a gallery when you organized a show of NO!art? Or did you really open your own gallery with this extraordinary exhibition? I opened the gallery with Boris to emphasize the importance of this movement, which was completely neglected and ignored. We opened with a solo show of Boris’s NO!art work, and then we had the NO Show after that, with Boris, Sam3, Stanley4, Allan Kaprow5, Yayoi Kusama6, Jean-Jacques Lebel7, Michelle Stuart8, and others. What made you want to do this show? Was there an idea behind it? Boris and I had very similar ideas about the art world, the role of the artists and the situation for artists at that time. It was a very difficult time to be an artist. If you were friends with museum curators or gallery owners, they could make you. They could also break you, you see? They were very powerful. The artists were not, so being an artist was very difficult then. We were starving half the time, but everything was cheap. Living in New York was very, very cheap then. 3 Sam Goodman (1919–1967). Born in Toronto, Canada. There he founded and organized the Experimental Art Group in 1937. Moved to New York in 1947 and created the March Group in 1959 together with Boris Lurie and Stanley Fisher. The NO!art movement came out of this group 4 Stanley Fisher (1926–1980). Co-founder of the NO!art movement with Boris Lurie and Sam Goodman. He was, a beatnik publisher and artist. 5 Allan Kaprow (1927–2006) was an American artist, art scholar and a pioneer in establishing the concepts of performance art. 6 Yayoi Kusama (1929) is a Japanese contemporary artist who works in sculpture, installation, painting, performance, film, poetry, fiction, and other arts. She has been acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to come out of Japan. 7 Jean-Jacques Lebel (1936) is a French artist, poet, poetry publisher. He is known primarily for his work with Happenings, and as an art theory writer and art curator. 8 Michelle Stuart (1933). American multidisciplinary artist known for her sculpture, painting and environmental art. 3 How were the openings for these shows? Everything was painted black. Boris’s apartment was black. He used to turn anywhere he went into a concentration camp. That kind of environment. Our openings were always great. It was very exciting to come into this black gallery, through this long black hall in a basement. We made the works look great, with colors and lights. We had a lot of wine, and people would come and never go home! So it would be a long evening, and sometimes one of the big collectors, who didn’t always come to buy the art, would take us out to dinner. And we would have a big party afterwards. It was a very exciting time. The pop artists would come to the opening as well. Everyone was friendly back then. Can you tell me about the other founders of the NO!art group? Sam Goodman was born in Canada. His father had been murdered in Canada by an anti- Semite. Sam was in the Canadian army as a photographer and he brought back photographs of the concentration camps, and political prisoners, and dead people, and he showed them to Boris when they met. The murder of his father killed him, and certainly what he saw in Europe stimulated him to work on this project. He and Boris were very connected in their art, and very interested in each other. Stanley Fisher came from Brooklyn, he was mostly a poet and a writer, but he also painted, and he survived as a schoolteacher. He was very socially active and he was doing something wonderful called Beat Coast East, an anthology of art and poetry. I have a copy of it here, with photographs of Boris and Stanley’s work in it. There are quite a lot of statements written by the artists themselves for shows from the beginning of the 1960s. Which of these were most important in your opinion? The ones by Boris Lurie were the best. Did you pay attention to public opinion? What was the reaction in NYC to your shows? What was the reaction of art professionals? It was horrific, no one was reviewing it. The buying public, collectors and museums were totally disinterested and hated the work. They were threatened and offended by the powerful statements. Did you buy any of their works yourself? 4 I supported them by putting up the shows and bearing all the expenses myself. We never sold one painting. Nevertheless, I did buy works by Lurie, Erró9, and Lebel. It would be hard to imagine that you hoped to sell some works from these shows. Did you work with any more commercial art as well? What was in your gallery program beside these works? I was selling my private collection out of the back room to support the gallery and the artists. What were the relationships like between Boris Lurie, Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher? They were 100% friends, they completely believed in what they were doing. Was it Boris Lurie who involved other artists in the gallery – Kaprow , Erró, Kusama, Lebel and others? Or it was you who organized the shows for some of these artists? Boris was really the one who had the contacts and organized most of the shows. But NO!art was a very loose group. We accepted all people who were interested in our movement. We showed the original boat of Kusama in 1963, and I wanted to extend it by putting the boat on the East River. Was this kind of art a suitable outlet for these artists to express their feelings and attitudes? These artists were all originals, they did what they wanted to do, we did not try to influence them in any way. Did any of them make their living with their art? Some of them worked part-time at other jobs to support themselves. Stanley Fisher was a schoolteacher, Sam Goodman had a little coffee shop with his wife, and the others had 9 Erró (Guðmundur Guðmundsson, 1932).