Regional Oral History Office University of California the Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

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Regional Oral History Office University of California The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

FRED MARTIN

ART DEPARTMENT ALUMNI AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Interviews conducted by RICHARD CÁNDIDA SMITH

in 2005

Since 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing leading participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of Northern California, the West, and the nation. Oral History is a method of collecting historical information through tape-recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. The tape recording is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected manuscript is bound with photographs and illustrative materials and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable.

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All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between The Regents of the University of California and Fred Martin, dated September 14, 2005. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley.

Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, Mail Code 6000, University of California, Berkeley, 94720-6000, and should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user.

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

“Art Department Alumni At The University Of California, Berkeley Oral History Project: Fred Martin,” conducted by Richard Cándida Smith in 2005, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2010.

Fred Martin in 2005 Oral History Interview

Discursive Table of Contents—FRED MARTIN

Interview #1: September 14, 2005...... 1

Audio File 1 ...... 1

Preliminary discussion on the Berkeley emphasis on design over content—Martin had little contact with Worth Ryder outside one large lecture course on the history of art— Parents and family background—Growing up in Alameda, California—Development of interest in art—Entering Berkeley as a Decorative Arts major—Switching to the art department—Taking Art 2A with Erle Loran—Educating the student for an awareness of formal value, order, and structure—Learning to organize the world visually—Martin's resistance to Loran's perspectives—Developing a romantic understanding of art— Studying Kandinsky outside of class—Loran's sequence of exercises—How Loran's approach influenced Martin's teaching—Learning Chinese brush and ink techniques from Ray Boynton—Becoming enthralled with the work of Lyonel Feininger—Color classes with Margaret Peterson O'Hagan—Comparing O'Hagan's critique style with that of John Haley—Martin's breakthrough painting—Developing a personal palette knife technique—Student friends.

Audio file 2 ...... 18

Class with David Park—Working with Glenn Wessels—The Berkeley art department and the California School of Fine Arts compared—Beginning to study Chinese literature and philosophy in classes at Berkeley—Chinese studies begin to reshape working methods with paint—More on studying with David Park—Becoming interested in Poussin and Lorrain—On art history classes at Berkeley—Curating an alumni show with Sam Francis and Jack Head as his assistants—Class with Mark Rothko—Class with Clyfford Still—A second breakthrough painting—On emotional intensity in painting—Emotion versus form—Assessing the limitations of the Berkeley approach to art training—Graduate studies in art—Involvement with the Six Gallery—Working at the Oakland Museum— More on family and its cultural background.

Audio File 3 ...... 34

Student social life at Berkeley—More on Erle Loran—Ninfa Valvo—More on classes with David Park, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still—On Carl Jung—On the relation of California-based artists to New York—Annual exhibitions of the San Francisco Art Association—Dorothy Miller—The Art Bank project—Reflections on how the Berkeley art program shaped its graduates.

Interview #2: September 21, 2005...... 46

Audio File 4...... 46

Glenn Wessels discouragement as a teacher—Martin’s developing his own approach to teaching—Aspiration as an artist—On fame and success—Sam Francis—Galleries and their influence on art—Martin discusses individual works created since the 1980s and the development of his visual thinking.

Audio File 5...... 59

Use of text and words in Martin’s work—Mixed feelings about the Berkeley approach to art training—Studio notebooks—More on the Art Bank—Joey America and the farm form series—Going to the San Francisco Art Institute—Philosophy of administering an art school—Teaching art history for artists—Sharing work with students—The role of imitation in studio art classes—More on conflicted feelings Berkeley art students from his generation had about their training and teachers—Continuing connections with his fellow graduates—The postwar generation of young artists—Berkeley’s way of seeing—Berkeley’s unique contributions to art education.

Interview #1: September 14, 2005 [Begin Audio File Martin, Fred 01 09-14-05.wav]

01-00:00:01 Cándida Smith: DeFeo was taught that it didn’t matter what the content of prehistoric art was.

Martin: Oh, really? Did she take a course? Or was this just told her in.

01-00:00:29 Cándida Smith: No, this was told her. Then she went to Lascaux when she was living in Europe. She did a lot of stuff with etchings and she went to some museum. I can’t figure out [exactly] which museum it was. It was probably the one in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. But she was able to do, put a piece of paper—

Martin: Oh, rubbings.

01-00:00:56 Cándida Smith: Rubbings, yes, rubbings. Of these prehistoric bas reliefs.

Martin: Jay did?

01-00:01:04 Cándida Smith: And then she did a couple of paintings while she was in Paris that were sort of based on the rubbings.

Martin: I hadn’t thought about it. I took a course in primitive art. I never thought about that. Yeah, we counted the triangles in tapa cloths. That was it. At least that’s what I remember.

01-00:01:25 Cándida Smith: Primitive art in that case meant Oceanic, African, or Lascaux?

Martin: I think it was Oceanic. It was nothing but design. There was no content. No, there was no content.

Cándida Smith: So that was pure Berkeley.

01-00:01:46 Martin: Yes, as far as I was concerned. And that’s one of the things in my stuff, even then. I was abstract, but I knew what it was. I knew what these things were that I was painting. I could hear their names, I could write their stories, the whole business.

Cándida Smith: I thought that was also Worth Ryder’s idea. At least he says so in his lecture notes.

01-00:02:14 Martin: See, I had so little of Worth Ryder, but I had one lecture course. Big lecture course. He was never this God-like figure for me.

Cándida Smith: I guess we’ve actually started. So let’s—

Martin: So let’s start at the beginning now?

Cándida Smith: At the beginning.

Martin: All right.

01-00:02:34 Cándida Smith: So the first thing I’d like to do is find out a little bit about your family background, where and when you were born, and a little bit about your parents, where you were raised.

01-00:02:48 Martin: I was born in San Francisco. I think at St. Francis Hospital. My parents lived in an apartment on Geary Street, downtown. When I was one year old, they moved to Alameda. My father was an engineer for the telephone company, who designed PBXs, which were the old ways of doing business phones. My mother had been a secretary at the phone company, and that’s where they met. She came from—she was born in Soquel, I think. Down by Santa Cruz. Her family all came from down there. My father came from Upstate New York.

Cándida Smith: Were they both college educated?

01-00:03:45 Martin: My father had a degree from the University of Toronto; my mother just was high school. When I was ten, we moved to Oakland, to East Oakland, to, I think, 64th Avenue, one block up from what is now International Boulevard— or East 14th Street. I went to elementary school and junior high and high school. I went to Castlemont High School.

Cándida Smith: A public school?

01-00:04:20 Martin: Oh, yeah. And then—

Cándida Smith: What about the levels of interest in culture amongst your parents? Were they—did they have a liking for art or poetry or music, or—?

01-00:04:44 Martin: My father had taught himself to play the violin, and to play the flageolet. We called it “Daddy’s flute.” He had taught himself to play these things when he was a kid. He was into classical music, particularly Mozart, Rossini and Mendelssohn. Well, so picking up from him, I was into classical music; but it had to be Tchaikovsky or Wagner. Or Richard Strauss. And in those days, also, I was into science. I was going to be a nuclear physicist. This is when nuclear physics is being invented, back in the thirties.

In the final year of high school, the teacher who taught what’s called “Senior Problems” gave us all a test, an interest test. My interests were in music, not in the sciences. When I’m looking back on it, I thought the sciences were really great, especially if it exploded and made a loud bang, you know? I would make little gun powder things and make rockets and all this crap. But since my father said I was totally unmusical, because I couldn’t play the violin by ear, just starting off—

So this teacher and I became extremely involved.

Cándida Smith: This is your mentor?

01-00:06:35 Martin: Uh-huh. I ended up an art major. I was supposed to be a decorative art major, because, quote, “artists never make any money.” So I would be a dec art major. So I took the first-year architecture and the first-year dec art, and the first year art.

Cándida Smith: This is when you came to Berkeley?

01-00:07:02 Martin: Yeah.

Cándida Smith: Yeah.

01-00:07:04 Martin: Dec art was just not going anywhere.

Cándida Smith: That was interior design?

Martin: Yeah. Well, I was undergoing enormous, I suppose, emotional, moral, an existential crisis. And, well, there were artists whom I had discovered who had dealt with crisis issues, like Kandinsky and Franz Marc and those people. I decided that art could be a, magnificent, gigantic, hyper-romantic thing that I could do. So I dropped away from dec art, and took, then, the second-year art courses, which was color, and took Margaret O’Hagan and John Haley. And watching Margaret O’Hagan storm around, I realized that—I mean, this is totally sexist. Art is something a man can do. So that’s when I decided to be an art major.

Cándida Smith: Were there other options for you besides dec art? Did you think about literature? English? History?

01-00:08:54 Martin: Well, let’s talk about literature for a minute. Maybe I would be an English major. So I took English—whatever it was called—1A and English 1B. Those didn’t do anything for me. Then I took the second year, and we had to do Chaucer and Spenser. Well, those are the two I remember. And they totally

didn’t do anything for me. Then I took a course in poetry, from Josephine Miles, and that didn’t do anything for me. I just let that all fade away. However, when I came back to get my teaching credential, I had to put it back together and construct an English minor. Which I did do.

Cándida Smith: So you declare as an art major?

01-00:10:04 Martin: Right. I don’t know what that means, when you think about it. Because when I think administratively, what—When you’re this person, what is all that about? Who knows?

Cándida Smith: Did that, to you, mean at that time that, I’m going to be an artist?

01-00:10:20 Martin: Absolutely. And this is the great thing about my family. They never questioned these things. They had no background. They never even said, “That’s the stupidest thing I ever saw.” They never said anything. They were totally supportive. To do nothing is support. They just said, “Fred’s getting along.” It was just great.

Cándida Smith: Did you live on campus?

01-00:10:55 Martin: No, I lived at home, all the way through. Every day, three of us—four of us drove from East Oakland to campus. I usually came back on the bus, because we came back at all different times. But we drove over every day.

Cándida Smith: And who were the four of you?

01-00:11:17 Martin: Well, one was a guy who lived next door to me when we first moved to Oakland. Another was a friend of his, and another was a friend of his. And so we came to know each other very well, over those four years. Afterwards, we drifted in totally different directions.

Cándida Smith: I do want to survey your classes, but I’d also like to first get a sense of how your social life was developing, as an undergraduate. You’re not living on campus, so—Do you have a lot of connection with other students? Are you starting to go out and date and all those sorts of things?

01-00:11:59 Martin: Social life. Well, all right, here’s our car full of people. One of them is a good Catholic. It’s his car. The other two are totally involved with the Masonic club. That is their social life. Well, I’m not part of that. I, in one sense, had no social life. I was still involved with my mentor, in one way or another. I was involved with other art students, a couple of them. Jay [DeFeo], for instance; Sam Francis, for instance, a guy named Jack Head, who I never saw again, from those days; a guy named Rik Thompson, and a fellow named Bob Kaess.

That was it. But no, I didn’t go out on dates. Well, I guess twice. But no. I had been sent, when I first got there—What I now realize was a suggestion that I see about joining a fraternity. And well, I just didn’t know what that was, so I threw that away.

01-00:13:28 Although my father was a Mason, I always felt alienated from those people. I just had a different under-psychology or something. Anyway, people outside of the art department, I had nothing to do with them at all. And these guys I went back and forth to school with, yeah, sure, we saw each other all the time that way. But what you might call my soul life, they knew nothing about. And that was the way that was. So with Rik, for instance, or Bob Kaess, or Sam or Jay, yeah, we talked about our stuff. But with nobody else.

Cándida Smith: So if we could maybe start talking about some of the classes you took, and how the teachers functioned. I’d also, then, like to get a sense of your own conception of the art that you’re doing. So I take it you took Art 2A with Erle Loran.

01-00:14:52 Martin: Yes, I took Art 2A with Erle Loran. In my first semester.

Cándida Smith: And Art 2A was supposed to achieve what? What were the goals of that course?

01-00:15:04 Martin: He never said, but looking back on it, the goal was to—I’ll use the word train, although I don’t think he would use that word—educate, whatever, the student for an awareness of formal values, formal structure, formal order. The word is form. We were talking before about content, there isn’t any. The purpose of that course—and ultimately, I came to believe they felt, the purpose of art is is to organize the world visually. To organize the visual world. According to basic principles of spatial organization: the picture box, all that kind of stuff.

The issue is that in the year before that, I was just going through my existential adventures, and had gone to the local public library. Since I’m going to be an artist, well, I better read up on art. I got a book published by the Delphian Society, about modern art, and I read that. Now, in talking about that book, I can only see the part that mattered to me, which is only a couple pages. No, but the part that mattered had this piece about Faustian man, who will ever aspire and never be satisfied; and a piece about Kandinsky. I just took off on that. So I land in Erle’s class, and well, that’s not his thing at all! The things he tried to get us to do and tried to get us to see, I kind of crashed my way through that. The one I remember was we were going to do cross- hatching. So I made a cubist figure, cross-hatched. At the end of all that, I got a C. And as I said in those notes, well, it proved my belief that he was an asshole. So that ended that.

Cándida Smith: Now, this is the class where you start by setting up a still life?

01-00:17:50 Martin: He always had still lifes, yeah.

Cándida Smith: Uh-huh.

Martin: Yeah.

Cándida Smith: And then you had graded—

Martin: It’s a very carefully sequenced lessons. Which, you know, I do now, when I teach. Some of those lessons. However, anyway.

Cándida Smith: But that’s interesting to me, that you have returned to that kind of analytic approach. I say that’s interesting, because I know that DeFeo, when she was going through her crisis in the early seventies, went back and worked through the Art 2A sequence. And Pat Adams did something similar.

01-00:18:39 Martin: I do it because—You know, why do I do it? First of all, with teaching, I find that there’re two ways of teaching art. One is, “Oh, you’re all so creative; do something, and I’ll tell you if I like it.” The other is that I think the students feel better, most of them, if you say…“Okay—” I learned this when I was getting my teaching credential. The guy that was teaching English said—and he was teaching us how to teach English—“Teaching is a transitive verb. I- Teach-You-This. I’m taking this and giving it to you.” And students, I think, feel better. They’re getting something. Maybe they didn’t like it, which, what we did yesterday, they didn’t like, but just the same, they knew what it was. I could demonstrate it. I could even, yesterday, go around and mark on their drawings, pointing out, “There’s no soul in this drawing. We’re just adding two plus two and getting four. Well, you got five. Look, that’s where you got the five.” So I did learn that. I use some of Erle’s exercises now. Except the difference is we are going to do vanishing point perspective, which he denounced as a heresy and a sin and should never have happened. But we’re going to do that next week. Anyway.

Cándida Smith: So this is the famous “Bring it all back to the surface”?

01-00:20:23 Martin: Yes. The picture plane. And the picture box. Picture plane and picture box.

Cándida Smith: Was it only Loran, or—?

01-00:20:39 Martin: Well, after that, I had Ray Boynton. I didn’t get anything out of that at all. What I think he was doing—I think he was doing—and this is—You should ask him. Anyway, we used a Chinese brush and newsprint. And one of those

god damn Chinese ink sticks. We would basically make Matisses in black and white. We were supposed to learn about texture, making different textures. I just got nothing out of that. Except using a Chinese brush. I didn’t think I was getting anything there, either; but afterwards, I used Chinese brushes on and off a lot.

Cándida Smith: Did you study at all with [Chiura] Obata?

01-00:21:45 Martin: No, I never did. I know it’s a heresy, but his stuff is bland. It’s just bland. He may be wonderful. I knew his daughter. It’s bland. So I never did. I never did. But of course, that came to be one of my big issues there. Blandness. The whole damn place was bland, as far as I was concerned.

Boynton was a really nice man, who was just washed up on the beach. He had been, really, a major artist in the twenties. The Mills College music concert hall has his murals all around, that he did. We have at SFAI [San Francisco Art Institute], the sort of consecrating mural he painted for the 1927 (or whatever it is) building. But by the time he was in Berkeley, he is this nice man in a suit and a tie, and a cigarette, and the ashes falling on his tie. That’s all I remember of him.

Cándida Smith: Were you aware that he was, in some ways, on the losing side of an internal department struggle?

01-00:23:33 Martin: No, I had no idea. No. But that would explain a lot.

Cándida Smith: And the battle between the modernists and the traditionalist, with Ryder being, the head of the modernists, and—

01-00:23:51 Martin: And Ray not?

Cándida Smith: No.

Martin: Not modern?

Cándida Smith: No.

01-00:23:57 Martin: Oh, well. We haven’t talked about Eugene Neuhaus, either, whom I never did have a course from. As far as the battle was concerned, I thought that’s where the battle was.

Anyway, so then after that, in the summer of my—between freshman and sophomore years, I got a job at Gump’s, in the silver department. I saw a show of Marsden Hartley and Lyonel Feininger.

Cándida Smith: At Gump’s, right? Or it was at the museum?

01-00:24:44 Martin: I’ve mixed my time. That was in the summer of ’45. The museum had moved into a big space at the St. Francis Hotel. To put on shows. And they’d borrowed this show from the Museum of Modern Art in New York. They put on that show. I really thought that Feininger was my answer to everything. So I spent the summer making Lyonel Feininger watercolors of clouds over San Francisco Bay, that I could see on the train, going back and forth to work at Gump’s.

01-00:24:24 Anyway, when I came back, then I had, in my second year, Margaret O’Hagan for color. And that’s when I decided art was something I could really do. Then I had John Haley, and that, once again, was bland, bland, bland.

Cándida Smith: If we could go back to Hagan, and how did her teaching style compare to Loran’s and Boynton’s? How did she set up problems for you?

01-00:26:08 Martin: Well, she started off, we had to buy every available color of watercolor. In those days, they were twenty-five cents a tube, so it wasn’t so terribly impossible. There were twelve or fifteen different pigments. Then we had to take a sheet of paper and paint a solid color of each one on each sheet. And then we had to take every other color, and paint it onto that, and see what color and shape did with each other. It was terrific. I didn’t know much about it at the time, I just did it. But it left me making abstract shapes that meant something. Or not. But I hadn’t thought about it till this instance, in that sense. It’s the first step of colored biomorphic abstraction. Or whatever you wanted to do. You could make any kind of shape. But you’re going to find out what yellow ochre does on top of cad red light. That this shape does it that way, and that shape does it in another. And if you’re near green, it’s this way; and if you’re near blue, it’s that way. So it was really good. After that, we did synthetic or flat pattern cubism. And that was that. She set up a still life and that’s what we did. And she had still life stuff—and old Victorian table that looked like a Picasso painting, and we made Picassos, all right? And if you didn’t make Picassos, well, you didn’t get knuckles, but you knew what you were supposed to do. You better do it. She had this presence. You know, she stormed around the room, and she was imperious.

Cándida Smith: Maybe you could compare Hagan and Loran’s style of critique.

01-00:28:25 Martin: [whispers] God! All right, the word critique raises all kinds of issues. You mean, like a formal critique, we all put our work up and she goes from thing to thing to thing to thing?

Cándida Smith: There’s that. There’s also walking through the room . Does the teacher pick up a piece of charcoal and draw on—?

01-00:28:45 Martin: And make a mark? Yeah, like I did yesterday with marking pens on everybody’s charcoal drawing. She would walk around the room and talk about your stuff. She never marked on it. Erle, I think we had formal critiques, but I rightly don’t recall. I know in the dec art ones that we did, we did have— we put everything up, and the teacher said, “This is good, and that’s not so good.”

Cándida Smith: Who did you study dec art with? Do you recall?

01-00:29:21 Martin: Lucretia Nelson. I think her name was. I’m not sure. And then as I said, I just never took another course there.

Cándida Smith: Was there a difference in intellectual charge between the two departments?

01-00:29:45 Martin: Hey, listen. I’m a freshman, I don’t know. I’m too busy stewing about my English essay and my paleontology course, and my eighteen units, to notice any of that stuff. I took eighteen units in my second semester. And in a way, that totally turned me on. I noticed, ever since then. I mean, I got to be real busy. Or there’s something wrong. So—I just—anyway, so I just switched to the art department, because I was going to make art. I was going to be a hero artist, I was going to make the great masterpieces. We aspire to the heights. And they did not aspire to the heights there, that’s all there was to it.

Cándida Smith: OK, who were the hero artists for you, at that time?

01-00:30:38 Martin: At that particular time, it was Kandinsky and Albert Ryder.

Cándida Smith: Albert Pinkham Ryder?

01-00:30:45 Martin: Yes. Because my mother had a subscription to the Ladies’ Home Journal when I was in high school. John Walker, who at that time, I think, was head of the National Gallery, he would pick a painting per month. He picked two Albert Ryders. I thought those were just great. So when I got to Berkeley, I had them framed, and I hung them up in my room, and all that stuff. Who else would there be? That was kind of it, as far as artists were concerned.

Cándida Smith: So it wasn’t Picasso.

01-00:31:25 Martin: No. Never has been Picasso, and it never has been Matisse. It never has been French. Although that was later, I got very involved in German romanticism.

But I didn’t even know that existed when I was a freshman and a sophomore. I did get involved in romantic literature. I don’t know why. I went to the library, and I looked up romantic in the card catalogue. I just read everything, sort of trudging through the card catalogue. Lots of it I didn’t understand or couldn’t get, but I just sort of loaded up on that stuff. And loaded up on the hero artist idea.

Cándida Smith: OK. Well, let’s get back to O’Hagan’s style of critique.

01-00:32:32 Martin: What I recall was that she would walk around and look at our stuff like so. We probably did put them all up on the wall at one point. I don’t remember that. The thing I remember about her style of critique, I didn’t witness. My first wife did, because she was also in the class.

Cándida Smith: And your first wife, her name was—?

01-00:32:59 Martin: At that time, Jean Fisette. But she was not in the same section of the class that I was. Anyway, Jean told me afterwards that her experience with Margaret O’Hagan was that—Jean was sitting there talking to the guy sitting next to her, and from the other side of the room, Professor O’Hagan says, “Miss Fisette, take your love life outside.” So you’re going to do what we’re doing here, or you’re going to get the hell out of here. And it made a great impression on me. That this is serious stuff. It isn’t dilettante, it’s serious. Now, looking at the total situation, however, of the actual students that are there, the serious ones are very, very few. You know, they’re all doing— there’s the pre-dental student, there’s everybody else. There’re very few serious ones there. But she ran it serious. And well, that was that.

Cándida Smith: I’m thinking of comparing Loran and O’Hagan at this point, and since you’re taking an art history class with Worth Ryder—on the mythos of art, the hero artist, as the three of them presented it.

01-00:33:29 Martin: Well, Margaret had it. Erle didn’t. I didn’t see enough of Worth Ryder to know. He was this—there’s a lecture class. It’s a large room. I’m not interested. I can blame him; he didn’t interest me. Anyway, I wasn’t interested.

Cándida Smith: So he’s just showing slides—

Martin: He’s showing slides

Cándida Smith: —and talking.

01-00:34:51 Martin: And talking. And one time, he played the “Bells of Florence.” I thought, This is the dumbest thing I ever saw. But now I do it. So, oops. But it is in Florence. We’ll use Tibetan chants, or we’ll use some damn stupid thing or other. I think I said in my piece he had had a profound experience. He’s sharing this with his students. I don’t think they’re getting it. I sure didn’t get it. I was sensing around the room, nobody was paying any attention anyway. Since then, most of my teaching career was large lecture classes.

Cándida Smith: Teaching art history?

01-00:35:42 Martin: Yeah. All the way through the Art Institute, all the time I was administering there, I always taught the first year art history class. Everyone must take this class. Unless they’d already had a first year art history. So that I could plant the ethos of the school, and so they would know who I was. So if they got something to complain about, they know who it is. And they—I had, I think, a very good relation to the students.

01-00:36:16 Now, sure, there’s a hundred people here. But they did know what I believed. And also, I would have them write letters to me. I’d do this for a year, and then not do it. But, “You write me a letter, and tell me what you thought of the lecture. And besides that, what the hell happened today? What’d you do this week? How’d it work out? What’s life like?” As an administrator, I learned enormously about how things are going, and mistakes we’re making that we don’t even know, and that it’s perfect hell being an art student. Especially there. There’s no place to live. And you can’t live at home, either! So, oh, I learned a lot. But back there in Berkeley—

01-00:37:11 Anyway, if I were to try to describe those four—Erle, Ray Boynton, Margaret O’Hagan and John Haley—Erle would be—Well, Olympian is not—he wasn’t Olympian, but he was aloof-ish and better-ish and nice, all at the same time. Bonyton was a fuddy-duddy old man. Margaret was a fireball. And John Haley, he was nice, but nothing. Now, you see, you’re just listening to a sophomore, who doesn’t know nothing anyway. But those were my feelings. And what was happening inside of me, as far as art was concerned, they hadn’t the foggiest idea! None.

Cándida Smith: Did they care?

01-00:38:28 Martin: No. No. Now that you asked that, no. Now, that’s one of the issues. That’s what I learned. So when I teach, I care. I want to know what this stuff is about. What’s going on inside of you?

Cándida Smith: Worth Ryder, in one of his lectures, does talk about knocking the “romantic subjectivity” out of the Berkeley students.

01-00:38:56 Martin: OK, fine. He wasn’t going to knock it out of me! He never had the chance. Yeah, I know.

Cándida Smith: But I also—I mean, people have told me that O’Hagan talked about the artist as god and goddess.

01-00:39:21 Martin: Well, I never heard that one, but—OK.

Cándida Smith: And there is an interview that CBC, Canadian Broadcasting, did with her in the eighties, when she was living in British Columbia, where she does talk about the artist as a god and goddess. The only thing that we have left of gods and goddesses. So she didn’t talk like that in the classroom?

01-00:39:45 Martin: I never heard it. Let’s put it that way. No. What I got from here was that color matters. That’s what I got from her. And that art matters. And that was that.

Cándida Smith: Well, what did your art look like?

01-00:40:10 Martin: What it looked like in Erle’s class is what we were supposed to be doing, I guess. What it looked like in Ray Boynton’s class was just, I don’t know, fumbling around with a Chinese brush, making still lifes. I have no visual recollection of them. In Margaret’s class, I told you it was those colored things. And then I made a still life. It was a round table that half of—it was cut it half, it hung down straight, and it had a big yellow, and she liked the big yellow.

Cándida Smith: Why?

01-00:40:48 Martin: Why did she like it? ’Cause it was bright, I think. At least, that’s what I got out of it. I got to get this straight. So then we come to—would be the spring semester of my sophomore year. And in a way, that’s when my own art starts. I had been to lunch with some of my mentor’s very intellectual graduate student friends.

Cándida Smith: Your high school mentor.

01-00:41:39 Martin: Whom I still saw every weekend. And they were so smart, and I was so stupid. And I’m just this little boy and, these really, hotshot grad students. And Khachaturian’s “Saber Dance” was on juke boxes everywhere right then, and I could hear this thing in my head, although it wasn’t being played. Which is all that pounding, and all those people, and I just left. In those days, the art department had a basement, the locker room, which was about as big as this dining room, but anyway—Maybe a little bigger, but not as big as the main

floor of this house, by far. Anyway, and there was a table there, a drawing table, where I would sometimes just go and paint. So I got my Ray Boynton paintbrush, Chinese brush, my Ray Boynton sumi stick, my Ray Boynton newsprint, and just started painting. And made this thing of a stick figure male, with enormous genitals, battling a giant snake. I just had this huge up- rush of—

01-00:43:11 So I didn’t know what to do with that. But it was real strong. A very powerful experience for me. And not the kind of thing we certainly did at Berkeley. So I just filed that away under interesting experiences, and then proceeded trudging along with John Haley’s class, where we were making watercolors by putting a little wash over a little wash, and we had this still life with a little boot in it and I was just making this thing. That’s the one I remember. And he had a way. We did have critiques. You put your stuff up. And he has a little chart that has line, texture, value, color, and space organization, I guess, running down this way, and this one, two, three, four, five across this way, and he puts a check mark for each thing, according to what you have in your painting. Is the line good? Is it a five, or is it a one? All right, anyway. Those were the critiques with John Haley.

Cándida Smith: Did he explain?

01-00:44:35 Martin: I don’t remember. I really don’t remember. He must have said something. But he never was a talker. Anyway, so that got to be over. And that summer, I spent the summer walking around up in the hills, which are now kind of built up, but weren’t then, and drawing. Making charcoal drawings of the hills and the forests, and rolling around in the grass and all that stuff. And then one night I came back, and I made another painting like the guy fighting the snake, except this one was completely abstract. It was just me having a Eros fit with the hills and the grass or some damn thing. It was a little watercolor about this big. And that, in effect, set me.

Cándida Smith: Were these representational?

01-00:45:39 Martin: No. Not at all. The guy with the snake was kind of representational, but the second one wasn’t representational at all.

Cándida Smith: So it would—somebody just coming across it would think that it’s a form of biomorphic abstraction, or—? Or not even?

01-00:46:00 Martin: They’d think of it as a form of mess, OK?

Cándida Smith: Well—

01-00:46:11 Martin: Actually—Then, however—This goes, in a sense, to social lives, in a way. Anyway, and my whole attitude toward the department. So now I’m going to be a junior. Well, this bunch of nothings around here. You know, it’s just— I’m just not going to go to class. I don’t need this. I will paint at home. So I got the garden shed in our backyard sort of cleaned out of the tools, and I painted at home. I took Glenn Wessels and Henry Schaeffer Zimmern. I don’t understand it. I did paint at home. Glenn let me do this, so long as I brought something in. I brought something in every week. I did that for two years. With Schaeffer Zimmern, I painted in class. I didn’t know what he was talking about.

Cándida Smith: Did you read his book?

01-00:47:34 Martin: No. Nor did I read Erle’s book. I finally did get Erle’s book. I did look through it. I finally did get Schaffer Zimmern’s book. I never did read it. And somehow, I’ve lost it. I don’t know how. Anyway, so he—I was making an Albert Pinkham Ryder painting of clouds, and he just—He was a very large, heavy man. Yesterday I gave a lecture about Max Beckmann. Max Beckmann and Henry Schaeffer Zimmern had a lot in common. Not I that I read—I never read Max Beckmann’s remarks about himself. Anyway, they had a lot in common. Including their—[grunts]. Well, anyway, Schaeffer Zimmern sits down beside me on this stool, starts jumping up and down and: “Look at the whole painting.” And the stool breaks underneath him, and he tells me to, “Get out of here, and don’t come back until you can see the whole thing.” So I just left. I went to Bolinas. Walked out—These scratchy little pictures of the Bolinas Reef, standing on the reef. And I came back. And I worked out a way of using a palette knife that sort of made planes of color.

Cándida Smith: Were you physically building up the paint?

01-00:49:20 Martin: Yeah. And I did a painting of the Faculty Glade, which seemed to be OK. Anyway, he didn’t make a issue out of it.

Cándida Smith: Was that your innovation? Or was palette knife technique being taught in any of the classes?

01-00:49:42 Martin: They didn’t teach any technique in any class. Uh-uh. So far as I remember. Margaret O’Hagan did teach us how to use tempera. How to mix egg and oil and water, how to use dry pigment, how to grind them together. She taught us how to do that. I did, totally unknown to her or anybody, make perhaps hundreds of paintings on newspapers, using that tempera, and using her cubistic stuff. Actually, I made—That’s true. All the time in John Haley’s class, I’m making these tempera on old newspapers. Anyway, no, nobody taught us anything about anything. Nowadays, they have a methods and

materials course. As I recall, in those days, they did not have that. I taught methods and materials when I went back there to teach. I was really gung-ho and, “All right, now we’re going to make our own pastels, we’re going to—” Well, nobody wants to do that, either. “Furthermore, we’re going to be here three days a week.” Well, nobody wants to do that!

01-00:51:04 “But wait a minute, it says here Monday, Wednesday, Friday or Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. We’re going to meet on Saturday, or we’ll never get through the curriculum.” Well, that was a no-no, because the faculty is not here on the third day. “I’m sorry, that’s the way the credits are billed. You’re supposed to be there.” So that was another thing that we didn’t agree about. But back to—no, nobody ever taught me any technique there at all.

Cándida Smith: But you played with brushes, you played with the palette knife, and—

01-00:51:40 Martin: Yeah. Yeah. And the palette knife, the idea was you can put one layer over another, and you don’t have to wait so long for it to dry. If you’re careful. And so I made a couple of palette knife paintings. Though see, basically, I do work alone. By do, I mean putting myself into the present sense of then. I worked alone.

Cándida Smith: At home.

01-00:52:24 Martin: At home. I did not work in class. I don’t know what they were doing. And listen, I had this hubris about up to here. I didn’t give a shit what they were doing, either. Whatever it was, it wasn’t worth doing; to hell with them. Just like that. That was my whole attitude. And there were a couple of others. You know, we shared this attitude, so this must be the way things are; there’re five of us that agree.

Cándida Smith: And you all thought that you were going to—you knew you were going to be artists.

01-00:52:52 Martin: That was it. We were going to be artists. And those girls were going to marry somebody, and those guys were going to get a job in an insurance company. So to hell with them.

Cándida Smith: Were there ideas that you wanted to convey through you art, or that Sam Francis or Jay DeFeo or—?

01-00:53:19 Martin: We never talked—we never really talked about ideas. We never did.

Cándida Smith: Was it always form? Did it always come back to form and the feelings form inspired?

01-00:53:37 Martin: It’s—you know. This is weird. You’d have to ask them, and they’re not here. We didn’t talk about it. We just liked each other. And we liked each other’s stuff. We didn’t talk about it. “Hey, that’s a great painting.” That’s all we ever did. The last thing we would talk about was form or stuff like that. We didn’t.

Cándida Smith: Much less ideas.

01-00:54:01 Martin: Much less ideas. Like, what’s an idea? What is an idea? The way things are taught today. Ideas? Huh? What’s an idea? We never talked that way, thought that way.

Cándida Smith: Did you go to museum shows or gallery shows—

Martin: Yes, we did, we—

Cándida Smith: —together?

01-00:54:22 Martin: No, not together. Or once in a while, accidentally. But it would be just sheer coincidence. No, we didn’t go together. I did, with my friend Rik, go see a Dick [Richard] Diebenkorn show, after Berkeley—must’ve been in ’51 or ’52—that was really powerful.

Cándida Smith: This is still the abstract.

01-00:54:47 Martin: That’s right, yes, yeah. Yeah, and I thought at that time they were really good. But basically, no, we never went to—And we didn’t even share who our favorite artists were, you know. Sam’s favorite artists, I don’t know who they were. We just liked each other. And liked each other’s paintings, that was all there was to it.

Cándida Smith: DeFeo’s artists were Morandi and Rouault. You didn’t know that?

01-00:55:21 Martin: No, I didn’t. At that time, they were? Well, Morandi was pretty far over there in the not-heard-of-much. And the only Rouault I ever saw was a couple in a book. I tried that once or twice, and it didn’t do anything for me. I did try it, though. I was operating, essentially, out of what might be called first- generation abstract expressionism, which wasn’t even quite invented yet. But we were coming up out of our souls or out of our psyches, or whatever the hell, and just—Yes, that romantic subjectivism was not beaten out of me. Instead, it was just like that.

Cándida Smith: So how many New York paintings were you able to see?

01-00:56:17 Martin: I saw a one-person show of Jackson Pollock. Grace Morley, the director then, she brought in this Jackson Pollock show, which must’ve been in ’48 or something like that; and an Adolph Gottlieb show. And, come on, what’s his name? The Armenian guy.

Cándida Smith: Oh, [Arshile] Gorky.

01-00:56:50 Martin: Gorky. A Gorky show. Now, all of these were before they hit their big time. The Gottlieb show was when he was gridding symbols. I made a couple of those. The Gorky show, he was using thick paint. Completely unlike the stuff that’s, you know, his great hero period. I got out of that, thick paint and stuff. I didn’t get anything out of the Pollock show. Except that geez, these things feel hot! That’s what I remember feeling. I—the drippy bit, that never did anything for me at all. But the sheer hotness of it, that did. Anyway, those are the three shows that I saw. I saw a one-person show of Erle Loran. Must’ve been in ’48 or ’49. I remember one of the paintings, which had a subject. It was the Lady of Shallot. And it was big, too. That’s about it.

Cándida Smith: You didn’t see much of your teachers’ work, then?

01-00:58:16 Martin: No. They had, once, at the start of school, or the start of the semester, a little show. I saw a James McCray geometric abstraction. I never saw any of their work. I saw some of Glenn Wessels.’ Must’ve been when I was back in my MA. I don’t remember seeing anything when I was an undergrad. Margaret O’Hagan had one in an annual exhibition at the museum. I saw that one. That is still, to me, the primary painting representing her, is that painting I saw way back then. I think they still have it in their collection, I’m not sure.

Cándida Smith: In the Berkeley Art Museum?

01-00:59:10 Martin: No, San Francisco.

Cándida Smith: Oh, San Francisco.

01-00:59:13 Martin: No, the Berkeley Art Museum didn’t exist. Anyway, no.

Cándida Smith: So most of the work you were looking at was the work of other students, then. To the degree that you were looking.

01-00:59:27 Martin: No, I was looking at the work of Kandinsky, in the book of Kandinsky that I’d bought.

Cándida Smith: So you spent a lot of time looking at books then?

01-00:59:34 Martin: And reading. And looking at art books. You know, there weren’t very many art books in those days, either. It isn’t like it is now. There really weren’t. So I had my Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, the book I still have; and I had my Kandinsky Point and Line to Plane, which I sort of struggled with, but didn’t get very much out of, truly. I had—novels.

Cándida Smith: Oftentimes, reproductions, actually, I find sometimes look—well, look better than the original.

01-00:10:18 Martin: They’re brighter, anyway. Or often, they are.

Cándida Smith: It’s a very strange of way of absorbing—

01-00:60:26 Martin: Well, there wasn’t anything. You’ve got to get back to 1947 and ’48. There isn’t anything. The San Francisco Museum of Art has shows. There was a show that I got a lot out of there. That must’ve been—was probably in ’48, that had David Park and Hassel Smith.

[Begin Audio File Martin, Fred 02 09-14-05.wav]

02-00:00:02 Cándida Smith: I’d like to move on to the David Park class. So you saw a show of CSFA faculty in 1948?

02-00:00:15 Martin: It must’ve been in the spring of ’48.

Cándida Smith: And then you took a class with David Park.

02-00:00:19 Martin: From David, who was there in the summer.

Cándida Smith: Right. At Berkeley.

02-00:00:22 Martin: Yeah.

Cándida Smith: So is that your first inkling of the difference between the CSFA and the Berkeley approaches to art?

02-00:00:33 Martin: I’m not sure. Glenn had told me—and I don’t remember when; it might’ve been that same spring, of ‘48—that I should go over to CSFA and see what’s going on over there. I didn’t, you know—Once again, you’ve got this person, this student, whose background is, like, this big; and who doesn’t, when something is said to him from one larger perspective, from his smaller, right? He doesn’t know what that’s about. Glenn told me to do two things that I

didn’t really understand. That was one of them. Anyway, I should go over there, see what’s going on. I went over there, and I didn’t see anything going on, except some paintings hanging in the patio, blowing in the wind. So I went home again.

02-00:01:37 The other thing he told me—In those days, there was an art festival in Union Square. And it was run by Artists Equity. And he told me I should go over there and volunteer. Now see, he wants to involve me in the art world. I didn’t recognize this. So I went over there, and this little boy wanders around, and wanders away. Anyway, Glenn was very good that way. So I don’t know if he was the one who suggested I take David or not. But anyway, so I took David. And by that time, I am making what amount to abstract expressionist paintings.

Cándida Smith: Did you call them that?

02-00:02:30 Martin: The word hadn’t been invented. As far as I know. I certainly had never heard it. By ’49 and ’50, maybe Thomas Hess had invented the term. But I had no term. All I know is these are the paintings I’m making. And they come out of projected imagery. You know, they’re also Rorschach blocks, except you’re painting them while making them. That’s basically what they were. I showed them to Glenn. Once a week, I have a new one, and he gives it a Hans Hofmann critique, in about ten seconds. But—

Cándida Smith: Which is? Maybe you could explicate that for us.

02-00:03:19 Martin: Well, he tells me about the lines and the planes, and how I’d used these lines to make these planes, and—“I had?” You know. Well, is that what I did? I didn’t know. I was making this figure that’s doing something. All right, this is the fundamental issue with the department. I’m making things. These shapes have names. Now, they don’t know the names. Partly because they’re too obscene to tell them; partly because they’re too upsetting to me to tell them; also because I’m coming out, by now, out of a completely different world. By then, I’d been floating around through Taoism, which my mentor involved me with. Told me I should read the Tao Te Ching. Then I had read Romain Rolland, Jean Christophe. That’s the way us artists are going to be. And then that led me to reading Rolland’s things of the thirties. And that led me to Ramakrishna. And that led me to the Vedanta Society, and all that kind of stuff. And—I’m sorry, the Berkeley faculty, they just never heard of it. They just hadn’t heard of it.

02-00:05:00 That whole—I hate to use the word spiritualism. Putrid word. But the spiritual world, they had never—Or if they had, they never talked about it. It did not exist. As you said, that was beaten out. So I’m coming out of there. I had a course in Chinese poetry. Which I learned from, first of all, that I loved

certain Chinese poems; and that I—When—I guess it was Taoyuan Ming says, “The roses are on the Eastern fence,” you affirm the—you don’t tell people what to think, you affirm what is there; and then they think. {inaudible}. I took a course in Chinese philosophy, taught by a man from the University of Beijing. This is in the spring of 1949. I wonder what happened to him afterwards, when he went back. ’Cause he went back to China. So I’m coming out of all of that. And out of romantic literature. So anyhow—

Cándida Smith: And what is art supposed to manifest in this scheme?

02-00:06:37 Martin: It’s supposed to manifest the great high ideals, and we’re climbing to the horizon, and looking across the sunset to eternity and things like that, OK? I mean, well, they’re not doing that. So we don’t talk much. But Glenn does give me a formal critique every week. I go see Jim McCray every week and get emotional support. No, he never critiqued my paintings at all. But he was coming, in a way, since he’d been over there at CSFA, he was—he was in a mixed milieu. He’d been in that milieu, and now he’s at Berkeley. I was told he was there, because he was their prized student in the thirties or something. I don’t really know. Another person told me, a student told me that. So I don’t know what that was about. But anyway—

Cándida Smith: So when you’re exposed to the CSFA approach, both in terms of the work and in terms of Park as a teacher—

02-00:07:43 Martin: Well, here we go back to [CSFA]. So I went over there and looked at the paintings blowing around on the wall, and there’s nobody home, and the place is deserted, and I walk away. Then—I take the class from David. And well, there’s a human connection. Now, I have a human connection with Glenn and with Jim McCray, but it’s a different kind of human connection with David. I don’t know how to describe it. Well, thinking about it at the moment, it’s like a colleague. Sure, it’s a very much more knowledgeable colleague, but it’s like a colleague. Whereas the others were like a professor. And that word is going to be there. They were professors.

Cándida Smith: And Park is a painter?

02-00:08:46 Martin: And Park is a painter. Yeah. And they’re professors, and that’s Professor Wessels and Professor McCray. And this David. And well, that’s David. The difference was very—somehow. So then he’s gone. I’m back there with Wessels and McCray, still painting on and on. And when spring came, I talked my parents into letting me take a night course at CSFA, with David Park. Again, this is the support issue, that they let me do this. Looking back, it’s amazing. They had no art background whatsoever. The pictures in our living room were a sunset in Venice, of the calendar type, painted sometime in the 1920s.

Cándida Smith: An actual painting, or a reproduction?

02-00:09:56 Martin: No, no, it was a reproduction. And a reproduction of a Monet that I made them buy, because I liked the way the beach scene with the clouds was. Anyway, they had no idea. But anyway, so they let me do this. So I went over there. It would’ve been two nights a week. While in Berkeley, with Glenn and with McCray, doing my Chinese philosophy course and my Chinese Buddhism course—And sitting in on Mark Schorer’s Modern English Literature. Those were the things I did in my final semester. While I’m with David—This is going to get into teaching, because teaching somebody something—he didn’t teach me much. In fact, he set me up. Here’s the night class. They’re over there in that other room, I’m over in a different room, all by myself. There was one guy there sometimes, but we were separated. And David came in a couple times, and we talked about being an artist. Not about painting. We talked about human beings, as human beings, in this together. And it was very profoundly supportive. So he did explain one or two formal things, like when you can’t think of what else to do, pick the part of the painting you like and paint everything else out. So I—this goes right with having large empty spaces in Chinese paintings, sure. So I still do that a lot. Anyway, but—

Cándida Smith: But isn’t scraping back the painting a normal part of the work process?

02-00:12:03 Martin: Yeah. Sure. But I mean, this is scraping back all of it except this much. So I want to bring back up, though, back to when I was a junior. It would’ve been in that same spring of ’48. And scraping back, we could call it, pushing the paint around, not with my palette knife. And not making planes of color for landscapes, but making things. I finally—somehow or other, my eyes finally changed, so I could see what Schaffer Zimmern was talking about with, “See the whole painting.” I could see it all at once. Top to bottom, left to right, in a single seeing. And the organic-ness of forms clearing and whatever. Anyway, and I pushed the paint around, I pushed it around, until this image came. And see, now, I’ve also been reading Jung. Although there wasn’t much to read lying around, but I’d read some of that, and—So I made this thing with sort of a male-ish and a female-ish figure, and a kind of a sun, and a sunflower, and a star. I brought that into Glenn, and he really liked it, and he put it up in the hall. Well, now I had arrived. I got put up in the hall! Oh, boy! And in that building, the stairs went like this. There was no way you could not see my painting. But—

Cándida Smith: Did he appreciate the emotions, the ideas in the work? Or was—had you achieved some sort of formal organization?

02-00:14:03 Martin: I had achieved a formal organization. He never talked about content. I don’t know what I would’ve done if he’d asked me. He never talked about content.

Cándida Smith: But you had a content.

02-00:14:14 Martin: Oh, I had a content. I always had a content. And that also led, in some respects, to writing. Since they don’t know what it is, I better write it out. Well, that’s literature, and that means that the painting hasn’t succeeded. Well, that only meant that they were coming from a different cultural background. They could never, they could never know what it was. They had no background. The background that they had, that I was given to believe from what they taught, started with Giotto and ended with Cézanne, and Picasso got in there. That was it. Well, I’m coming out of the Germans. They don’t exist. Paris is it. And as far as from Giotto to Cézanne, don’t bring up Michelangelo! Or anybody else in between. So—

Cándida Smith: So no Poussin?

02-00:15:26 Martin: Hah.

Cándida Smith: Claude Lorrain?

02-00:15:27 Martin: Hah. No. I got very involved with all those people, long later. I never heard of them. How did I get involved with—? Sure. I got involved with them, because I got involved somehow with Roman art, and with Arcadia. That led me to Claude Lorrain and Poussin. I’ll have to say it—the education we received, the art education, viewed from today, was pathetic. However, I’ll have to say, that the amount of units that were available to teach it in, you wouldn’t be able to teach most of this stuff anyway; you’d never have time.

02-00:16:32 Or it would be just a slide going by with a date, which doesn’t connect to anything. Nowadays, I believe—though I haven’t taken the courses—that the art education is equally, probably, as narrow. It’s just a different narrow. It happened to me that when I went to work at the Art Institute, in 1958, Wally Hedrick, Jay DeFeo’s husband, was running the night school at the Art Institute. He had Kenneth Rexroth teaching a course in world art history. Well, Kenneth pulled out of that after a month, and Wally asked me to do it. So all it was, I have to go and learn world art history. Which I did, and I’ve been doing it ever since.

Cándida Smith: Prior to that, you maintain that what you knew was Giotto and Cézanne.

02-00:17:34 Martin: No, I knew I didn’t know them, and I didn’t care, either.

Cándida Smith: Well, was there any discussion of prehistoric or primitive art?

02-00:17:44 Martin: No. Oh, I did take the Oriental Art course from Otto Maenchen [-Helfen]. Which, again, I took it because I was just really into Oriental right then, taking these Chinese philosophy and poetry and stuff like that courses. So I took that course.

Cándida Smith: And he was an art historian.

02-00:18:07 Martin: He was an art historian, a German art historian. I got these scattered scraps. Here’s another problem. You know, we have what’s called the university prints. Do you remember those? Well, they are probably five-by-seven, and they’re black and white prints. They come in a little box, and here’s fifty or a hundred black and white prints of Chinese bronzes in China. And there’s nothing there. There’s the name of the thing, the date, and a picture of it. It doesn’t mean anything. But my mentor had given me a book, the catalogue of the Burlington Chinese exhibition of 1937 or something. It had some color plates. There was one in there of a Tang vase that I just thought—I learned from looking at that Tang vase the way the color and pigment and substance fuse into a thing. I mean, that’s where I learned it. Not from Berkeley. They never talked that way. Albert Ryder, I always told them, I said, “Albert Ryder said, ‘A blob of paint will do for the robe of Miranda, if she’s in the blob.’” Well, that’s true. That’s painting. That isn’t what they did. They did forms.

02-00:19:43 Miranda wasn’t there. So a last point about that. For reasons of art politics, we have the Delta Upsilon Art Society—or is it Epsilon? I don’t remember. Art Society. There’s going to be an alumni exhibition. The Art Society’s supposed to organize it. Well, there was this guy who wanted to be the president of the Art Society, so we all elected him president. Well, after a couple months, he doesn’t want to be, and he disappears. For some reason, I become president of the Art Society. Well, that person’s job is to organize the alumni show, in the old Power House art gallery. I don’t know, that building is still there?

Cándida Smith: Yeah, the building is still there, yes.

02-00:20:44 Martin: That was the art gallery. All right. So I’m supposed to do this. I made clear my attitude. Sam Francis and I, and this guy Jack Head. I’m the organizer of the show, and we do the installation. I’m deciding where things go. But I think most of this stuff is just, oh dear. So the week before the show opens, Sam and our friend and I get in my back yard, and we get four-by-eight sheets of Masonite and poster paint, and we each paint gigantic abstract paintings. We install those in such a way so when you enter the show, that’s all you can see. You can’t see the other alumni; you can only see us. And we’re not even alumni, incidentally. Well, so afterwards, I’m told that there was a great one of those faculty storms, and the administration hated it, and the dec art

department, who’s supposed to be in charge of that building is upset because we did this thing. Rat-a-rat-a. I graduated, and that was the end of that.

Cándida Smith: Now, I notice that you wind up primarily working with Wessels and McCray at the end. You seem to take them term after term—at the end. Was there a reason why you settled in on them? And is it safe to say they were your mentors?

02-00:22:42 Martin: Sure. I would sign up—and we had what was called independent study or directed—something like that, where not only would I not go to class, now I didn’t have to go to class. I would just sign up for those. Yeah, they were. Sure. They gave me support. They did not—Well, also Glenn, the issue was “ideas.” Anyway. I’m making these things, and what is my aesthetic or—I don’t remember how this worked. Anyway, so he has me read a book of modern aesthetics. Well, I got out of that, there’s more than one. So whatever the aesthetic here, which seems not to be mine, I didn’t necessarily find in those others; but that means I could make up my own. Just go ahead and do it. But I never intellectually formalized it. I still basically don’t.

Cándida Smith: Now, when you say that, if I pause, it’s because I think of you, given the writing that you’ve done—and the stuff of yours that I’ve read is one of the more intellectualized on the West Coast.

02-00:24:33 Martin: I know, but—

Cándida Smith: And erudite, on top of that.

02-00:24:39 Martin: Well, I’ve written statements. You know, you have to write a statement. Oh, this came up the other day. I have a TA who’s really smart. One of the smartest TAs I’ve ever had. I like him a lot. He’s also independent. He’ll also tell me the way we should teach. Sometimes he has good ideas, too. So he gave me a copy of—he had to write a statement, and it was awful! Pure jargon, from beginning to end. So I said, “I can’t write statements like that. I can’t use that language.” I haven’t written any statements, but I did write a statement for the show I had with Wally Hedrick, Manuel Neri, and Sam Francis at the San Francisco museum in 1959. So I got out that statement. And it is, in a sense, an aesthetic statement. Did I give you a copy of that?

Cándida Smith: No, you didn’t.

02-00:25:55 Martin: I’ll give you a copy. I never intellectualized, rationalized. I can describe what I do well enough. I mean, I can even place it in—now we’re supposed to place it in the world of contemporary ideas and issues and all of that. You are what you are where you are. And that’s all there is to it. As long as you stay open,

and don’t put anybody down—they’re all trying as hard as they can. As soon as I got out of Berkeley and went off to teach, I realized that all of my denigrations of Erle Loran, damn it, he’s painting things. And to make anything is such an achievement. You know, wow. So—Anyway, ask me a question and I’ll think of an answer.

Cándida Smith: Well, I’ve two different directions I could go. But I think I’ll go with the simplest one, which is you graduate—

02-00:27:17 Martin: Yeah, right, get out—

Cándida Smith: —I think in the spring of ’49?

02-00:27:20 Martin: Oh, yes, and so—oh, wow.

Cándida Smith: And you face practical choices. What does a young ambitious artist decide to do?

02-00:27:29 Martin: Well, you go to grad school, of course.

Cándida Smith: You do nowadays. Did you do that then? And what were your parents expecting from you? And did you care?

02-00:27:51 Martin: They didn’t lay expectations. Well, all right, this takes us back to that final year.

Cándida Smith: And what advice do your teachers give you, if any?

02-00:28:06 Martin: None. If I had asked. I never asked. But what had happened was painting down there in that basement, I did meet a woman, another student. And I fell in love with her. Sometime in the wintertime ’48, ’49, I proposed marriage to her. And so when we came to—

Cándida Smith: You were how old? Twenty-one, twenty-two?

02-00:28:52 Martin: I was twenty-two in June, when I graduated. And then, there’s this night course with David. So what happened was, summer comes. I’m into it hot and heavy with Jean. We’re going to be married the following January. David somehow sets it up that I take a course with Mark Rothko in the summer. I do that. I get a job, through Jean’s aunt, working in a drive-in restaurant, which would be, today, if you set a McDonald’s, with one person to do everything, which was the way our place was run. I’d do that from—What were the hours? From six to two. Six p.m. to two a.m., five nights a week. Do Mark for

six weeks, five days a week. Then when fall comes, David got me a scholarship. We had what were called working scholarships, where they give you a job, and you do the job, and they cover your tuition. So I got covered to take a course with Clyfford Still. But I’m still doing this night job, and I’m still into it real heavy with Jean. I did my day job, which was to pick up the papers on Francisco Street. I think I did it twice in the course of the semester, or something like that. And paint like crazy, and make love like crazy, and plan to get married like crazy. And we’re going to have this big wedding. Italian. Her family was Italian immigrants, her grandfather and grandmother, who had made it big in the wholesale grocery business, and then lost all their money in the Depression. They had a sense of Italian grandeur. Whereas my family was very the opposite. Anyway, so we’re going to have an Italian grandeur wedding, and Italian grandeur wedding gifts, and all these things. So I saw Clyfford Still about twice. Made paintings there. His critique method was to stroll in, he looked at one and said, “It looks like a fish at 5,000 feet,” and walked away. He didn’t know it was the “river of life.”

Cándida Smith: Would he have cared?

02-00:32:00 Martin: No. Yes, he would’ve; he would’ve said, “Paint it out.” Because Mark had made this big thing about seeking the unknown. And if you have an association with it, you should paint it out. The example he gave was Bill [William] de Kooning. He’d been at Bill’s studio, and Bill had been using yellow, looked out the window, and there was a yellow cab. “Well, get the yellow out of here.” It’s not the unknown.

Cándida Smith: Had you seen Rothko or de Kooning paintings at {Berkeley}?

02-00:32:34 Martin: I had not seen any de Koonings. I had seen the Rothko—the sort of surrealist Rothkos of the late forties. And that show that I saw of David—the Elmer Bischoff, the show I saw of David Park and Hassel and Elmer. Elmer’s paintings in that show, it seemed to me, were take-offs of the Mark Rothkos of that time. I’d have to see them again, and I’m sure they’ve all been destroyed. As a student, that was the effect I had, that that’s what he was doing. So I hadn’t really seen any Rothkos. In class, he did his unknowns thing. And he praised a painting that I had made. Well, I knew what it was. I had been out to Mount Diablo on a picnic in the afternoon with Jean, drinking wine; and those were the fog drifting in over the East Bay hills. Well, it was unknown to him, but it was all loaded with my feelings and the visual stuff picked up off those cloud banks. I learned from that—here’s an aesthetic statement; this is my aesthetic principle—the intensity of the feeling of the artist, if you can get it in there, the viewer, coming from a different place, will pick up that intensity and hook it to whatever their intensity happens to be, whatever their subject is.

02-00:34:30 In a vague subject. That was a big afternoon for me, because after that afternoon, we went to Jean’s place. She was living in Berkeley, and her roommate was having a heart attack because the FBI was after the roommate because the roommate was a communist, and we were going to this room to make love, and the roommate is here, and all this crap. So we went up on the hills, and there was a glorious thunderstorm that afternoon—even right while we were up there in the hills. It was just, I mean, it was worth painting! And it wasn’t nothing. So—

Cándida Smith: But where does the intensity come, in that situation? It’s obviously—the intensity’s in your brain, but that isn’t what’s—

02-00:35:15 Martin: The intensity’s in your body. I took a psychology course back then, when I was a sophomore—that emotion is the feeling of the body, in response to an experience.

Cándida Smith: Then how do you translate that affective feeling into forms on paper that generate something equally strong in somebody else? Isn’t that the question that your teachers were trying to ask?

02-00:35:50 Martin: No.

Cándida Smith: No?

02-00:35:53 Martin: They were asking—That word form, that was the word. And my stuff—One of the reasons I never took anybody else is because I didn’t have any form. All right, if you play a five-year history, I had no form. There’s no form. And that whole crowd over there at CSFA, there’s no form. And they [Berkeley Art Dept. faculty] yapped on and on and on. So then there’s the annual exhibition of 1949. I submit a painting, and it gets in. It was a big painting. Well, that proves that the jury was no damn good, since they let in this stuff with no form. And on and on this way. So after we were married, then what am I going to do with myself? So we start an art gallery. Glenn did tell me what to do. He said that in the Great Depression, when he came back here, he got a big studio, and he painted in it, and he got students in, and they wanted to learn how to paint, and so he gave lessons, and taught, and charged. And made a living this way. So we rented this space down on Milvia. Started our gallery, and had a mezzanine, where we were going to teach. Well, we never had any students. I ran out of my unemployment insurance, and ran out of the money my father had saved for me to start my life with. We threw all that away in six months. And—Well, I guess I better go to grad school. So we had to draw the figure. There’s a model, you draw the figure. I get rejected. O’Hagan says, “Poor Fred, he can’t make charcoal drip.”

Cándida Smith: You’re rejected from grad school? You failed the entrance exam?

02-00:38:11 Martin: Well, I couldn’t make charcoal drip, and I had no form. So then, well, we’re going to enter crisis mode soon. So artists all have jobs in gas stations. So I get a job in a gas station. A Standard Oil station, now Chevron. And we have to have lessons. Five days worth of lessons.

Cándida Smith: In charcoal drip?

02-00:38:41 Martin: In gas station attending. So I go to there. We’re given these educational movies, which I thought were just awful. Then I have to buy my uniform. I don’t want to buy my uniform. I’m not going to do this! So I went over to the Standard Oil headquarters in San Francisco. I said, “Listen, you’re showing these movies, I could make better movies than that. If you want some good movies, call me up.” They never called. My father says, “Well, Fred, you are going to have to get a job. I’ll support you guys at $150 a month,” which you could live on, “While you get a teaching credential.” So he gives us $150 a month. I get a job working in the university cafeteria. Jean gets a job work— oh, she finishes getting her degree. She still hadn’t finished. I get a teaching credential, and that is the end of Berkeley for a while.

Cándida Smith: Well, you come back, right?

02-00:40:01 Martin: Well, so to get out of teaching, I got to get a masters degree. So I come back. And that time, I got in.

Cándida Smith: What was the difference between the masters program, what defined the masters program and made it professional training, as opposed to—?

02-00:40:22 Martin: Beats me. If you ask me, there wasn’t any.

Cándida Smith: Did you have the same set of teachers, in grad school? It was a one-year program, right, at that time? And you had to do a masters show at the end, so you—

02-00:40:42 Martin: No.

Cándida Smith: No?

02-00:40:44 Martin: You took the courses, and that was that. At least, that’s what I remember.

Cándida Smith: So all you had to do is be breathing.

02-00:40:51 Martin: Well, for some of them, that was the attitude I had toward them, yeah. They were breathing. All right, let me try to think clearly. The only thing I remember are what were called the seminars. I think that’s all we had. Since I had so much other stuff going on in my head at the same time; I had a seminar with Glenn Wessels and a seminar with Ward Lockwood. That would’ve been it. You know, that’s two semesters worth. We must’ve had to take something else. I have no idea what it was. I really don’t. And with Glenn, the only thing I remember—Well, , before, while I’m there in Maxwell teaching, I’m painting these abstract expressionist paintings. Sam has gone to Paris and is doing quite well in Paris, actually. Meeting all the right people and doing the right things. And he’s cooking up the “École du Pacifique.” Stuff like that. And making these paintings. And then I just got bored with it. There was a magazine, Domus, was just starting. And Sam says, “They’re looking for writers.” I wrote a piece about art in the Bay Area. Extremely romantic and, actually, totally weird. I’m getting more and more intensely romantic all the time. By that time, I had been reading Walter Pater and all of the late nineteenth-century English—’Cause I also, to get the teaching credential, I had to take a course in nineteenth-century prose.

02-00:43:18 Anyway, I decide I’m going to paint figures. All right, so here we go. You know, what is the subject matter? The subject matter of my work has been primarily myself, so I’m going to paint self-portraits. Nude self-portraits. So I made one. The first figure painting I ever made. Because, by the way, we did not have figure painting at Berkeley. We do not have the figure.

Cándida Smith: What about—Actually, I should’ve asked you, what about drawing from the model? Sketching.

02-00:43:53 Martin: N-o-o-o! N-o-o-o! Finally, when I was a senior, Glenn did get a course going where there was a model. Listen, you’re going to start modeling in three dimensions. At least, that was the feeling I had about it. That was the sense I was given. We don’t do that! So I never had a course in figure drawing, which is hilarious, when now I’m supposed to teach a drawing course.

Cándida Smith: So drawing was—

02-00:44:27 Martin: They [student] drew better than I do. I tell them so, too.

Cándida Smith: Drawing was always still life.

02-00:44:33 Martin: It was still life, and it—it’s form. And where are you going to get the forms? Well, you can get them from landscape. You can do figures, I guess. But we don’t do figure drawing. We do form. It’s abstract. It’s the only place in the world, I think, at that time—and this was extremely positive for me—that’s

abstract. Otherwise, I would have been drawing figures. Huh? I never did learn to draw things that way. Ever. To me, that’s learning a set of formulae. And it is a formula they invented in the Renaissance, and they’ve been doing it ever since. Going down hill, too. Anyway.

02-00:45:20 So I painted this figure. Which is a large male figure, holding a golden dagger, stabbing a bowl of blood. Bring that in, Felix Ruvolo sees it and hangs it up in the hall. It was, big. Life-size. Two times I got up in the hall. It was at the end of the art department hall. There was no way you could go anywhere without seeing that thing. So I made, I think, four more of those. And then, well, I’d sort of done that. I started making lots of little things, landscapes.

02-00:45:59 Anyway, so Glenn has this thing, and we’re supposed to make a self-portrait. So I nailed a bunch of my little landscapes together on a stick figure. The stick figure is me, those are the landscapes. I put a night seascape where my head would be, and rammed red nails sort of sticking out, so that the viewer looked at the nails. And hell, that was that. With Ward Lockwood, we’re supposed to do color. It’s supposed to be with casein. And we’re supposed to use washes. Well, I’m still a stubborn son of a bitch. I’ve just discovered Windsor Newton warm sepia. Because I’d also bought a book of Guardi drawings and Canaletto etchings. That’s where my head is. So I make a whole lot of warm sepia pen- and-wash drawings of clouds and bring those in and claim they’re color studies. And following David’s thing about, if you don’t know what to do, pick the part you like and paint everything else out, I did some of those and brought those in. then some of the students brought in parodies of those. And that was getting my MA.

02-00:47:23 Oh, I also made a mural, a fresco, with John Haley. I had picked up a book of Eugene Berman, and I really liked Eugene Berman. So I will make a Eugene Berman Medusa head fresco. ’Cause there used to be a place, Neptune Beach in Alameda, was a kind of resort beach, that’s now covered over with housing developments. From the 1920s. It had 1920s sea decorations with a Medusa head. So I picked up on that. I’ll do a Medusa fresco. And I’ll do a Jackson Pollock Medusa fresco. So I paint this thing, and I’ll spatter it Eugene Berman style, and then I’ll scratch it up Jackson Pollock style. Well, John Haley never did say anything. But at the end of the semester, they chipped it off. Whereas other stuff stayed there for years.

02-00:48:37 So those were the things I did. And to do research—I remember this vividly— to do research for my Medusa fresco, I went to the art library. And was thrown out because, “We only allow art history students in here.” There was a blackboard there, and some kind of ruckus happened. Not in the process of throwing me out, but something or other happened. The blackboard moved, and there was Herschel Chipp, hiding in back of the blackboard. Well, Herschel and I had been in Margaret O’Hagan’s class, way back then. And so

I thought that was interesting. And then many, many years later, Herschel does his Theories of Modern Art, I think it’s called, which was a very important book. But Herschel, in our young Turk-pirate style, he was no place, you know?

Cándida Smith: He was not one of the young Turks?

02-00:49:47 Martin: No, he definitely was not.

Cándida Smith: Well, if I’ve got the chronology right, at the same time you’re finishing out your MA, you’re getting involved in the Six Gallery?

02-00:49:57 Martin: Yes. Through Jay.

Cándida Smith: Through Jay. Is that operating as another sort of post-graduate school experience? I mean, is that a form of self-training?

02-00:50:08 Martin: Both yes and no. Because I have a wife and a kid. And then two kids. I live over here. And they’re all over there [in San Francisco]. And they don’t have any children. I have a full-time job. When I got out of grad school, I went to work at the museum, in a full-time job.

Cándida Smith: Oh, the Oakland Museum.

02-00:50:38 Martin: Yeah.

Cándida Smith: The Art Bank? Is that the—

02-00:50:41 Martin: No, no, that was later. The Oakland Art Gallery. In those days, the museum was called the Oakland Art Gallery. It was in the attic of what is now the Kaiser Convention Center; in those days, was the Auditorium. The attic had been designed as a ballroom. Well, instead, they put in partitions, and made it into a three gallery art gallery. So I got a job there. Just as I was finishing my MA, my friend Rik, who—We’d bought this place in Berkeley that had a cottage in the front, and a garage and an apartment in the back.

Cándida Smith: You and Jean.

02-00:51:24 Martin: And Rik and his wife, Haven, is living in the apartment in the back. We’re living in the front. Well, then Rik graduates and gets a job as an office manager for a company that delivered cars in Milpitas. So he moves to Milpitas. But along the way, he had met Paul Mills, who’d just become curator at the Oakland. Paul’s going to do Whistler’s trial, reenact Whistler’s

trial. Somehow or other, Rik connects Paul and Jean and I, somehow or other, about this trial thing. Jean turns on all the charms in the universe on Paul. We end up with jobs. So, swell. The thing was that the gallery is under the library. The staff consists of the curator and the curator’s secretary, who was the wife of the previous curator, who had died. They had never been able to admit they were married, because nepotism was against the law. But she’s still there. So she’s there, Paul’s there. And then there’s a handyman, there’s an educational assistant, and there’s an elevator operator, because we’re on the second floor, and there’s a gallery attendant. So Jean is the gallery attendant, and I’m elevator operator. But Jean is to do publicity, and I’m to do registrar. So here we go. Paul does a big Japanese art culture festival, and Jean does all the publicity for that. I run the elevator, and go to all the collectors and register all the incoming collection stuff for the show, and help with the—Ultimately, I’m the person of all work.

02-00:53:37 And at one point, Paul makes this very clear to me. It was an important learning experience. We just had an opening of some other show. We’re back here on Saturday, cleaning the god damn place up. It’s going to open in another hour. There’s crap all over the floor. “Fred, mop the floor.” “I don’t want to mop the floor!” (I’m too good to mop the floor). “You know, Fred, here, all of us do everything.” He gets the mop, and he mops the floor. So it was very important. We all do everything. Ever since, there, at SFAI, we all do everything. Now, maybe I can’t do your job. But nonetheless, we are colleagues in this together. And if necessary, I’ll flush your toilet, you flush mine. That’s the only way we can survive. Now, it’s all chopped up, so—I mean, when I had my show there [Oakland Museum], it was insane.

02-00:54:45 The chopping up of jobs. And who can and cannot do this, that, and the other. Just putting up the show, since I was so pushy about installation. You know, We’re going to put it up this way, and I’m going to be here, and we’re putting this here and that there, and all this stuff. And who I could talk to, and who I couldn’t. Who could install and who couldn’t. And who could arrange the lights and who couldn’t. All this shit. Anyway.

Cándida Smith: I have a number of sort of follow-up questions that like to see if we could get to. I was wondering, what was your family’s religious background? Were you raised in any particular faith?

02-00:55:35 Martin: There was a church a block from our house. One day, my mother decides, it’s Easter, we have to go to church. So we went to church that day. Then I’m in the Boy Scouts. Boy Scouts are supposed to go to church. One day I went to church. I’ve been to church. That was it. Then I had a friend there at Berkeley, we used to ride back and forth on the streetcars sometimes at night. He belonged to something called Youth for Christ. He said I have to go to that. I went there, came in the door, looked at those people, and turned around and

walked out. No, there’s no religious background. Except what I picked up out of the Chinese and the Hindus.

Cándida Smith: So as you move into Asian philosophy, that’s your first—?

Martin: In a way, yes. I’ve never read the Bible. I should, actually. I’ve thought about that. So I’ll know what they’re talking about. I have a better background in Greek mythology than I do in the Bible.

Cándida Smith: But I take it that your parents were sort of average middle-class, probably culturally conservative Americans.

02-00:56:59 Martin: Completely. My father was a Republican, so I, as soon as I can register to vote, I am voting for Norman Thomas.

Cándida Smith: The Socialist party candidate. Also the relationship with the high school mentor. Besides the fact that you have this ongoing relationship that seems intense, what struck me about it is that Jay DeFeo had a similar—I mean, an analogous relationship with a high school teacher who was her mentor and who continued to be very close to her until she died in the late sixties. And Pat Adams had something similar in Stockton. So we’ve got Oakland, Stockton, San José. What’s going on here? It strikes me as very unusual, but maybe there’s something happening in student-teacher relationships that I don’t understand. Something in the 1940s that is allowing certain kinds of avant- garde-y type people to be seeds of consciousness change, and—

02-00:58:31 Martin: I would’ve ended up as a nuclear physicist. I’m sure. That was where I was going to go. I’m sure that would’ve happened. What my achievement would have been as a nuclear physicist, I have no idea. But instead, I ended up being taken to the symphony, taken to the opera, taken to the ballet, given D.H. Lawrence and E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf and all those people to read. And it was just a different world. As I mentioned, my father, he was a classical music person, but I ended up in a world that was completely other, not just larger than, but other than theirs.

Cándida Smith: You have siblings?

02-00:59:39 Martin: I have a sister.

Cándida Smith: And what happened to her?

02-00:59:44 Martin: She went to Berkeley. She joined the Masonic Club. She was very socially active in the Masonic Club. Met her future husband in the Masonic Club. He worked—Is it Cypress Lawn, over there, the Masonic Cemetery in Colma? So

when we came back from Maxwell, and then when we moved into the house on Harrison Street, she, my sister and her about to be husband—my sister came to live with us for a few months. And so they were there having dinner with us one time, and in my snotty way, she’s saying about, “Oh, this is so great, how much money we’re saving, having dinner here,” and I said, “Well, listen, Caroline, if that’s it, I’ll give you the money to go out, if you want.” He was in optometry. He ultimately became Dean of Optometry at Ohio State. He’s one of the world experts on flexible contact lenses. They spend most of their time—he’s retired—going to conferences, where he gets awards, and he raises money for the Optometry School at the University of Ohio. She became a public school teacher, and taught, I guess, third, fourth, fifth grade, there in Columbus. She’s now retired. And she is very straight.

[Begin Audio File Martin, Fred 03 09-14-05.wav]

03-00:01:05 Cándida Smith: Did you consider yourself a bohemian?

03-00:01:11 Martin: No. I had a wife and a kid and a house.

Cándida Smith: But you knew bohemians.

03-00:01:23 Martin: Oh, sure! Oh, certainly. As Jay once said, “You know, Fred, you and Jean are the squarest people I know.”

Cándida Smith: So when you were at Berkeley—I know this can sound like a peculiar question, but this is something I’ve been asking a lot of people, for over fifteen years—how did you dress when you were going to school?

03-00:01:55 Martin: I wore a wool sport jacket. I think I wore corduroy pants, and a shirt.

Cándida Smith: Did you wear a tie?

03-00:02:09 Martin: No. No, I didn’t wear a tie till I went to work at SFAI.

Cándida Smith: Did you wear shoes or sandals?

03-00:02:18 Martin: I wore shoes. I didn’t start wearing sandals till—probably the early sixties. Because my feet sweat so much, I get such athlete’s foot, it kills me. So by wearing sandals, I have no trouble. I’ve been wearing sandals ever since. They’re sort of weird when you get to Montreal and the snow is this deep. But I have these shoes, I can change right when I get off the plane.

Cándida Smith: And how did you do your hair, or have your hair cut?

03-00:02:57 Martin: It was longer than this. It was just a sort of normal haircut. Although once in a while, I did get what was called a butch cut or whatever.

Cándida Smith: Right. I don’t know if—David Wool, do you remember him? Dave Wool, he was a student in the program. Showed me some photographs of the artists, the annual—from the annual artist balls. Did you go to those? In the—I guess it was the department’s annual artist balls.

03-00:03:33 Martin: I don’t know about those at all. There was one in San Francisco.

Cándida Smith: Unless he was confusing them, these were supposed to be the Berkeley—

03-00:03:44 Martin: When was this?

Cándida Smith: 1940s. Late forties, while he was a student there.

03-00:03:49 Martin: I don’t think so. We did—

Cándida Smith: And he had a photograph of him, Jay, and Philip Oliver Smith, all dressed up [in costumes].

03-00:03:58 Martin: I know nothing about it.

Cándida Smith: You didn’t—

Martin: Uh-uh.

Cándida Smith: So you didn’t go to those.

03-00:04:04 Martin: I didn’t. I didn’t go to those, I didn’t even know they happened. Nobody told me. I only remember one party. We did have an art department party, a student art department party that Sam Francis and this Jack Head guy, was my impression they cooked up the whole thing. It was at somebody’s house. And Jack Head made these terrific martinis, that I’d ever had. I got very drunk, and had to drive home from the hills in the fog. But that’s the only party I ever remember. And clearly, that was not a costume ball.

Cándida Smith: Doesn’t sound like, at least from your perspective, there’s a big active student social life in the department?

03-00:04:51 Martin: There could’ve been. Listen, as Glenn said once, “Don’t get solipsistic, Fred.”

Cándida Smith: Where did you hang out during the day? Was there a coffee shop that you liked?

03-00:05:09 Martin: There was the Taproom Terrace. That’s all gone now.

Cándida Smith: That’s gone, but Moses Hall, right?

03-00:05:16 Martin: Is that called Moses Hall now?

Cándida Smith: Yeah. Well, the old student union is Moses Hall.

03-00:05:21 Martin: Yeah, the Taproom Terrace. I liked that place a lot. I made pictures imagining looking at the hills from there, even. I hung out there. I hung out in the art department basement, painting. I hung out in class. I hung out in the library, in the reserve book section. ’Cause you could usually find a seat there. That was it. I didn’t have much social life.

Cándida Smith: I’m just asking.

03-00:06:01 Martin: Yeah, sure. Now see, you’ve hurt my feelings. By clicking on one of my faults.

Cándida Smith: Part of this is just to confirm an implication of things that you’ve said, so if it sounds repetitious, it’s partly just to get it on the record. Erle Loran, you knew as a formalist. In the—

03-00:06:36 Martin: I didn’t know that word then.

Cándida Smith: Oh, he didn’t use that word?

Martin: No.

Cándida Smith: OK. Because art is about form and—You didn’t need to use the word?

03-00:06:45 Martin: You didn’t—the word formalist, my experience of that word doesn’t start up until we have, oh, Frank Stella and oh, that whole group of people.

Cándida Smith: Painterly abstraction people?

03-00:07:0 Martin: Yeah, right, yeah.

Cándida Smith: But then there’s occasional references in his book, in Cézanne’s Composition, to the emotional feeling. And there’s a sort of—and there are references to creating the emotional effect of Dostoevsky—

03-00:07:22 Martin: What? Is that a quote?

Cándida Smith: It’s a paraphrase. And then there’s, there’s another Erle Loran, apparently, that others knew, which was the psychological existentialist.

03-00:07:38 Martin: All right, let’s—I only had one contact there. That was through Ninfa Valvo, who was a curator at the de Young. My contact with her came through the San Francisco Art Association, that the de Young had arranged to have a show of members of the San Francisco Art Association. It was to be a show of four people, and the names were picked out of a hat, and one of them turned out to be mine. This was when I was teaching up in Maxwell.

Cándida Smith: OK, so early fifties—

03-00:08:16 Martin: That would’ve been in ’53, ’53, someplace around in there. I’d made these things, and I’m not sure I ever even saw the show. Anyway. Later on, when I’m doing the Art Bank, since now I’m an official art administrator—I get in touch, one way or another, with the guy who was the registrar at the Legion. And one way or another, connect up with Ninfa. We become rather close. She came over here for dinner a couple of times, and all these things. And at least a couple times a year, I went to her house for cocktails and lunch with her. And from her, I learned that Erle’s wife was a psychoanalyst, a psychologist; and that there’s a completely other side that I knew nothing about. It never showed to a student there in the art department. And Ninfa was very close to them. You know, it’s too bad Ninfa was not a UCB person, because she, in the thirties and the forties, for a contemporary artist, she was practically it. She showed people. There was no place to show. You know, there aren’t any galleries. She showed people.

Cándida Smith: Well, there was the old Lucien Labaudt Gallery.

03-00:09:55 Martin: Yeah, I had a show there, that Sam cooked up. Sam was really good at cooking up these shows. But that was it, you know? And so for a serious show, Ninfa did it. Then there would be shows that John Humphrey did at the museum. John was really good, too, with artists. He knew the artists. He went to see the artists. They don’t do that anymore. As far as I know, and I’ve heard them say so. So it’s an entirely different world. But anyway. No, as a student, I knew nothing about any psychological side of Erle.

03-00:10:42 But I will say, I was horribly shocked when—Deborah Remington gets into this, because she was at the Six Galley, and we kept remote contact. In the seventies, at some point, Deborah heaves into town. She cooks up that we’re going to have dinner at Erle’s. We go over there. And {Claudia?} was Erle’s wife’s name. I think that was it. Anyway, she had died recently. And—What was Mark’s name? Come on, the English guy.

Cándida Smith: In the English department?

03-00:11:28 Martin: Wrote the book about Blake. Gave the course on—

Cándida Smith: Schorer, right?

03-00:11:32 Martin: Yeah, Mark Schorer had recently died, and there’s Mark’s widow, prancing around Erle’s house. I thought, Oh! Our relationship afterwards, Erle Loran’s and mine, was totally different. So some more years go by. It became different through Deborah because every time Deborah came to town, she goes and latches onto Erle and drags Jean and I off to dinner at Erle’s house. So then he’s eighty, I think. And he has a show at the Oakland Museum. And Tom Albright writes a vicious review. I was just—So that was when I was writing for ArtWeek, so I wrote an intense praise about the—that this was totally, totally uncalled for, wrong, and blah-blah-blah-blah-blah. Anyway. As I said at the beginning, as soon as I went to Maxwell and realized, he’s painting. Anybody that’s painting, that is such an achievement in itself. Even if I thought that they were tepid and dumb. Just to do it.

Cándida Smith: When you took a class from, say, somebody like Rothko, what was the point of it? What were you supposed to get out of it? What did you want to get out of it? What did David Park think you were supposed to get out of it? It doesn’t sound like there’s a whole lot of structure in these classes. As opposed to the Berkeley method, where—

03-00:13:23 Martin: Hey, there wasn’t any structure. Clyff, his structure? Oh, God! His structure was to select disciples. This was extremely clear to everybody. He selects the disciples. The disciples are moved to another room. I had a friend who was a disciple. He didn’t understand the social structure. So he, my friend, says, “Hey, come on, move over here, this is better space.” Clyff sends me back over there. All right. I had three contacts with him. One was the “fish at 5,000 feet;” one was the whole class will be brought together to listen to—come on, what’s Judith’s name? The actress doing Medea?

Cándida Smith: Judith Anderson?

03-00:14:25 Martin: Yes. So we listen to a record of her doing Medea. We all listen to this. Well, now you had that, go back to doing whatever you’re doing. And then he got a painting of Mark Rothko’s. A large painting. About as big—not quite as big, I guess, as that wall. And he set it up—

Cándida Smith: Twelve-by-six, maybe?

03-00:14:51 Martin: No, it couldn’t have been that big, actually. It must’ve been maybe six-by- eight. Maybe six-by-eight. Something like that. But anyway, he sets it up, and we all go to sit there and look at it. So we sit, like, in a—it’s in a small room. Just sit there in our chairs, and we look at this painting for twenty minutes, and then we leave. Now, not knowing anything about what—At the time, this was when Mark is leaving the surrealistic-y things and moving toward what was his final work. But it’s in between. He’s just developing it. So actually, it was a very significant thing. But do we know what this is? No, we just sit here. That was it. So that’s what I learned from Clyfford Still.

Cándida Smith: Were you impressed?

03-00:15:49 Martin: No. But I’ve used this with students from time to time. To tell them, “Look, that’s what we did with Clyfford Still.”

Cándida Smith: Were you impressed with Rothko?

03-00:16:-2 Martin: As a person?

Cándida Smith: Painter? Person? Personage?

03-00:16:08 Martin: Well, he wasn’t a personage then. All these people became personages afterwards. I tried to explain this at a staff meeting at SFAI once, when they’re going on about the giants. Well, they weren’t. They were not. The giants at that time, in 1948, ’49, were Philip Evergood, maybe, and—Well, I had a book that popped into my head immediately. They were in the business of killing the American Scene painters. But these guys, they got in Life Magazine as the “irascibles” or something. But they—they weren’t anybody.

Cándida Smith: The Life Magazine was ’52, as I recall, anyway, wasn’t it?

03-00:17:08 Martin: Maybe. I don’t remember. But they’re in ’48, ’49. David—I think when he was teaching that summer, he certainly had been doing the crane at the shipyard until then. He told me about that. And then when I saw that show of David’s and Elmer [Bischoff] and Hassel Smith, the painting that hit me there, I realized afterwards, when David told me about the crane, that was David’s

experience as a crane operator. It was a view, in fact, of the Bay, when you’re running a crane in the shipyard. All of that, god-ness stuff, it was not there. It’s true that Douglas MacAgy was promoting them as the gods of the future. But anyway, Mark’s class, this summer class, is full of school teachers, and a couple of others. Me, Jeremy Anderson, and Jack Jefferson, I think. We were the others in that class. Or it maybe have been in Still’s class that it was Jeremy Anderson and Jack Jefferson and I. I don’t recall. But anyway. No, they hadn’t had the how-to-teach-English course, where you are told that teach is a transitive verb, and you better teach them something.

Cándida Smith: Was that liberating to you, or a waste of time?

03-00:18:46 Martin: What?

Cándida Smith: A structure-less class.

03-00:18:55 Martin: Well, I had my own structure going. It was so strong, I didn’t even notice. If there’d been a structure, I would have been pushing it aside, like I was doing there at Berkeley.

Cándida Smith: So you didn’t have to rebel against that?

03-00:19:07 Martin: No. I could’ve easily ignored—And anyway, Mark liked my painting. That’s fine. David was very supportive of my painting. That’s great. What else did I need. I just come off as a real egomaniac. But anyway, that was the way it was. All the time thinking, “Poor little me. I’m not a jock; poor little me. I didn’t get a job in a stock brokerage.”

Cándida Smith: You have mentioned Kandinksy was important to you. Jung seems to be popping up here and there.

03-00:19:50 Martin: Oh, yeah, definitely.

Cándida Smith: Were all of you reading Jung at this time?

03-00:19:55 Martin: I think not. Jay, later—in the fifties; I guess late fifties—I lent her my Jung’s Secret of the Golden Flower, because she wanted that. I never got it back. That’s why I remember that. Oh, David [Park] told me that the only psychologist that he thought artists could get anything out of was Jung.

[material deleted]

03-00:21:08 Martin: John I. H. Baur told me one day, absolutely in the simplest one or two sentences, in the room directly below here—He was out here to jury a show. This is when I was doing the Art Bank. I had to take the jurors around. So he was out here to jury a show. And so since I’m a painter, he would look at my stuff. So I was making those eighteen-inch collages at that time. He looks at those, and he says, “Well, Fred, when you really care enough, you can come to New York and see what—when it’s serious enough. When you care.” I don’t remember the exact word. But anyway. “You can come to New York and see if it matters.” In other words, “If you don’t go to New York, you don’t exist. If you do go to New York, you may survive. And then we’ll look at you.” Well, sorry. I have my own life.

03-00:22:28 And so to say that—Because a few artists—Bill [William] Wiley’s done reasonably well in New York. Tom Holland—oh, that was beautiful—gave me the perfect example once. I was doing a graduate seminar for graduate students at SFAI. Tom had just had his big show in New York. Which he’d sort of gotten through—Clement Greenberg had seen Tom’s stuff. And Carlos Villa had just gotten an NEA grant. So I invited them to come to the seminar to explain to the students how these things work. They both said, “Well, you just have to be true to yourself, and it happens.” Well, I knew how it had worked! Because Wayne Thiebaud was on the NEA committee, and Carlos was teaching at Sac [Sacramento] State. Anyway. So after the seminar, we go out for coffee, and I reaffirm exactly how it had worked. Well, then with Tom—So Tom is teaching at SFAI at the time. So then he doesn’t want to do this anymore. OK. So then I saw him a year or two later. I asked him how things were going. Well, he’d gone back to the gallery—Elkon, I think it was called—and they couldn’t remember his name. They still had his stuff in the back room.

Cándida Smith: Gallery stories.

03-00:24:27 Martin: Sure. The world is full of them.

Cándida Smith: The archives would suggest that Dorothy Miller used to get in contact with you on a regular basis to find out who you thought were the interesting artists in California. Can you fill me in on this at all?

03-00:24:47 Martin: Sure. So the annual exhibition. There’s actually three—there were three shows. There was the painting and sculpture, there was drawing and prints, and there was watercolors. I remembered there were three like that. Anyway. But the painting and sculpture is the big show. It was juried by local artists. Well, nobody’s paying any attention to us. We’re out here, and everybody else is in New York. We don’t exist. One of the reasons the Art Bank was founded was to deal with that, so that when people came, there’d be someplace to go

see something. So I had this work of, I guess 100 to 150 artists. So then, all right, if we get the movers and shakers from New York to come out here to jury the shows, then they might see something. So we got Dorothy Miller. We got Tom [Thomas] Hess, Lloyd Goodrich, Baur—There’s another one. Anyway. I think Dorothy Miller was the first one. Well, she made it very clear that she is not putting together a show, but she’d like to go and see people. So I took her to see the people I thought were interesting. And that was Jay and Wally—and I think Bruce Conner, I don’t remember. But the Jay and Wally ones were the ones I remember. And so well, she wasn’t putting together a show; but she really was. And she put together “Sixteen Americans” with Jay and Wally in it. So the show comes up and should Jay and Wally go to the reception? Well, no, how can they? And that was the show that did it big for Jack Youngerman.

Cándida Smith: It was the show that established Frank Stella. But whether it would’ve established [DeFeo and Hedrick] is another question.

03-00:27:18 Martin: Well, see, it probably wouldn’t have. One, they didn’t live there, to network. And the direction of their work was not where New York was going. When I had my New York deal, it was the same issue, the direction of my work. And he was very supportive. He truly was. But the car’s going the other way.

Cándida Smith: Did Miller indicate what she actually thought of Jay and Wally’s work?

03-00:27:48 Martin: She put them in the show.

Cándida Smith: But did she—

03-00:27:50 Martin: Well, listen. Going there to their studio, that was a, you know—I always took people there if I could. ’Cause Jay would put on this lunch made out of a hundred pieces of nothing. And the place looked great, and there’s Jay’s painting [The Rose] and all these things.

Cándida Smith: I mean, she chose other people for that same show that it’s hard to imagine that she really supported their work.

03-00:28:13 Martin: Oh, I don’t know. Well, listen, she had to support their work. If it’s in the show, she had to support it.

[material deleted]

Cándida Smith: But she didn’t say anything, Miller didn’t say anything to you as you’re taking her around, about what she thought about the work she was seeing?

03-00:29:29 Martin: No. She was generally very—Oh. Well, she did. There’s an artist, Clayton Pinkerton. Well, Clayton, I knew him reasonably well. He was a very nice young man. And he painted. You know, we’re getting into the art politics of the institutions thing, since Clayton was at CCAC [California College of Arts and Crafts]. Anyhow, he’s a nice guy, and he tries hard. And because I represent everybody, I’m representing him. He had been in contact with her, and so she made a point of bringing up she’d like to go see him. He was living in a woodsy cabin in the woods of Woodside. So we go down there. We see his stuff. He’s very nice, and she’s very nice. And after we leave, she did say, “He’s a nice young man.” That was that.

Cándida Smith: Now, here’s my last question. DeFeo said multiple times that Berkeley was stodgy, completely out of step with everything else going on in the art world in the forties, yet, it shaped everything that she did, even though she was rebelling against it. Pat Adams said something, actually, quite similar. Is there a Berkeley stamp that has been imprinted on you and other students, whether you are rebelling against it or not? Is there some way of looking at art and the world that you all share?

03-00:31:46 Martin: I don’t know.

Cándida Smith: Even if your work doesn’t look at all the same?

03-00:31:47 Martin: I don’t know if we share it. It’s to see the whole picture. That enormous moment with Henry Schaeffer Zimmern, when the stool broke, that changed my—I took almost a year before I—you know, these are physiological, neurological things. It was—until I made that painting in the following spring, somehow something came together. I see that way. But I don’t follow this way. Stephanie, my current wife, has done a lot of work—and I’ve been to their conferences—with the International Association for Empirical Aesthetics. They do these eye path studies of watching where people’s eye go from here to there and all that kind of stuff. Uh-uh. You go with the whole thing. After that, you can look around, sure. But like Chinese painting, you walk through the landscape. [whispers] I don’t. So I got that there. And no matter how much I sneered, and will still often sneer, painting is form, medium, and content. I didn’t get any medium out of them. We did oil painting, we didn’t know how. I got form in the sense of the visual elements. It is visual, the thing is visual. And if it isn’t hitting your eyes, you’re never going to get any content. But content didn’t exist. Medium, you used either charcoal or oil paint. And we didn’t know anything. Well, Glenn taught us a little bit about linseed oil and turpentine.

Cándida Smith: You didn’t do gouache?

03-00:33:59 Martin: Well, with O’Hagan, we did. No, we used transparent watercolors. We did gouache in the dec art department.

Cándida Smith: know you did sculpture.

03-00:34:12 Martin: Well, I took a course in sculpture from Jacques Schneir.

Cándida Smith: Was his perspective, his aesthetic, his vision, how did it work in relationship to the art department? I mean, there must’ve been some reason why he was in the School of Architecture.

03-00:34:33 Martin: Oh, there is a reason. I don’t remember what it is. I heard all about it a few months ago, again. I don’t remember why that was like that.

Cándida Smith: But what about the way he taught, the way he wanted you to see?

03-00:34:51 Martin: What he wanted us to see, in effect, was the same thing that Erle Loran wanted us to see. Namely, form. So we started with bas relief. We did one with rounded forms and one with angular forms. And then we did three dimensions, and we did one with cubist-y angular forms, and we did one with rounded forms. That’s all I remember. But it was about form.

Cándida Smith: And gradated exercises?

03-00:35:27 Martin: Yes. Very definitely. Because at Berkeley, there was stuff about form and about the picture plane. There was a book by a German guy named Hildebrandt, sometime in the early 1900s, which dealt with these same issues. I had bought that book, so I saw the same stuff there. I don’t know its title. I don’t remember. I don’t want to go find it, because everything is mixed up. But I still have that one. Although I haven’t looked at it in fifty years. So anyway. Whether there is—You see, also, you can rebel and get nowhere. Jay and Pat and I, and—I’m not sure about Sam. It would be interesting if one could, nowadays, interview him. I never had a class at the same time as he. I just don’t know what his feelings were. Did he get anything from the—? I don’t think so. I really don’t think so.

Cándida Smith: Did you ever meet any of his French friends while they were traipsing through California?

03-00:36:50 Martin: Michel Tapié. He came looking for “École du Pacifique.” I took Michel all around the Bay Area, to everybody he wanted to see.

Cándida Smith: Did he discover the École?

03-00:37:03 Martin: He took a lot of photographs. One woman said to me afterwards, “You know, he took so many photographs, and the light was terrible. I wonder if he had any film in his camera?”

Cándida Smith: Was this before the article, or after?

03-00:37:17 Martin: Which article?

Cándida Smith: The famous article, “École du Pacifique.”

03-00:37:21 Martin: Oh, was there one? I never saw that.

Cándida Smith: Yeah, it’s ’53 or ’54.

03-00:37:26 Martin: It was after that. It was in my Art Bank days. It was in the early sixties.

Cándida Smith: That’s, actually, a quite important article.

03-00:37:31 Martin: All right. That’s good.

Cándida Smith: In French art history, because it’s part of the declaration of independence against New York.

03-00:38:05 Martin: I took Tapié around. I also took—what’s his name? Pierre Restany? Restany, yeah, I took him around. He wanted to see Nathan Oliveira. That was his whole purpose in life, was to see Nathan Oliveira. So I took him to Nate’s place. But—

Cándida Smith: Did the Nouveaux Réalistes come by? Niki de Sainte-Phalle and—

03-00:38:30 Martin: No. No, no. At least not that I know of. I stopped doing that in ’65, so I don’t know after that.

Interview #2. September 21, 2005

[Begin Audio File Martin, Fred 04 09-21-05.wav]

04-00:00:01 Martin: So they’re all in there drawing seriously, and I notice that there’s an opening, and we really should go to the opening. Besides that, we always have wine at the openings, for those of us who are old enough to drink wine. So I told them, “All right, now, you’ve all drawn a—” This is the first lesson in using cross-hatching. They’re all going to draw a coffee cup. You have to visualize a light source, and draw a coffee cup.

Cándida Smith: Do they have the actual coffee cup in front of them?

04-00:00:35 Martin: Well, they could go fish one out of the garbage, or they could just imagine it. Anyway, so we got to go to the opening. And then—So I get a glass of wine. And at the end of the class, explain to them that, “See this glass of wine? Now, I had a professor who came to class drunk once.”

Cándida Smith: This is at Berkeley? You want to mention—

04-00:01:39 Martin: It was Glenn Wessels. It was an afternoon class, and he came in drunk. He sat down. I’m sitting right on the model stand in front of the class. He sat down on the model stand. He says, “You know, everybody, I’ve wasted my life teaching you people, who are never going anywhere.” So I said, “I’m not wasting my life teaching you. ’Cause you have the passion to be here, otherwise you wouldn’t be in this place.” Anyway, it was just a wonderful class. So every Tuesday now, we have to go to the opening. The thing that the show was, was a gigantic shipping crate, about eight-by-eight-by-eight. Like a cube. Must’ve been about ten. And it was totally closed. Except if you would look constantly, you could finally find one knothole that you could look through. Inside this thing, there’s a bed. Just a bed and a mattress. A massive small chest on the floor. And on the roof, the faint reflections of water rippling. That’s all it was. So OK, everybody. If you want to do this assignment, go look through that hole, and write the story that’s in there, and illustrate it, and bring it back on Thursday. So anyway, I thought it was a great class. I had a super good time.

Cándida Smith: That’s nice. Yeah.

04-00:03:36 Martin: Yeah, between {Mahler?} and the dark room. So OK, should we—are we lined up?

Cándida Smith: Well, I wanted to start out discussing some of the paintings that you did at different stages of your life. I’d like to be able to get a sense of the degree to which what you learned at Berkeley, the Berkeley method, if there was such, shaped the way you framed problems, shaped your visual vocabulary, shaped the questions you asked yourself, shaped your method; and then the degree to which you moved in and out of it at different times. This is all assuming that, in fact, you were shaped by this five-years exposure to—

04-00:04:35 Martin: I was sure shaped by Glenn’s trip that “I wasted my life on you people,” I’ll tell you. That was a very important moment.

Cándida Smith: How old were you then?

04-00:04:49 Martin: Twenty, maybe.

Cándida Smith: Twenty. So you were a third-year student?

04-00:04:53 Martin: I think I was a third-year student at that point.

Cándida Smith: And you already knew you were an artist?

04-00:04:59 Martin: Oh, God! That’s such a—Wanted—that’s a stopper.

Cándida Smith: Or you were an artist.

04-00:05:14 Martin: No, no. Wanted to be. That was the high ambition. I mean, that word has gotten kind of loaded, too. But that was essentially it. Aspiration.

Cándida Smith: There’s something that Wally Hedrick said once that he desperately wanted to be famous, he wanted Jay to be famous; and then something happened that made him feel that it wasn’t going to be worth all the effort. Of course, he never really became famous.

04-00:06:00 Martin: Oh, we’re going to roll into the whole subject in a minute and what is fame? Oh, that’s just a real complicated one. Fame is given by somebody else. And after a while you realize, I don’t give a shit about them. It comes down to that. No. The way I feel about it now, anyway. I didn’t see high ambition or aspiration, in terms of fame. That goes back to the Kandinksy issue and things like that. It was more a—It was totally unclear. But there’s something glorious up there on the horizon. And at that time, certainly—I’m talking about when I was a sophomore and a junior and a senior—fame is conferred by New York or Paris. I have no relationship to them. No, it was a spiritual thing, whatever the hell that is. It was—it had nothing to do with being in magazines. Huh?

04-00:07:29 And that’s where fame is, I think, now. Certainly, now. Fame is in magazines. I may have mentioned the time I had Willoughby Sharpe, I think it was, was at the Art Institute. It was just at the time of the Kent State business. At the Art Institute, we were having a big flap about what we should do. Ronald Reagan had said we should, when he was the governor, close down the universities, so that there wouldn’t be any riots. So we took a vote, and decided not to close. Instead, we would spend the week making political art. So everybody’s making, big, massive Richard Nixons and all sorts of stuff like this. We had our regular classes. I had, at that time, a Friday lecture, every Friday, in art history. Modern art history. So Willoughby Sharpe—who was the—I think the editor of Flash, which was the hottest new magazine—was in town, and he came to my class to give a talk. I wanted that, because I wanted to deal with fame and the fact that what you put on your magazine cover has an effect on the history of art. That sets what’s going to be happening. So let’s talk about that.

04-00:09:11 Well, two things happened. What I overheard was when I brought this issue up, he said, “What? We put the flashiest photo we got that month.” Has nothing to do with art. A magazine is journalism. It isn’t culture, structure. It’s journalism. And then we had three faculty. So he’s there talking. We had about, in those days, a class of about 120 people in that auditorium we have. So he’s there talking, and I’m in the audience. These three faculty come in, who are our sort of card-carrying leftists. Chanting, “Shut it down! Shut it down!” So I just stood up and said, “You know, we already voted not to shut it down, now get out of here.” Well, I mean—[makes a noise] But fame? No, look, I’m here. I’m a person. Yeah, fame is nice. I think I told you about I. H. Baur’s trip, that if I wanted—if I got serious enough, I could come to New York, and then they’d decide. Yeah, well, sorry. I have another life.

Cándida Smith: Did you ever think of going to Paris?

04-00:10:27 Martin: No. Sam Francis told me I ought to do that. I mean, that was just—It wasn’t within the horizon.

Cándida Smith: Was that because you were married, or—?

04-00:11:03 Martin: I was married, and had a kid, and—You know, I mean, come on! Let’s be real. Because see, Sam is a different personality type. Totally different personality type. So that was all there was to that. And certainly, fame was an issue with him. Very much. That’s what he was after.

Cándida Smith: If I think about some of the things that Worth Ryder seems to have written in his lecture notes, he was trying to convey to students—I understand you just

had this art history class, but, but the sort of understanding is, is that the curriculum or the program at Berkeley, largely, flowed out of Worth Ryder’s vision. So maybe what he was thinking was influencing the teachers that you had more direct contact with. But the goal—the success would be to be able to articulate your relationship to the world; who I am, in relationship to the world, through my art. Not through the recognition that a person may not get. And not through following the latest fashions. I hear echoes of what he’s saying. And maybe that’s Berkeley. But maybe that’s also the wisdom of someone who’s had to run a school program for a long time, and what you’re trying to convey in the school.

04-00:13:00 Martin: You know, it’s so—ambiguous is not even the right word. It’s so double, and two-faced and Janus-like. Because that’s such an easy out. Having failed at fame, well never mind. You know? That’s such an—What is that called, sour grapes? I don’t know, but anyway. So I just don’t know.

Cándida Smith: Mm-hm.

04-00:13:32 Martin: But—Yeah. I just don’t know. All I know is that whenever the situations aIt just wasn’t. When I got rejected for the MA program, I announced, “We’re going to New York!” Well, that lasted three days. But in the meantime, let’s get real. You know, I’ve got to get a job, OK? I mean, it comes down to realities. Now, we have students at SFAI who become famous. They really do. We had one, she’s got a MacArthur Grant. How old is she, thirty-five? We do have these things. And that’s wonderful. But to tell the truth, the others must live. Inside themselves, instead of forever hungering for something that’s not going to happen. So this leads to back in the sixties. Change Magazine is a higher education magazine. One came along—this is at the early days of setting up Santa Cruz, University of Santa Cruz. And it wasn’t talking about that place, but nonetheless, that a liberal arts college or university, it would be like a country club, with cultural amenities. Well, you know? OK. The way I’ve seen SFAI, it has to be the most wonderful moments of your life. And something to remember, as a great time. That’s all we can do. And we can certainly instill or encourage or thrill or—I mean, I spend most of my time trying to thrill them, actually. Make it be something wonderful to remember. Whatever they’re going to do in the future. One of the problems is we also get these guilts in there. If you don’t become a great painter, you’re guilty forever. That’s not so great. But anyway—

Cándida Smith: But does that come later in your life?

04-00:16:28 Martin: You know, “I never made it, god damn it. I never made it, and I should’ve made it, and they told me—and I’ve given up painting. I’m selling insurance.”

Cándida Smith: Yeah. I’m thinking more in terms of, California didn’t have any contemporary art galleries of any note until, what? The late fifties.

04-00:16:45 Martin: Does it now? To tell the truth. No. Which are the galleries of note? Well, let’s see, there’s Gagosian and oh, I don’t know, I’d remember if I looked in the magazine quick enough. I mean, the galleries here don’t amount to a damn. They derive.

Cándida Smith: But you didn’t even have 49 Geary.

04-00:17:15 Martin: That’s what the Six Gallery was all about. And the Metart Gallery, which is before—and that’s what that stuff was.

Cándida Smith: And the academy provides a different way of thinking about art than the gallery world does, obviously, so—A different foundation, but also, a different way of approaching what art is about.

04-00:17:37 Martin: OK. Yeah, because look, we—If we’re going to get into our current cultural situation—And this is where I get into my old man mode. Nonetheless, when I grew up, we had the annual exhibition which was juried by artists. Or later, by outside curators, but nonetheless—In effect, we were in charge. Now, since the early sixties and the rise of the gallery scene, we’ll call it, they are in charge. I have very good friends that are art dealers. Ultimately, they have to sell. And stuff they can’t sell, they won’t show. They can’t show. Therefore, what we do is ultimately bounded by what an art dealer can sell. That has two disadvantages for us. First of all, the horizon of our vision is limited by the horizon of the dealer’s vision. Well, we have seen and known more than that person does. But that doesn’t matter.

04-00:19:14 Martin: I mean, they don’t have the education we had. Just for simples. But secondly, even if they do have a wide horizon, it is ultimately limited by their patrons. And that’s all there is to it. So this puts me in line with the Wallys and all those other people. You know? It’s just too bad for the whole art world out there. It’s just too bad. So us artists get in this scene about we got to show, we got to have a show, we got to have a show. We have to have our CV [curriculum vitae], all this kind of stuff. That—even twenty years ago, that— at the Art Institute, at least. Because the thought was coming out of the forties and the fifties that, you got to have a show. Well, those people that do the shows, they don’t know anything. Why should I have a show? Why should I be at the mercy of—? So we didn’t pay any attention to that. Well, then time passes, and then we have to rank faculty, and then we have to have a way of ranking them, and then we have to have a CV, and then we have to have shows. So the first time this comes up Bill Berkson made the speech about how the only shows that matter are museum shows. Well, the way it is now,

where the curators get their ideas are from the art dealers. Huh? So it all goes back to—I’m going to—I can be grandiose. It goes back to smaller minds setting the horizons for what larger minds can do. Well, to hell with it. So that’s what I think about that.

Cándida Smith: Or you could rephrase it as the practical facilitators that have to deal with the narrower problems of reaching large numbers of people.

04-00:21:44 Martin: Sure, yeah, of course. I understand that completely. But I cannot see—So this is going to take us to fame. I am not interested in what—what’s his name?— Kent Logan thinks of me. I’m really not. ’Cause his ideas are somewhere else anyway.

Cándida Smith: Did Margaret O’Hagan or Glenn Wessels or Jim McCray discuss this at all?

04-00:22:14 Martin: No. No, never. Never, never.

Cándida Smith: So you were producing for?

04-00:22:22 Martin: Kandinsky on the glowing horizon. That was it.

So this painting was part of a whole giant set of four. This was the top one. Which I made back in ’94, when all of my juice was colossally turned on by marrying Stephanie. I tried to recreate how I felt back then, in the late forties.

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Cándida Smith: So this is a conscious effort to return to the work you were doing as a student.

04-00:23:16 Martin: It’s hard to say. No, it wasn’t a conscious effort to return to the work I was doing, but what were my dreams, ambitions, feelings, whatnots? And so I made this one. This was a kind of Kandinsky-ish apocalypse. But it had these other parts. I never could get the whole thing all together. The following year, took the other three and painted them over. But this one did kind of say the kind of thing. You know, it really does say it. Because it has Kandinsky’s colors up there. And it has my sperm down here. So my sperm and blood, and his glowing horizon, and the whole bit is all right there. So that was what I thought about what I wanted to become. Yeah, that was my ambition, whatever that is.

Cándida Smith: Well, you have talked—you’ve written about sexuality as being a key theme in your work. Could you talk a little bit more about that? Maybe it comes from Kandinsky, maybe it comes from—?

04-00:24:31 Martin: I don’t think it does.

Cándida Smith: Maybe that’s more Henry Miller? So sexuality—Also, I mean, it seems actually maybe more, you’re talking about life cycle.

04-00:24:44 Martin: Nowadays, very much. Absolutely. Well—So if you take my work as if it were an object—

Cándida Smith: Your oeuvre.

Martin: Huh?

Cándida Smith: Your oeuvre.

04-00:25:07 Martin: Oh. Well, yeah, right. You know, I never could say that word.

OK, there’s the first phase. Which this was kind of, throwing myself back into painting. .But this is this first phase.

04-00:25:58 So I mentioned to you that this last month or so, I’ve been doing these Tarot things. So I decided, since I’m going to—I’ve set up this website thing, I’m going to sell these prints and all this stuff, I needed samples. So I had a couple of samples, but I needed more samples. So I decided to make some of myself. So I would do this time period of 1947.

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04-00:26:52 OK. So it’s difficult to do these things of oneself, because you sort of fix it up the way you want it to be. But anyway. At that particular time, it seemed to me that what I have regarded as the stave, the club. The deck that I use, is has it sort of a stick. I’ve always thought of that as being a branch of the tree of life. Anyway, so I made the print, that’s it. But I then put a hole, a circle with a question mark in it, since I didn’t know where the hell I was going then. And the way these things are done, that person chooses one of the aces as their force. So that was certainly my force. Then they choose one that represents themselves. Well, I chose this hermit. My first association with the hermit was the word fear. I was very much—you were asking about my social life. I was a hermit there at Berkeley, in many, many ways. I was also scared. When I made the print, it turned out—it came out pretty scared looking, too; most of it isn’t there. Then the second thing one chooses with this particular set-up, you choose a card that represents the world around you. Well, I was in a situation of great conflict about my sexuality. What the hell am I going to do with this? So at the moment, in making my prints, I can’t find the card, the block I used for temperance. But I had to temper my polymorphous perverse sexuality

somehow. So lately, I’ve been using this card—this block, I mean—which— with these two arrows. Pulling in two directions, which must somehow be balanced. Well, anyway.

04-00:29:10 So I played around with it, and did the black. And I’m trying to get these two—Then I made all those little lines, which is—that’s the way I felt all the time. So then with this procedure, then you pick two cards that were face down. You don’t know what they are. Well, what I picked was the lovers. And that was certainly my issue, What is love? And then you pick one more, and that {sort of?} your deep unconscious. Well, I got the high priestess, or wisdom. So then what did I write? I will be strong; I will not fail; he left the marks, and his promise, and his year, but not his name. So I put that for my name. So that’s where I was then.

04-00:30:11 So I was like that. Until, like, Where the hell am I going and what am I doing? And all this stuff is boiling in me constantly, all through the fifties. And then in the sixties. So when we moved here, and before that—So things turned into building a homestead. And in that catalogue, that comes up in there, about— I’m the good farmer, the husband; and Jean was the Venus Genetrix. And all that stuff. So all of this sexual energy was turned into that. And into this. Which the climax, in a sense, came in the seventies, when I picked the moment when we had built the now-old new building at SFAI, just before I— the year before I decided to leave SFAI. So I picked 1973. And what was I then? Well, I still was this; but I also was the sword. And to me, this is my animal strength, and that’s my intellectual strength. And what I did there was both at the same time, tied together that way. And what I was there was an emperor, somehow. Yes, it was the globe of the blood of the power of life, bound by the gold of the cross of eternity. And so that’s this little business here.

04-00:32:22 And what was I doing all day long? I was juggling? How did I do it all day? Every day? Always this—always whatever that says, the game or something. Anyway. That’s what I was. So in this oeuvre of a life, that was my youth. This was my maturity. One of the issues with these prints is to—Because especially online, they don’t have enough color. I haven’t figured it out yet. There’s too much white paper. But anyway, so I thought, Well, I’ll put some color in there. And certainly, in my job, I had to use the three primaries, and keep everything balanced, and build this structure. And so when the face down cards came up, what I got was strength and justice. And those go together. If you don’t have strength, you can’t have justice; but if you don’t have justice, strength just tears everything to shreds. And then the last card I got was the star, which pours water of the stars down. So I did that little bit there and stuff.

04-00:33:49 But then I decided to do one more. I was going to try to deal—artistically, we’ll call—that’s the art part. Anyway, the problem about too much white

paper. So I made this one. This one was 1983, when Jean died. And so this, the cup had always, for me, been the representation of her. And there are various formats of—various cards have different versions. The set of cards that I got from here, the cup was like this. Now, it’s often much more like a {inaudible} or something else entirely. But anyway, with these flowers coming out and stuff. And for me, at that time, I had to be truly strong. And also go wandering off into the world again. So I picked the fool, as a lover. That’s me to the life. Then when I picked the cards that were face down, I got this chariot card. And then the next one was strength. And certainly, I needed all of that. I long ago, when Jean and I were first married, the Rachmaninoff Second Symphony, the program notes had this piece about, “Life is—” Or we’re all grass. I had made a pastel of grass, with Jean in my shadows in the grass. And that came back so strongly, as she was dying, and when she died. I had already made this little block about grass, and that little block. So I put that all over there and stuff, and—

04-00:36:08 And—Anyway, so those—But what this leaves out is when I got my set together, got the house built, that’s when we went traveling. I traveled around the world and all that. And the aesthetic, just sheer, traveling—You know, that’s another thing. I am not a traveler who discusses the politics and sociology of these tragic countries and all that kind of stuff. I just want to see the great ruins and feel the great spaces and—So that doesn’t show in these. I should try to make one like that. But anyway, so that’s—And see, nor did I made one for since. I’ve been think—because—Anyway, I only made these {three?}. I had to have samples on my website. So it doesn’t say whose these are, by the way. Anyway. So ask me another question. Let’s change the subject.

Cándida Smith: OK. Well, let’s—You know, you’ve talked—you’ve written about, the way in which you think about painting as a material substance. Working with it as a material substance, and the working with visual organization simultaneously. Maybe you could discuss what you’re looking for, in terms of a material effect and an organizational effect, and what that relationship—how that relationship emerges, and the way that you work through a piece. Does that make sense?

04-00:38:30 Martin: Yeah.

Cándida Smith: Material form, I guess. This goop and—

04-00:38:36 Martin: Well, I could talk about this.

Cándida Smith: Yeah.

04-00:38:43 Martin: So the idea, then—I have to watch out there, we always have the word idea. That’s beginning to be—have power or something. What I was thinking

about, I was going to make big things. Because for almost ten years, I’d been making these, they were smaller and smaller. And then in the late eighties, since I felt very strongly I had to keep all my stuff. If a piece goes away, I’ll fall apart. But I want people to have them. So I went to this computer art idea, where I could do printouts. So I could keep it, and give a thousand away. So I bought a computer and a printer, and started trying to figure out how to do that. I bought a little scanner that you—it was a hand scanner that you pulled across. I mean, this—viewed from today, this stuff is pathetic. But anyway. My attitude towards it was, Well, it’s just like those first German woodcuts; they were pathetic, too. Anyhow, so I worked that way. And there was less and less physical. In a way, my whole body was drying up. It was all like this. Then I would make these little drawings and scan them. Then I had a pad— whatever they call them, tablet—with this pen that you could draw with. Anyway, I was doing that.

04-00:40:59 When the spring of ’92 came, it was just kind of the last—I was really dried up. I went to a conference in Santa Fe. The least you could do was drive to Taos. Well, I rented a car. I decided it was too far. So I didn’t do that, either. And the hotel room I had a mirror. The mirror had curlicue flowers hand painted all around. I looked at myself in that mirror, I thought, you know— Anyway. Spring is coming. I’ve just got to come back to life. So after the conference—I knew Stephanie, but because we had had acquaintanceships over the years. But anyway, so she had always been inviting me to Montreal. So I went to Montreal. Well, OK, so we started our relationship. And all my juice came back on, like—So what am I going to do with this? Because the work I’d been making was like that. I was sick of it anyway. And I’d been working on pieces of paper. I would take the printout and paste it on something and paint around, you know—And everything was this big. Well, all right. No more watercolors.

04-00:42:57 I also went to China right then. And in China, started using—They had this poster paint stuff. Started using that, to get some substance. I came back, All right, I’m going to switch to acrylics. So I reorganized the studio slightly, got some acrylics, started working. I am doing both the kind of computer-y-write- y pieces, and the painting pieces, and trying to put those together, with not very great success. Then there was going to be, at Pier 23, that bar there in San Francisco on the Embarcadero—is still owned by an ex-student from SFAI. And she was going to do a Valentines show. So would I make a valentine? So all right. So I made about twenty valentines. Just getting into that paint.

04-00:44:07 Then I was going to do a seminar that fall, a graduate seminar. So I decided I would do a backdrop for the seminar, and it would be big, and it was going to be—this was a whole experiment, which was a total failure. It was going to be a seminar where we would talk about art and spiritual things. So I made the first painting of this type that I made. It would the mind on one side and the

body on the other side, and earth at the bottom, and the sky at the top. So I made this thing.

04-00:44:59 Martin: It was the biggest thing you could make in here, because to put it up, it just reached up to the ceiling. But it was made in four parts, so I could do it on the floor, all that stuff. OK, so I made this thing. I never used it. The seminar, anyway, was very badly set up, by me. Then when it rolled around to January, I said, “You know, that was a good idea, making paintings that way.” So I made four or five of them, including this one. Now, the way they were made, as I just described, that the mind was on this side and the body was on this side; I’m just going to feel body and go [makes a noise] with the paint. So that’s going to be red, and the mind’s going to be blue, and I’m just standing over here. The earth is going to be sort of dark, and the sky is going to be sort of light, and I’ll put a circle up there. I’ll put a circle down here. And then you look, and you look and you look, until it visually gels. Well, what happened with this one, it was going to be Kandinsky’s apocalypse. It never would visually gel. So I threw the other three away. Because this one, all right, when I made this, I—that was going to be the thing; I don’t know what the hell’s going to be down here, but something has got to be down there. And then finally—I just thought, Well, all right, I’ll put my sperm and my blood. And that sort of—and that was that.

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Cándida Smith: So that is supposed to be a corpuscle?

04-00:46:53 Martin: I don’t know. You mean right there?

Cándida Smith: Yeah, right.

04-00:46:58 Martin: Yeah, right. No, I hadn’t thought of it that way, but sure. It was just red. You know, all right. This is unpleasant. Well, I have to get that painting out. ’Cause it’s not an attractive painting.

04-00:47:29 Ah. Here, we could just pin it right there, I think.

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04-00:47:35 Cándida Smith: And you just put pins right through the middle of it?

04-00:47:46 Martin: Oh, well—I mean, with this one, it’s going to finally end up in the throwing away department. I was going to paint a skull, and it was going to be dug in. First, I put a gel. I tend to work with everything wet. I put a wet wet gel on

there. Then I sprayed it with red. Then I sprayed it with black. Then while it was wet, I could cut in, because I had to have—It’s got to be cut in there. I cut the skull, add a little nosey and little teethies, the cross bones. That was that. Then a few weeks later, I said, “You know, that is really dumb.” So I’ll work it some more with this. Now, I give it my little eternity sunrise or sunset or something, so it has this little cum spot up here, and it’s Mt. Tamalpais with a streak of power light. This turned out to be an egg. All right, because my theory is—this is going to go back to when I was building a homestead and doing that Beulah Land book—that we go around. And so, I’ll come back as grass. And/or death—The painting isn’t settled. It’s so sad to me. I can never let them go until there’s a life sign in them.

04-00:49:53 So the egg. You see, you find these things as you go along. At least with me, I find them as I go along. The last thing I had planned on, or even thought of, was that was going to be an egg. I just knew that something down there has to be happening. So anyway, that’s about mind and body, and that’s about the physicality of paint, and about thinking. And certainly, at Berkeley I used to listen to Henry Schaeffer Zimmern carrying on about—I don’t remember his phrase, quite. It was essentially “visual thinking.” There is visual thinking, that you can’t explain it to people. They learn how. Oh, you can sort of say, like setting up that triangle and all that stuff. Finally, it comes. And with me, it came, as I think I said in the catalogue, there with that painting, in—I guess it was the spring of 1948. Suddenly, it came together.

Cándida Smith: Are there visual syllables that you return to?

04-00:51:22 Martin: There are two kinds of things there. There are symbols there; this is semiotic, and syntactic or something. For better or worse, there are semiotic ones right now—It’s better not to name them to oneself, then they become habits. Just— it’s—That was why I started the Tarot card things, at the end of the seventies. Everything was just worn out, cliché, habit. All things I’d found in the late fifties, that whole wonderful vocabulary of symbols [that] came out of me, I wore them out. So anyway, yeah, there are things, I’ve noticed, that do recur. If nothing else works, stick that on it. But as far as visual vocabulary—

04-00:52:33 Anyway—I don’t think that’s a great backdrop. Suppose we take that down? It’s either a pirate flag or it’s a poison bottle. Which one do you want? And that’s my spirit mark. That’s my spirit mark.

Cándida Smith: Your spirit mark? A blue triangle.

04-00:52:52 Martin: Yes.

Cándida Smith: There’s a diamond under it?

04-00:52:54 Martin: A blue diamond. That’s a conscious, corny choice. But it helped, and I needed something there. Because when you’re working here, this end is too far up, and I keep getting the proportions wrong. And oh, there’s a big space at the top I didn’t see.

Cándida Smith: You always work flat?

04-00:53:17 Martin: For the last lot of years. Because otherwise, it drips too much.

Cándida Smith: It seems that you like a porous kind of visual feel. Maybe that’s the wrong word, but the sense of being able to move into the color, and the color blocking you.

04-00:53:44 Martin: Yes. I need a field which will vibrate and stimulate me. I like it to be physical too, so I can cut through it. That’s why I like to work wet.

Cándida Smith: And the cutting through is a sort of cutting back, then?

04-00:54:08 Martin: No, it’s affirm—well, in that one, it was. But basically, it’s just affirming the materiality of the stuff. It would be like carving stone. You know, carving an inscription in stone. You’re in there. It’s not going to come out. Then of course, sometimes you’ve got to get it out, and that’s a struggle.

Cándida Smith: So the material, you’re taking something which has a very much of a light and porous effect, and materializing it at the same time, or reminding us of its materiality.

04-00:54:46 Martin: And lately, I’ve been—You know, I have so much right now invested in acrylic. I have three sets of acrylics. That one, then the one in Montreal, then the one up in Stephanie’s country place. I’ve been using that stuff now, and working in the same size, using that stuff now for fifteen years. Working in the same size for the last seven years, I think it is. Maybe it’s time to change. I looked at some old watercolor stuff. I sure did like those. Anyway, I don’t know what I’m doing right now, to be honest.

Cándida Smith: When I look in the catalogue, I look at the first painting that you had in the show, Sunrise, from spring ’48, it seems rather thick, in terms of—at least from looking at the picture.

04-00:55:47 Martin: It is. It was pushing the paint around with a palette knife.

Cándida Smith: And rather straightforward physical images. You know, triangles, a cross, what looks like probably a fish.

04-00:56:06 Martin: Well, there’s a sun, and a flower that’s a star.

Cándida Smith: When did you start thinning your paints and your colors? Can you say?

04-00:56:23 Martin: What do you mean?

Cándida Smith: Thinning them out. Making them more porous, more luminous.

04-00:56:30 Martin: Oh.

Cándida Smith: I’m struggling for the right words, but this seems rather—

04-00:56:36 Martin: Yeah, that’s opaque paint, yeah. That’s all in paste. I don’t know.

Cándida Smith: Were you doing more translucent work at the same time as you were doing this?

04-00:56:57 Martin: Depends on the material you’re using. With oil paint, because it takes longer to dry, because what’s there wasn’t what you really wanted after all, so you paint over it. It just builds up. When I started working with watercolors, which was in’57, ’58-ish. That’s the way they are. And anyway, if you don’t like it, you make another one. It just went that way. I think the material that you use makes a huge, huge difference anyway. I never thought about it, that painting is just such an example. All the paintings I made then, if we had them— Furthermore, right after that, I started using house paint. And that’s opaque. And that’s that. It doesn’t have to be, but you don’t get anything if you thin it out a lot. But I do like substance. Like these even, to me, one of the things about these is if you touch them, touch it, the thick stuff. That’s why, for instance, computer art was never satisfactory. Etching is so beautiful. Just because of the line is there. It’s there. Whereas lithography, alas, is such a surface thing. Well, so anyway, yeah, I like to touch stuff.

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05-00:00:09 Cándida Smith: I did want to ask when you start integrating text into your artwork. When does that emerge? And how does that develop over time? In the catalogue no. 13A, which is ’57, ’58, is thickly textured.

05-00:00:37 Martin: Let me see it. I don’t know which one that is. Okay, yeah, right.

Cándida Smith: You paint over an image of print text that you ripped out of what looks like a book catalogue.

05-00:00:46 Martin: It’s Art in America. No, no, sorry. The Art Bulletin.

Cándida Smith: From the series, “Do You Know My Name?,” you write, you hand write on the top. And the collage effects—Of course, collage effects are, at this point, not new in terms of the world of art, but—

05-00:01:12 Martin: No, they certainly were not. Although at Berkeley, they were.

Cándida Smith: Joey America has got intricate writing and storytelling integrated into the work. Going though the catalogue, I could read the progression.

05-00:01:51 Martin: The progression is pretty simple. It goes back to Berkeley. I may have talked about that last time. That is to say, that—And it sounds so pretentious, but it isn’t. I was coming out of a different cultural background than Glenn or Jim McCray or Erle, or any of those people. They were coming—I’ll just—from what I think, they were coming out of the School of Paris. I wasn’t. First of all, I was coming out of the Kandinsky modes, and more or less, the Central European and the German Romantics, whom I really didn’t know until 1949. I was coming out of there. Secondly, although I was an abstract painter, I knew what those things were. Maybe they were—I couldn’t tell people, because they were nasty or something. It was my dick or whatever. But I knew what these things were. And they didn’t. And they—you mentioned it—beat the subjective emotion—

Cándida Smith: Romantic subjectivity.

05-00:03:12 Martin: The romantic subjectivity out of them. Well, it didn’t get beaten out of me, I just covered it over. Knowing what they were, hearing their names in my mind, hearing sentences in my mind, it just came naturally, once—to write them down. In 1955, I guess it was—’54 or ’55—we moved from—when I was teaching in Maxwell—we moved back here. We were living in a house on Harrison Street. A very large, ruinous old house. It had lots of cracks. And there’s this texture stuff to fill up the cracks. So I’m filling the cracks, and painting on or with anything I can get. And so—And also, when Jean and I were first married, she gave me a book, which is over there, to write my thoughts in. I’ve been writing—I mean, that’s all my studio notebooks— writing them down ever since. So all that was just there. So then that one from The Art Bulletin, I’ve got all this texture stuff I’m repairing the walls with and it—you cover it up and use it for paint. I just make the form and then write on the form what I’m thinking about the form.

05-00:05:06 So I did that. And then I gave up using the texture a lot after a month or whatever. ’Cause it’s not very satisfactory. Yes, I had been reading Jung, and yes, I knew his ideas about mandalas and stuff, and, well, so—That series that’s in there, I made a whole series just—because the idea was to make an image, make another, make another. I would come home at night and just do that. And let them grow. So here’s the image, there’s the word that goes with it, and you just do it. So that went along. And then by ’63, ’64, by that time, we’re living here. I got to make them bigger; I want them to be symphonic; all I’m doing is making little one-line folk songs. So I started to make them eighteen-by-eighteen inches, instead of nine-by-twelve, which is just to take the nine-by-twelve and paste it differently. And this is going to be a Berkeley piece, because you do have visual order. And this needs something in the corner. And it doesn’t need color, it needs texture. Well, words look pretty texture-y when you write them. So I would just sit there, free associate, write into the places, the shapes that they seem to need. So it has nothing to do with the ongoing march of collage. So—what’s his name?—Bill Seitz comes. He’s going to do this collage show. Assemblage. He’s all hot for Bruce Conner. I take him to see Bruce Conner. We do all that stuff. He has all them in his show, but he doesn’t have me. So fine.

Cándida Smith: At this point, because of the Art Bank, you’re the local—

05-00:07:20 Martin: The local person. The person to go to who knows everybody, and who will take you anywhere. And knows where they live. And if he doesn’t, he’ll find out.

Cándida Smith: And you were supposed to have already sort of weeded out the wheat from the chaff?

05-00:07:35 Martin: No. What was one of the issues. If you’re a member, an artist member of the Art Association, you’ve already been weeded. You’ve been in three juried annuals. That’s it. Now, it may be that you’ve greatly declined from the glory days of thirty-five years ago. That doesn’t matter. I made—well, that’s not quite true, but it’s essentially true—no choices. I showed everybody who wanted to be shown. I organized their work into theme shows, toured those shows around the country—mostly to community colleges, places like that. We published a catalogue with a bio and a photo. We did three of those catalogues. I did, with—we mentioned Dorothy Miller, I think, last time.

05-00:08:28 I did take her to see Jay and Wally, because I knew that that’s always a— they’d put on a great show, sure. I like their stuff. And they were members. So a few years later, in ’62, ’63, Jim [James] Elliott and Walter Hopps came up from L.A. Elliott was, at that time, head of the L.A. County—I guess he was contemporary art or something at the L.A. County Museum. And Walter was

the hotshot of the Ferus Gallery. They came up to see things. So they came to see me. I got every single artist out, and made them look at every one. Afterwards, I heard—I guess from Jim Elliott—“Why did we have to look at all that stuff?” In the meantime, all those people were accusing me of playing favorites. The artists were. And what was very rapidly happening, the gallery world was coming up. And anybody who could get a gallery dropped us and went to the gallery, because then they would get exclusive. So I’m being accused of not showing everybody. The good ones are all leaving. By 1965, it became untenable. So there’s a big art revolution and an art war, and I’m to be fired. So a new artist council is elected to fire me. We have a meeting. Well, Ted {Elliott?}, who was the executive director of the Art Association, he’s there, and they tell him to fire me. And he says, “I won’t.” Not long after that, Gurdon Woods left as director of the school. So I got that job. The Art Bank lasted less than a year afterwards before it all fell to pieces.

Cándida Smith: Well, maybe its time had come, too.

05-00:10:36 Martin: It’s time had come.

Cándida Smith: As I look at the work done in the sixties, there’s the introduction of a more cartoon-y kind of—

05-00:10:52 Martin: I’ll have to admit it does connect to pop art. But which cartoon-y ones do you mean?

Cándida Smith: I’m actually thinking of, like, the large corn sheller wheel—

Martin: All right, OK, let’s talk about that.

Cándida Smith: Which has the sort of Philip Guston feel to—

05-00:11:10 Martin: Oh, to hell with that!

Cándida Smith: Well, a later Philip Guston.

05-00:11:13 Martin: No, it has nothing to do with Philip Guston at all. No, let’s talk about that, because very, very particular things happen. So there’s the Joey America thing there. Well, in the making of that catalogue, we had this terrible argument. Because since I set the layout of the show, and laid out the walls, and then laid out the cases. All right, so the sequence of things on the walls, which is blah- blah-blah-blah-blah. Well, I did the cases last. So they have high catalogue numbers. However, chronologically, the Beulah Land book is in between Joey America and that “Carpenter” painting. Although it’s way at the back of the

book. So it gets a high catalogue number, so it completely throws off the chronological development.

05-00:12:17 Well, what happened was, with Joey America, I was making those, then I made more, and I made more, and now I’m using this up. They were made out of scraps of scraps. Pretty soon, I’ve used up all the scraps and I’m not getting any new scraps. Furthermore, the imagery really is coming down to, like, one word of a sentence. So we come to Labor Day. And Jean and the children go off to her family’s place on Russian River. I’m up here all alone, all by myself. I got to get out of this thing. I have one of my colossal erotic roars, and switch back to using homemade paint, the way I had done back in the fifties. Get a bunch of sheets of paper about this big, and in this room, just start painting simple, simple, simple, simple cannons and pyramids. The pyramids were women and the cannons are me, OK? I made hundreds of those things. I took them to school. I’m doing a graduate seminar. I take them to school. We’re in this very large room. So I pin them up on all four walls, from the floor to the ceiling, which is about, oh, fourteen feet up. Besides that, the floor is all covered. There’s about ten feet where you could get in the door. So “OK, kids, this is my work.” So I thought it looked pretty good. So then two weeks later, I reset up the same thing, and invited Gerry [Gerald] Nordland, who was the director of the San Francisco Museum [of Art] at that time. So he offers me a show. So I’m feeling pretty good about these things. So by then I’m with {Royal Marks} in New York. We’d shown collages like the Joey America.

05-00:14:45 Zero results. Right after those, I had started making pastels that were this big, of sentimental themes. Like the rose in the hills and stuff like that. California old fashioned, sentimental. He even showed that. That was real bust. So then I bring these “Carpenter” things. It’s July in New York. He comes down from Maine just for this. He doesn’t like them at all. On the way back, I read Darby Bannard’s The New Art, or whatever it was called. Somewhere in there, I read a piece by someone who’s setting up a show, that the glory of American art— whatever his term was—its majestic size. All right, I’m going to get majestic size, that’s it. I reorganize the studio, so I could paint big; I buy a roll of canvas, make my set of stretcher bars, and just do one after another—starting with the images in those “Carpenter” things. I made, I don’t know, maybe eight or ten of those. And then I noticed I could pick up the Beulah Land book imagery, and make billboards. So I made that one, and I don’t know, maybe four or five others. I always thought that one came out—there’re two that came out really the best. That one that’s in the show there was one. And Jim Newman a dealer here, he bought the other one from a show that I had with him. Anyway. Then that ran out, like I’m just doing this over and over. And so again, we come to the summer time. I think I went through all this, did I? The man coming up out of Lake Merritt? All right, I didn’t.

05-00:17:04 I’ve been making those like that one, except simpler, and just any kind of thing I could think of. But getting stuck. I’m driving along Lake Merritt. It seems to me a man comes up who’d been swimming in Lake Merritt. How could he have been swimming in Lake Merritt? I have not the foggiest idea how this could be. Anyway, he’s half nude, and I get this very strong male charge, and there are these cirrus clouds rolling around in the sky. I come home and I say, “You know—” So I have a canvas. They were—Well, they could just about fill this. They’re basically seven-and-a-half-by-five-and-a- half. I got a brush, and I’m just going to make forms. And the whole problem with things like that California Harvest, or whatever it’s called, Harvest on the {Beater?} Road was that the forms are fixed. Each is an enclosed form. All right. Any time a form starts to close, I’m going to break it open with another form. And when that closes, I’ll break it open with another. I just did that for hours that night. And came to look at it the next day. And that’s what I’m going to do. So after about six months to a year of doing that, comes the next painting in there.

Cándida Smith: Yeah, the corn sheller wheel.

05-00:19:05 Martin: No, no, that’s part of the California bunch. The one after that.

Cándida Smith: Oh, the one—OK.

Martin: That one.

Cándida Smith: The Joey America still life?

Martin: That one. I decided I was going to make more farm forms. But anyway, there’s that one. I made a bunch of those. Until that kind of—I keep doing this and doing this. And then I came over here one morning and was listening to Rachmaninoff at top volume. I think the next painting in there—let me see it. OK, we didn’t—turn the page one more. Yeah, we didn’t reproduce it. OK. That brown one.

Cándida Smith: Number 83.

05-00:19:56 Martin: From there on, everything was extremely linear, ending up with the pastel that’s on the other page. That purple pastel. If you go back one. This is a materials issue. With acrylic, I never could manipulate the colors, I feel. I just never could do it. So I thought, Well, I’ve got all these lines pouring out of me. And I’ll use pastels, because I could hold a, quote, “a rainbow in my hand.” So I’d do all the lines, and then I would just sit there and color them up. I did that until—pastel smears, god damn it. So I’ll switch to oil. I did a few oils in the manner of the pastels. Then the next thing that came was that hands thing. With the hands.

05-00:21:15 Then what doesn’t show, the pastels of Asia, which we didn’t put in the show.

Cándida Smith: In ’65, you become director of SFAI.

05-00:21:37 Martin: Yeah.

Cándida Smith: And that’s going to be, I guess off and on, where you’re going to be for the next twenty-something years?

05-00:21:48 Martin: Till 1992.

Cándida Smith: ’92, Right. To what degree did you set out to review and revise the curriculum?

Martin: None.

Cándida Smith: None?

05-00:22:06 Martin: What I set out to review and revise—We had a triumvirate of Elmer [Bischoff], Dick [Diebenkorn] and Frank [Lobdell]. Elmer had already left. Frank and Dick were leaving.

Cándida Smith: By the time you get there?

05-00:22:28 Martin: I think Dick had already gone to L.A.

Cándida Smith: I think he was at UCLA at that time.

05-00:22:33 Martin: He’d already gone. Frank was going, or had by that year, gone to Stanford. They had left behind their disciples. And SFAI was a very fixed thing. So what I set out to do was to bring in other attitudes. I may have mentioned, I got that idea from Stephen Pepper.

Cándida Smith: No, you didn’t mention that, actually.

05-00:23:16 Martin: But anyway, I got that idea from him. What was coming up then was the new age-y, dope-induced or whatever, the new age-y bunch. So I hired, I guess, one of them. Also, since they were so painterly, I knew Tom [Thomas] Akawie. And spray painting was the coming thing, so I hired him. We were having an issue in photography. Fine art photography had to be in black and white. So I hired a color photographer. Things like that. But in terms of revision of the curriculum, no. Later on, we did revise it some. But I never saw myself as an architect of curricula. Actually, what I saw myself as—this

kind of shows it—I saw myself as someone who is building a community that I could live in. I was building a place for me to live. Where we could all live. I could only live in it if we could all live in it. So in terms of my hermit mode and all of that, I built myself a place to live in. And community, togetherness was, I realize now, extremely important to me. One reason I taught the entering class was so everybody knew who I was, and I kind knew who they were. I didn’t know their names, but I knew their feelings, their concerns. And they knew mine, and knew the community they had come into.

Cándida Smith: This was the introductory art history class?

05-00:25:27 Martin: Yeah.

Cándida Smith: So it was, like, Lascaux to Picasso?

05-00:25:31 Martin: It wasn’t. It developed over the years. In the beginning it was, quote, “modern art history,” and it was nineteenth and twentieth century. But you couldn’t really do nineteenth century unless you’d done something of eighteenth century. So by the time it was over, we did start with Lascaux, kind of, except I—I did—instead of Lascaux, we’ll do shamanism, we’ll do hunter-gatherers. I set it up with music and all this stuff. Anyway, we did that. As time passed, I got more and more stagey. Because the guy who was the—in those days, we called it humanities. He remarked, “You know, Fred, all we do is vaudeville.” Yeah, that’s what we do. We do vaudeville. Sure. ’Cause we got to keep them excited and involved. Art history can be a real killer. Sure, I did Greek and Roman. Roman was nothing but sex. Roman sex. I went to Pompeii and took all these slides. Took them through the Villa of the Mysteries, how that worked. I would do art history, but it was really artists. I did artists. Because they’re going to be artists. We’re going to go looking for friends and enemies. This is what he or she did and why they did it. How they lived their lives. It was kind of gossipy. But it held them. And they looked. I said, “Listen, all you have to do is show up, and you get a C.” You’ve seen everything. What more do you need.

Cándida Smith: So to what degree did materials and visual structure fit into your lectures?

05-00:27:42 Martin: Materials came in when—It didn’t, in the beginning, at all. Then, in the seventies, some point in the early seventies, it must’ve been, I went to a thing where there was lots of talk about interdisciplinary and stuff. Ultimately, I did. I had a special lecture on performance art. I worked up one about earth art and installation. I never really did photography. I never did film. ’Cause by that time, we had separate courses. We had a film history course, a photo history course, and so on. My course was mostly really a painting course. But as I said, taught from the perspective of being an artist. It is true that form and materials turns up then. Sure, because he’s using that and she’s using that.

And that’s because that’s what they had then to make the major statement they could make. Now, for better or worse, it’s movies. And it is. We live in a mass culture, and a painting can’t reach a mass audience, because there’s only one of them. That’s it.

Cándida Smith: You mentioned that you, well, you put up your own work in one of your seminars. Did the teachers at Berkeley, or at CSFA, when you were younger, did they integrate their own work into their classes?

05-00:29:45 Martin: At Berkeley, never, that I know of. In the CSFA days, I understand that Clyfford Still did. He took his disciples—he had a studio on campus, he took his disciples to see it. ’Cause a couple of them told me about it. It was a very serious, important thing. But since then, I’ve always been very much of two minds about that. Nowadays, I have been doing it. Right at the start of class. “Look, this is where I am. This is what I am. You can drop now. No hard feelings. Because this is what you’re going to get. However, I’m not going to teach you to paint what I paint. But this is the kind of person I am, and this is where I am. From where I am, I will meet you where you are, and the two of us will talk.”

Cándida Smith: When you were at Berkeley, which teachers did you know what their work was like? If any.

05-00:31:13 Martin: I’d seen one of Jim McCray’s geometrics, because they had a little faculty show. They did do that once that I know of. They had a little faculty show, I saw his there. I don’t remember Glenn Wessels there. I don’t remember anybody’s except his. I saw a painting of John Haley’s somewhere, somehow; I saw one of Margaret O’Hagan’s, I think at the San Francisco museum. I saw a show of Erle Loran’s at—it was called the Rotunda Gallery at the old City of Paris. I saw a show of his.

Cándida Smith: Did they let you know that these shows were going on, or did you just discover that—

05-00:31:57 Martin: I think it was entirely accidental. I don’t think he mentioned it. Although why would I have gone there, if I didn’t know about it? But they never pushed their work at all. And this time that I did, of bringing in all those things, because I was just so god damn hot about it, I had to show them to somebody. Let’s try them out here. Because I had a relationship with the students where I could do that, too. I mean, they would bring in stuff, you know. They’d bring in stuff, I’d bring in stuff. Our ultimate bringing in stuff was—A guy who was at that time head of the program—whom I had put there because Frank Lobdell had been the head. Frank wanted {Al White?} to do it. So his students were in rebellion. They wanted me to come to class and see what it’s really like. So I went. This one guy had built a guillotine, that’s about as high as this ceiling,

with a big light on top that would flash. I don’t know what it was all—I thought it was hilarious and fantastic. Al was crushed. Totally destroyed. Because this had been his favorite student. We had to get somebody else to do the seminar and all that stuff. But anyway, it is not uncommon—now, I don’t know what they do at Berkeley—but at the Art Institute, it is not uncommon to show them your work.

Cándida Smith: But you talked in terms of starting up a communication, “Here’s where I’m at.”

05-00:33:49 Martin: Yes, right.

Cándida Smith: “I don’t expect you to be like me.” And maybe, in fact, showing your work operates like, as a, “Don’t try to do what I do,” kind of—

05-00:33:58 Martin: It can do that, yeah. I gave a talk at the Smith-Andersen Gallery, back in, I think it was 1981, about the watercolors I was doing then. I had a show there, I gave a talk about the watercolors, about how they were painted using this table, in this room. So the students right now, for other reasons, tend to work about this sizes, and in cramped locations, and have very little physical relationship to their work. This gets back to that constant issue. They have just none. So I made a set of slides then. At that time, I would stretch a huge piece of watercolor paper on this table, throw paint all over, and then pick it up and turn it around like this, while it’s still wet, and then work back into it. Then at that time, this room was all—now, it’s a square; at that time, it was definitely linear. I would sit on a chair, that seems to have disappeared now. I would sit there like this, with my legs spread, and go in and out of the painting like this, breathing the painting into me, me back onto the painting; let its imagery flow into me, me flow back out, while it’s drying. ’Cause watercolors—these were all water—when they’re drying, what is beautiful isn’t afterwards. Anyway, I would do that, and then paint back into it. It was extremely physical. So I made a set of slides, back in 1980, of that. So I was going to show them to the students last night. Because it’s about being in your space. Your painting is in your space. This is a living space we are in. And you’re with it. And so here’s what I did once. Now, in that particular case, I made the first step of the painting, and I explained a little bit of the imagery in the painting, that was found in the process of looking at the drips, the splats. Then the truth was, afterwards, I put the painting up, and it had a white background, and I didn’t like it. What am I going to do about the white background? Well, I got to paint into it some more. So then, do the same thing, and put it up. I still don’t like it. I’m going to paint into it some more. So I paint into some more. When it was all done, the thing was a muddy mess. It’s as simple as that. At the very end, finally, I found a symbol in one corner that was really OK. The rest of it is just bleah. The painting’s a failure. But anyway, live with it.

05-00:37:10 So anyhow, in terms of showing your work, I was going to show that last night, and I couldn’t get the computer to connect to the projector. Because I had left my projector home. Last year, my computer connected to that projector; this year, it won’t.

Cándida Smith: You know, as I look through the archives that have been left by the teachers in the Berkeley department, it seems like they had a very prescriptive method. They wanted you to paint work that looked a certain way. Certainly, when I took Art 2A in 1965—and I don’t even remember the name of the teacher, which is shocking, I suppose, but that was also very prescriptively driven. Is it and was it, in fact, in the classroom, you were supposed to produce work that looked like what your teacher wanted it to look like?

05-00:38:27 Martin: Of course! I mean, sure. How do you know you’ve learned it, unless it looks like it?

Cándida Smith: So what happened to individual vision?

05-00:38:37 Martin: I thought that was beaten out.

Cándida Smith: No, that’s the “romantic subjectivity.”

05-00:38:40 Martin: Well, what’s the individual vision, except that? It’s true, there could be an individual formal vision. There was a vision. It was a formal vision, and this is the way it’s supposed to look. And it was, it seems to me, I still believe, derived from Erle, Cézanne, and Picasso and Matisse. And we won’t talk about Surrealism. It is a heresy and a sin. It isn’t even art. And we won’t talk about the Italian Renaissance, although {inaudible} did, because it breaks the picture plane. And come on! It was extremely narrow.

Cándida Smith: And those of you who recognized yourself as artists—you and Sam Francis and Jay DeFeo and—

Martin: And a couple of others, yeah.

Cándida Smith: So you all recognized yourself as being rebels?

05-00:40:30 Martin: I never would’ve used that word, but yes.

Cándida Smith: And you all recognized that what you were learning from your faculty was stodgy? Like Jay DeFeo used that word, that actual word in one of her interviews.

05-00:40:47 Martin: Well, see, what we were learning, by—Because I was—although I was like this, I was also so—so whatever. So Art 2A/2B, 3A/3B, you were supposed to learn things. When I went back, when I came back in the fall as a junior, well, I had learned all that. So now I’m going to do my own stuff. I’d learned all that. So what am I learning from them? I don’t know. Nothing. I did see Glenn every week. He did give me a critique every week. Whether I learned anything from it, I don’t really know.

Cándida Smith: What were you learning from your friends? From Sam or Jay or—What were they learning from you?

05-00:41:55 Martin: It isn’t like that. You do see each other’s stuff, you do get—we’ll call them ideas—from each other’s stuff. But it isn’t—What did—Now you’ve given me an answer, unfortunately. What did Picasso learn from Braque? And what did Braque learn from Picasso? You know. They were making it up together.

Cándida Smith: Well, maybe learn is the wrong word.

05-00:42:22 Martin: It’s the wrong word. You’re making it up together. And then when you separate—which you do do—when June 1949 comes, people disperse. And they’re never really together again in the same way. At least I was never together again in the same way. For instance, yeah, with the Six Gallery. I was never a member of the Six. It was a kind of a cooperative gallery. I think we paid dues, even.

Cándida Smith: You’re down as one of the dues paying members.

05-00:42:55 Martin: In that sense—but that doesn’t—I didn’t hang out with them either, except I went over to Jay and Wally’s all the time. But I didn’t hang out.

Cándida Smith: You went over to Jay and Wally’s all the time, and the records suggest that you had the single most successful show at the Six.

05-00:43:15 Martin: Oh, really? Oh, yeah, right, at fifty-cents a piece, sure.

Cándida Smith: Right, you sold more work than anybody else.

05-00:42:23 Martin: Yeah. Yeah, that was fine with me. I don’t have to take it home. I still have that attitude, too. Anyway. So where are we now?

Cándida Smith: So maybe learning is the wrong word, but as you’re developing your own vision and things, you are, in dialogue sometimes with people, who may be people you’re teaching with, if you’re a teacher, or your friends. Is there a

shared vocabulary? Is there a shared way? Did you and Jay have a shared way of looking at things? Or a shared way of looking?

05-00:44:07 Martin: If we did, I never found out. Nor, I think, did she ever find out. We liked each other’s stuff, sure. That’s all there is.

Cándida Smith: All right. So maybe you didn’t talk about art stuff. Maybe you talked about alchemy? Mandalas?

05-00:44:32 Martin: What did we talk about? I have no idea. No, we never talked about mandalas. We never talked about alchemy. Wally made those alchemy pictures, that was all a surprise to me. We never talked about stuff like that. Though this is going to go back to the New Yorkers have ideas, and they come out here and there’s nobody to talk to. Maybe it’s true. What happened in 1945, ’6, ’7, ’8, ’9, ’50, ’51, ’51, ’52, ’53—My opinion is that—and I think this is correct, statistically—the artists of the first generation of abstract expressionism, they never were in the war. Were they?

Cándida Smith: No, they weren’t.

05-00:46:11 Martin: They went through the thirties, and all of the social catastrophes of that. They went through American Scene painting. They went through the New Masses art, and all that kind of stuff. And the world was not saved. And they also went through a time of great emotional strain and intensity. And from my perspective, their art arose out of what Cubism did to Surrealism. And it broke out as Rorschach blots. Then—and this will go to Berkeley, when I was a student there in ’47, ’48, ’49. In ’47 and ’48, Berkeley hadn’t heard of them, as far as I know. Anyway, that first generation, there’s an enormous psychic charge there. In my stuff, I mean, there was a whole psychic charge, is what was making these things. Otherwise, go be a physicist, or be an English major or something. Well. I was accused—well, you can’t accuse students of anything, but anyway, you know. I didn’t have any form. No form. So a couple things happen. First, in the New York adventures, Clement Greenberg is a very persuasive writer. He has his history theory he’s going to put on everything, which forces the picture plane, and can’t let Jackson Pollock let the people show—that were in his stuff the whole damn time! As soon as they show, he’s a retrograde. As soon as the content shows, it’s retrograde. So that’s happening there. What’s happening in Berkeley is Erle and those people figure out how to formalize what was not form before. And then lastly, abstract expressionism, when it has no psychic content, make great corporate decoration. It looks good, and it doesn’t demand anything. And you can sell the stuff. And then also, we have the Museum of Modern Art’s 1958 “New Americans” show, or whatever it was called, traveling Europe. You have the climax of a movement. What else can you have, but non-subjective pop art or else post painterly abstraction? What else can you have? Well, to me, I’m still

stuck back there in the late forties. I do come out of—I try and explain this to students. You know, we do come out of the world. We have roots. And oddly, the roots I have both are and are not the Berkeley art department. One side of me certainly is. I do look at the form; is it a coherent thing, visually? And if it isn’t, how can we get it to be that, and say what you mean? Because until it’s a coherent visual form, no one will know what you mean. So I ran on about how I used to teach English, and I’m going to show you where to put the periods and the capitals. Because otherwise—if they can’t read the sentence, they won’t know what it’s about, and they’ll look away. We want them to look. How did we get into that?

Cándida Smith: Well, I was asking you about—I think we got into—we got into the generational shift.

05-00:50:41 Martin: Oh.

Cándida Smith: And what you and your peers, your friends at Berkeley and afterwards, what is it that ties you together? What is it that you got out of Berkeley? What did you independently create for yourselves?

05-00:50:59 Martin: I think we got out of Berkeley—we did get out of Berkeley, looking, form. And we also got out of Berkeley that, god damn, this place is so stuffy, and these are such old farts, and it is stodgy as hell, and it’s as lame as hell, and it’s so—what was the word I would use?—limp. So let’s go do something! And every generation has people like that, too. So, swell.

Cándida Smith: But for a program that does seem to be stodgy, overly prescriptive—

05-00:51:41 Martin: But it was the only program in the U.S. where you were going to get form.

Cándida Smith: You don’t think from Black Mountain or Josef Albers?

05-00:50:23 Martin: Oh, those don’t exist. No, those don’t exist. Yeah, sure, they exist, but not in that way. That wasn’t a university art department. Nobody went—

Cándida Smith: Well, the Josef Albers at Yale was—

05-00:52:00 Martin: That was later. That was later. If you went—I don’t know if you could go to Yale then, in art. In fact, university art departments hardly existed in those days. There weren’t very many. That all comes in the sixties, with the giant increase in enrollments. Before that, there weren’t many, and they taught figure drawing. Figure drawing means certain things. You’re taught certain skills, and a certain formula. Well, those don’t happen to have anything to do with visual form. We were not taught those skills, those formulae. We were

taught visual form instead. I can’t draw the figure worth shit. I can’t. I explain this to the students, too. You know, “You can do it better than I can. Too bad the form is no good.” You know, you got this lump in the middle of the page, but—I think what we got, we did get a way of seeing, that we would not have gotten at UCLA or Stanford. Those are the only—UCLA and Berkeley, well, those were the only two campuses then, weren’t they?

Cándida Smith: UCLA had an art department because it had been a teachers college. So that just continued. Annita Delano and the faculty there was rebelling against the Dow method.

05-00:53:39 Martin: The what method?

Cándida Smith: The Dow method. It’s a very formalized way of teaching shape, color, mark, form and line, that came out of Teachers College in Columbia. Arthur Wesley Dow.

05-00:53:52 Martin: Oh, I’ve seen his book. Yes, I know who you’re talking about. Yes. I even bought a copy of that book a couple years ago. Didn’t he come more out of Japanese art ? He was flatter. Whereas the thing that, for better or worse—all that junk about the picture plane—nonetheless, it was grasping at volumes. One thing I learned from James McCray, when I failed in my application for the MA, he said to me that I should look at Leonardo’s drawings. As I remember it, he talked about the rhythm. I did look at the drawings, and what I remember, having a sense of how things went together. Also, that there’s mass. That’s when I decided I’m not a Buddhist, because I have flesh and bleed, and it’s real. All that was at that time. I did get that. They did involved push-pull in deep space. You know, picture plane; nonetheless, there’s this thrusting inside of it, whereas Dow or whatever his name was, he doesn’t have that. He is rhythm on the surface.

Cándida Smith: Rhythm on the surface, exactly. His phrasing, in fact.

05-00:55:23 Martin: Oh, is it? OK. Because that is what’s there.

Cándida Smith: Yeah. In rhythm and color.

05-00:55:28 Martin: Yeah. But the colors are all muted. Whereas with Margaret O’Hagan, they’re never muted.

Cándida Smith: What kind of work was Sam Francis doing while he was at Berkeley? How did it relate to those puffs of color paintings that he was doing from the early fifties?

05-00:55:53 Martin: They were much more shaped form. Although they still were round-ish. But they were much more shaped forms. That’s the main difference that I recall.

Cándida Smith: Were the paintings as large?

05-00:56:11 Martin: That was physically impossible. The biggest paintings of his I remember from those days would be maybe that size. I remember when he first was doing those big ones. He was here for a week or something, we were talking about it. He was talking about the imagination, floating around in a helicopter or something. But at Berkeley, a big painting was three-by-four feet. That’s another thing that has happened since. When you only have the flat surface, you have to spread out this way. To have any events, any visual events. If you’re going into depth, you couldn’t have visual events going back this way. So you don’t need anything so big. Furthermore, nowadays, if it isn’t big, it gets drowned out by big ones. Also, we have more energy and spend more money than we had then.

Cándida Smith: Well, it does seem, in terms of wrapping up, a theme that we were talking about before, that Berkeley, the Berkeley school, whatever its problems were, during the years you were there—or let’s say ’45 to ‘55—produced an awful lot of painters who achieved some level of recognition. And it can’t just be a generational thing, because there were a lot of schools that were formed, that opened because of the GI Bill. There were a lot of young painters produced. But the Berkeley school does seem to stand out, in terms of the names of people who achieved international recognition.

05-00:58:11 Martin: I don’t have an international—come on!

Cándida Smith: A reputation.

05-00:58:18 Martin: So I had a show in Japan once. I had a show in Montreal once. I almost had a show in Paris once. He showed them around, and there was no result. Because that was when I was doing those little collages this big. Well, that didn’t go over in Paris.

Cándida Smith: Your modesty nonetheless, there’s a number of people who achieved some kind of reputation who came out of there. Maybe not, as I going to say, actually, maybe not the same kind of international reputation—

05-00:58:56 Martin: As Sam, yeah.

Cándida Smith: —as Sam Francis.

05-00:58:57 Martin: Sam went after that. That’s what he wanted.

Cándida Smith: But how do we explain that this school, with this group of students, achieved more than a modicum of success in the American art world, during their lifetimes?

05-00:59:24 Martin: How do we explain that?

Cándida Smith: Yeah, how might you—how would we explain it?

05-00:59:27 Martin: Why don’t we ask some sociologist to do a study. Because that’s sociology, isn’t it?

Cándida Smith: Well, it could be. It’s also history. I mean—

05-00:59:46 Martin: We had high ambition. Do the other schools have people with high ambition? I don’t know. We had high ambition. We were not bound by figure drawing. We were not bound by that. We didn’t think that’s what art was. I don’t think—without doing a study—I don’t think any other university taught Picasso and Matisse in 1945. I don’t think they did. I don’t think they did. Maybe I never took to Picasso and Matisse, quite. But what I’m talking about, they didn’t. The Stanford art department, it was lame. Berkeley was lame, maybe, but Stanford, for instance, that was nowhere.

Cándida Smith: Of course, as I recall, that’s where Diebenkorn came out of, right? That’s where he did his art training, was Stanford.

05-00:61:01 Martin: And CSFA.

Cándida Smith: Well, yeah. As a faculty member.

05-00:61:05 Martin: No! As a student. He was a student there in the late forties. Came back as a faculty member, when Gurdon Woods put the place back together. He might’ve been a faculty member—Because—what’s his name?—MacAgy hired hot students. But as a faculty member, he came back when Gurdon came, which I think was ’54 or ’55. And Gurdon put Clyfford Still and David Park back together by hiring Elmer Bischoff and Dick Diebenkorn and Frank Lobdell. They ran it until 1965, when I came. As they left, it didn’t matter that they had left, because they left surrogates behind, whom I kept.

[End of Interview]