Harry Anderson Audio Transcript Invisible City Sid: So we’re at Harry Anderson's house on West Oak Lane on July 1... Harry: …East Oak Lane. S: We are doing an interview for the project Invisible City Philadelphia and the Vernacular Avant-Garde, funded by Pew Center for the Arts and Heritage. So I've known Harry for a long time, going back to 1970. Where were you born? H: Highland Park, Illinois. S: What your parents do? H: My father was a painting contractor and my mother was a housewife. S: Is Highland Park where the Frank Lloyd Wright's are? H: There some there but that's Oak Park. There was, but I don’t want to get into that too much but there were a lot of people that did Frank Lloyd Wright type houses, his disciples. What was that called? S: Prairie Schools. H: So there were a lot of really nice houses in Highland Park that were from that era but I don't know if any were definitely Frank Lloyd Wright houses. S: Did your home have any inkling of culture or art in it? H: No, no. My parents were both immigrants. S: Oh where were they from? H: My father was born in Sweden in 1900 and my mother was born in Oslo about five, six years later. S: So what was your first art experience? H: Oh boy, well I don't know if you want to get too personal. When I was in school like third, fourth grade I started doing these drawings of houses and buildings more mechanical stuff and the teachers just loved them. They would put them up in the hallway. I would do these science reports with these exaggerated letters stylized, all mechanical stuff. I kinda discovered perspective on my own in the fourth grade. I had a shop teacher, that was in the fourth grade, she showed us these isometric drawings of cube things, with things cut out in different sides you know different views of it and she said I know nobody can do this but can you draw the picture of that cube? So I just whipped it off. You know with perspective, this side looks like that, then I started showing the girl next to me how to do. Well look, if you look at that side that's over there if you put that over there and the teacher was so impressed she gave me this model ship she had made. She couldn't believe that I was able to do that. But I was always interested in, I don’t know if you can call that art, but you know it’s like architecture. S: It’s spatial. H: Right. S: Intelligence. H: Right. But for years after I left the teachers would put my drawings up in the hallway. S: So did you take art classes in high school? H: Highland Park is very wealthy suburb of Chicago. One of the largest concentration of wealth in the United States in the northern suburbs. I had a teacher named, Ruth Estherman, she’s pretty well known, if you look her up. She was a good painter. She taught at the Art Institute as well. All my teachers were good, the only problem I had in art is that I was the only guy. I would be in a class with, you know, 25 women and me. S: That doesn’t sounds so bad… H: Yeah, well when you’re a young kid not interested in women necessarily. You know, all the guys would take shop... S: Right… H:…drawings, so I don’t take any shop drawings I know all at stuff. You know, just inherently, I know it. Take art and Estherman she showed the films of Picasso. No, not Picasso. You know, Pollack. Doing all this. And this was, you know, this was in the 60s, early 60s, late 50s. I don’t know where she got these films. S: Is that town where the Bergman's lived? H: Could be. S: The big collectors of surrealist work? H: Yeah I don't know. I didn't know anything about that. I left there long ago. It could be. S: So you went to Penn State and... H: I went to the University of Illinois first. S: What did you study there? H: I started out in architectural engineering but it was just terrible. It wasn't anything inspirational about the type of program they had there so I switched into industrial design, this was good… S:…and then transferred to Penn State in industrial design? H: No, no. I graduated from the University of Illinois in industrial design. Then I went to graduate school in Penn State. S: Okay okay so that's where you first came in contact with Italo? H: I applied in the design department because that was my strength. I was very strong in graphic design and industrial design. They didn't have industrial at Penn State, so they had graphic design. So I applied for that and got accepted, but Penn State was so unstructured there they didn’t really care what you studied. Once I met Italo I just kinda made that my secondary thing. I did a lot of the graphics stuff all along. I should show you my thesis that I did. I printed it myself offset and I did all the graphics and stuff. S: And that's why you did posters and books… H: Yeah, I was always interested… I had a friend who ran the film society there. Showed all of these art films like Cocteau and all those European guys. Wild Strawberries. I would design these posters for him for his events. Penn State had this incredible film library and if you taught a class there, which I did cause I had an assistantship, you’d look through their archives of things. If you wanted a film I on time or an abstract thing on what time is they would show up in your class with a projectionist and the film, show it and then leave. I didn’t have to do anything except order it. S: Wow. H: My friend Juris Urbans was sort of in charge. He was very interested in film so he knew all the stuff to order for the film library there. So he had all this incredible stuff. S: Yet talk about Juris, because I asked Mary about him and she didn't remember him. H: He was a painting major. They had really good painters in the painting department. He had studied film somewhere in California. He came to the graduate school at Penn State for painting. But he was always interested in film and his paintings were film-like, frames and stuff I can’t remember. S: So what year are we talking at this point? H: ’68. See I graduated from Penn State in ’69 I think. So ’67, ’68, something like that. S: Was Richard Frankel there at that point? H: Yeah. S: And he was running the gallery? H: Uh, yeah. I guess so. The gallery was pretty unstructured. S: Well I spoke to him and he said that Italo said, “You should show my friend, Dan Flavin”. H: Yeah. S: So. I looked up the catalogue and there's a work that says “Untitled Florescent Ultraviolet Environment (For my Friend Italo Scanga)." H: Right. He did that in the student hall not in the gallery. S: The next year there was a show with Flavin, Sol Lewitt, and Carl Andre. It was an amazing show. Donald Judd maybe? And I don’t know if Italo was involved with that or if it was Richard Frankel. H: I think Richard Frankel was involved more in that. Italo and Frankel were real good friends. That’s why Italo got fired from RISD because he invited Flavin and Judd to come up and give lectures and the administration wanted nothing to do with it, because you know, they didn’t touch the art. They just do drawings and hand it to an engineer. S: Oh okay, so that was anathema to a school that was involved with making. H: Yeah, right. When Italo was at Penn State he was taking over for this guy named Cook, I can’t remember his first name. S: Robert? H: He just beat metal and made stuff, but all I knew was Italo. Italo was there for a year while he was on sabbatical, and then this guy Cook came back and I was doing all this minimal stuff, influenced by Italo. Cook wanted nothing to do with it. He wanted me to start doing work like his. Cook almost blackballed me out of the school. Failed me. The faculty in the other departments really liked my work. I did all this great printing and posters. My work was very strong. I took Eugenio Battisti Art History course on Early Renaissance on Cimabue, and the transition into the Renaissance, pre-pre-Renaissance. Battisti was an expert on Cimabue, for him I did this paper where I analyzed a painting with perspective lines to determine if the perspective was reversed as it is coming to the eye. Not going into the distance like a drawing. They had this idea that the vision comes to you through the eye so that things come out from that, and he was so impressed that he put my paper in his Art History journal that he contributed to.