Oral history interview with Joseph Hirsch, 1970 Nov. 13-Dec. 2 Contact Information Reference Department Archives of American Art Smithsonian Institution Washington. D.C. 20560 www.aaa.si.edu/askus Transcript Interview PC: PAUL CUMMINGS JH: JOSEPH HIRSCH PC: It's November 13, 1970 - Paul Cummings talking to Joseph Hirsch in his studio at 246 West 80th that Street. Could we start with some family background. You were born April 25, 1910 in Philadelphia and you went to the Museum school, so did you grow up in Philadelphia? JH: I lived in Philadelphia until I was thirty which is about half my life now. PC: Were you born right in the city? JH: Right in the center of the city and lived there until two years after I was married. I continued to live at the same address because in the building (which is Philadelphia red brick which is the equivalent of New York brownstone) there were several apartments in the building that my father owned. My father was a doctor. His offices were on the ground floor and the family lived in back. After my marriage we moved into one of the vacant apartments upstairs and lived there for about two years. And then we moved to New York. PC: Do you have any brothers or sisters? JH: I have one sister who lives in Philadelphia. I never had any brothers. My parents died years ago -- well, my father about ten years ago. PC: What schools did you go to before the Philadelphia Museum school? JH: Central High School which used to be City College and when I went there they still had courses in subjects such as ethics, philology, architecture and students had to take eight terms of Latin and something like ten terms of science, chemistry and physics. I wasn't a good student because I had many extracurricular activities. And that combined with this left over college curriculum -- PC: What were the extracurricular activities? JH: I was art editor of this and the Art Club. We had a weekly newspaper, the Centralizer. And a monthly magazine The Mirror and I would do covers for it. We had exhibitions. PC: It sounds as if you got interested in art very, very early. JH: I was interested in art very early. I guess the earliest things that I did -- I think most children are picture makers; I think the great majority of children make pictures and make music when they're young. And then as they grow up the stop making music and stop making pictures. I would say that most children make pictures. Wouldn't you say so? I mean the average child makes pictures, draws. Well, I just scribbled more than the average. My mother occasionally used to take me to hear the Philadelphia Orchestra when I was eight, nine, ten, or eleven. She would take along a pad and pencil. That would be my tranquilizer. If the concert was a little long or tedious for my ears apparently it wouldn't matter if I had a pad and pencil. PC: Was there a great interest in music at home? JH: Yes. There was a piano in the house. My sister played. My father played. My mother used to play. Dad was torn between medicine and music to a great extent. Although he was quite interested in medicine and was chief urologist at two of the hospitals in Philadelphia his love of music and his interest in doing something about Sundays in Philadelphia resulted in his being one of the founders and the manager and treasurer of the Philadelphia Philharmonic Society which used the musicians in the Philadelphia Orchestra and gave eight or ten concerts a season on Sunday evenings, which were practically the only public event in Philadelphia. At that time the movies -- Philadelphia was closed on Sundays. The blue laws in Pennsylvania really were applied. And it was kind of a breakthrough. That lasted roughly during the twenties. But his interest in medicine prevailed and he couldn't do both things. Music was important in our lives. We heard a lot of concerts. We lived only a fifteen minutes' walk from the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. PC: Was there interest in literature and in the visual arts, too? JH: There were pictures on our walls. Many of them were the usual bourgeois pictures of sweet things. I remember we had several etchings by the Philadelphia artist, Joseph Pennell. He actually came to the house once or twice. I remember piping up and criticizing an etching he did of the Philadelphia railroad station; it looked as if the locomotive was coming through the guardrail or some strange thing. Our contact with artists was perhaps a little more than average. I think music was the more dominant influence. I still play piano every day; not by design; I just sort of drift to the piano. It's right there; it's the piano that I had when I was ten. PC: What kind of music interests you? What do you play? JH: I did play a lot of jazz by ear. I happen to have a good ear. My sister is three or four years older than I am and I had the sam music teacher that she had. This meant that very frequently I would play pieces that were assigned to me by the teacher largely by ear. I never learned to read music as well as someone -- my youngest son now reads music better than I used to because he learned the right way, whereas I faked a lot because I have a facile ear. Which, of course, has nothing to do with musicianship. I still play a log of popular music but I think I play much more classical music now. PC: Which composers? JH: The old squares -- Schubert, Beethoven, Scarlatti, occasionally Bartok, Ravel, Rachmaninoff. The old standbys that are still good. PC: Do you think there's been any relationship between the painting and the music? JH: I'm sure there's a relationship but i don't know what it is. The amount of time spent playing piano and the amount of time spent at the easel are bound to impinge on each other. I don't think the painting has affected -- yes, I suppose I'd play the piano better if i didn't paint so much. Perhaps I used to play more than I do now. But as I say, I still play a bit every da. I'm sure that there's been a relationship. In my choice of the things and the forms that interest me once in a while when I go over photographs of past work I notice the appearance, for example, of musical instruments a lot, much more than I realize. PC: How did you decide to go to the Philadelphia Museum School? JH: Mr. Milliet, who was my art teacher at Central High School, without telling me, sent in a application for a municipal scholarship to that school. Just before I graduated he informed me that I had been awarded a four- year scholarship to what is now called the Philadelphia College of Art but which then was called the School of Industrial Art. I had planned to go to college without thinking too much about it. The son of a Philadelphia physician goes to college. For some reason I had applied at Amherst; I think because I had spent aa lot of my summers up in Massachusetts at a boys camp. When this four-year scholarship came through to the art school -- it was a municipal scholarship, the City paid I think two-thirds or three-quarters of the tuition each year -- it occurred to me to try it, at least for a year after I finished high school. Incidentally, one of the things -- a completely artificial thing that influenced my decision to postpone or perhaps forego college was that I was in possession of a big snazzy-looking diploma which said Bachelor of Art; I actually got an authorized Bachelor of Arts diploma. I don't think Central High School continued with that more than two or three more years after I graduated. But at that time the high school graduates got either a B.S. or a B.A. And since I had a diploma with Bachelor of Arts on it occurred to me that maybe I could postpone going to college. And I think it worked out very well. PC: Who were some of your teachers ant the art school? JH: I suppose the chief teacher there was a Quaker illustrator named Thornton Oakley. I believe someone who still teaches there is Henry Pitts; he teaches pen drawing. The painting courses chiefly were taught by Thornton Oakley and an Italian whose name I'll think of only after you go. PC: Were there lots of students? Was it a fine arts school? Or a commercial or industrial school? JH: It was not as commercial as it is now. I get appeals from the alumni association now and it's very much involved with the world of art editors and advertising agencies and packaging and commercial design. The poetry aspect of painting and personal expression play an increasingly minor role than they did even when I was there. In Philadelphia there were two chief schools, as there are now. One is the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts at Broad and Cherry Streets. The other is the Philadelphia College of Art at Broad and Pine Streets. I chose the one at Broad at Pine.