Oral history interview with Klaus D. Kertess, 1975 Oct. 1 Contact Information Reference Department Archives of American Art Smithsonian Institution Washington. D.C. 20560 www.aaa.si.edu/askus Transcript Preface The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Klaus Kertess on October 1, 1975. The interview was conducted at New York City, NY by Paul Cummings for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. This transcript has been lightly edited for readability by the Archives of American Art. The reader should bear in mind that he or she is reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose. Interview PAUL CUMMINGS: Let me say it is October 1, 1975. Paul Cummings talking to Klaus Kertess in his loft on Bond Street. I'll start at the beginning. You were born in New York City, right? KLAUS KERTESS: Born in New York City in 1940, grew up in Westchester, started going away to school when I was 14 [inaudible]—do you want schools and things like that as well? MR. CUMMINGS: Oh yeah. Well, you were born in New York City. You lived here until when? MR. KERTESS: I didn't live in the city. I was born here. My parents had a home about 20 miles outside of the city. MR. CUMMINGS: Oh, where was that? MR. KERTESS: In—first in Briarcliff and then in an apartment in Ardsley [ph] and then a house in Ardsley. So I grew up [inaudible] years and when to Andover and then went to Yale, got a B.A. at Yale. I went to Europe for a year, thinking I was never coming back. MR. CUMMINGS: [Laughter] MR. KERTESS: Worked in an auction house there and studied—I took courses at the University of Bonn and the University of Cologne, partially because I wanted to, partially to get out of the draft. MR. CUMMINGS: Ah, well, practical. Anyway, we've jumped 20 years. MR. KERTESS: Jumped 20 years. MR. CUMMINGS: [Inaudible]. What was Westchester like? Do you have brothers and sisters? Are there more of you? MR. KERTESS: There's more. There's a brother that's a year older and a sister that's 14 years younger. MR. CUMMINGS: Oh. What are their names? MR. KERTESS: My sister's name is Barbara; my brother's name is Hans. MR. CUMMINGS: Um-hm. Now, in growing up, was there art around the house or books or movies? What kind of ambiance was there? MR. KERTESS: My father was clearly involved with music. He was near blind. He always had bad eyes. My mother had studied some history of art. I mean, from a fairly early age I was instructed in art. There was some art around the house, nothing incredible. I mean, the thing that most impressed me was a copy of a Vermeer that's in the Louvre that my parents got on their wedding trip. There was a German sculptor named Kulver [ph]. There's a piece of his and a couple of nineteenth century paintings that my father had inherited from his father. A lot of my early experiences were of looking at art. And for awhile, I guess for about five years, I drew a lot [inaudible]. MR. CUMMINGS: When did you start that? Was that very young? MR. KERTESS: Well, starting in the first grade. And I stopped when I was about 10 or 11. MR. CUMMINGS: What schools were you going to then? MR. KERTESS: It was in the local public school. I mean, in Irvington, until I was—I guess I was 10 or 11. Then I went to private school in Tarrytown called Hackley. When I was 15, I went to Andover. MR. CUMMINGS: You went to where when you were 15? MR. KERTESS: To Andover. MR. CUMMINGS: To Andover. How come Andover? Was that— MR. KERTESS: Purely [inaudible] choice. I had a sense that I wanted to get out of the house. I wanted to go away to school. A friend of mine had gone to Andover, a person my father was fairly close to it. The school had a lot of interests in what I was doing and what he thought I was going to do. MR. CUMMINGS: Who was your friend who had gone to Andover? MR. KERTESS: Johnny Dexter-Cayler [ph], who I have never seen since. MR. CUMMINGS: [Laughter] MR. KERTESS: Almost everybody I went to school—it was a small neighborhood, almost everybody went to Hackley. MR. CUMMINGS: Um-hm. MR. KERTESS: I wanted to get out of my family's house. So I went up to look at Andover. I liked the feeling of the place, applied, and was told it was too late to apply. I got in my sophomore year rather than freshman year. So I went to Andover for three years. MR. CUMMINGS: Well, what kind of drawings did you make when you were young? Were they school drawings or things started in school to continue at home? MR. KERTESS: Well, I tended to be like a fairly lonely child and I couldn't like play with too many people. I read a lot. I dreamt a lot. And I started drawing. After awhile I started drawing from the how-to-draw books, essentially just copied things from books. MR. CUMMINGS: Um-hm. MR. KERTESS: Occasionally, [inaudible]. MR. CUMMINGS: Well, was there any desire to be an artist at that point? MR. KERTESS: No. MR. CUMMINGS: Or were you just kind of— MR. KERTESS: I mean, it was like an activity that really involved me. That, swimming, and walking dogs were the only things that I seemed to enjoy. I never thought at the time of being an artist. When I was about eight or nine years old, I got very involved with reading history books. For a long time, I had this thought that I was going to go into government service and be a diplomat. But I never thought of becoming a painter. MR. CUMMINGS: What intrigued you about diplomacy, the government? MR. KERTESS: I really don't know. I probably dealt with it on the same level of fantasy as I did with drawing. MR. CUMMINGS: [Laughter] MR. KERTESS: I got involved with reading like books about history, like some Roman history. And I got involved with certain explorers like Halibut, who [inaudible]. It was—I guess it was a replacement for what now would be television. I mean, I never—wasn't permitted to have a TV in the house. Wasn't permitted to go to the movies more than once a month, only when it was approved by my father. MR. CUMMINGS: Why such a strict regime? MR. KERTESS: My parents were like very—well, on the one hand very liberal, but on the other hand, like both my parents—my father is dead. My mother is still alive. Both of them were German. My father had a very traditional European sense of family. It was that he—the parents were supposedly mainly responsible for the education of the children. Television was an outside influence that he didn't accept. Movies, he didn't accept. It was like a very traditional nineteenth century German intellectual attitude. On the other hand, he did very little to, you know, like educating his children. And the same [inaudible]. MR. CUMMINGS: Yeah. MR. KERTESS: But it was the same way, like when I wanted to go away to school. It was my father's idea that that was wrong because one would stay together as a family until one was 21. MR. CUMMINGS: Well, what about—did they speak German? I mean, both of your parents? MR. KERTESS: Both of my parents spoke German. My grandmother was with us until I was nine. And I spoke German before I spoke English. The first help that—well, the first four years of my life, I didn't see another child other than my brother and spoke only German. And then when we moved into an apartment house I learned to speak English within like six or seven months. MR. CUMMINGS: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So were there any teachers in high school that you remember, or grammar school, that were particularly interesting? MR. KERTESS: There was a first grade teacher who was the one who probably trained me on the painting and drawing. I used to make paintings of clouds for her. Most public school teachers are a total bore and I have no [inaudible]. When I was at Andover, there were three of four people who were very influential in terms of what I was going to do later on. MR. CUMMINGS: Who were they? MR. KERTESS: Well, two art teachers and one English teacher. The art teachers were a man named [inaudible] and Patrick Morgan, who was mentioned in everybody's biography as being "Patrick the painter" and also taught, you know, a so-called art appreciation course there. MR. CUMMINGS: Now, what about his wife who comes into so many stories? MR. KERTESS: Maud [Cabot Morgan]? MR. CUMMINGS: Yeah. MR. KERTESS: The story was, I worked for the paper when I was there. I wrote a fairly typical prep school humor column for the paper. And the way we had—every two months we had to put in some blurb in the paper that Maud was touring with her self-portraits again, and it usually meant that she was in a sanitarium somewhere. And Patrick had—I mean, one of the big status symbols of being at Andover was if you were invited to Patrick's house for dinner.