¡Colores!; Cinton #2; 1303; Clinton Adams: No Regrets; Interview with Clinton Adams

I've done that at Reinhart also was yes ad was in the ad was in the show well I'm just a second maybe I'll count it out 48 20 21 22 23 24 all right let's just pick it up from the beginning of that thought again which was you're in the show okay see you're in the show yeah and the show was very broad cross section and it was Pollock and Decooning and Rothko and all of the great abstract expressionist painters but also Edward Hopper and Stuart Davis and so on and so forth and they had a jury section of Los Angeles artists in which they picked relatively small number of Los Angeles artists to go along with the much larger number from around the country and I had this little painting called candle flame which I think is about 12 15 inches maybe 16 and there it was in the midst of all of this

huge painting in a realist painting and I was not only out of phase because I wasn't working abstractly but I was out of phase because I was working small and I've seen all was to have gone against the current there I've never felt the need to to move to the the great sizes that have been so characteristic of abstract painting but I I worked in this vein of representational work into 54 but it already in early 54 I'd began to change and become more abstract in a different way pictures which don't look at all like my earlier abstractions but which came out of the experience of making the representational paintings and

that was sort of cut off prematurely by my move from California to Kentucky in 1954 where I took on a job that took so much time to do the job that I didn't have much time to paint always a bad sign always a bad very bad sign let's talk a little more about your relationship to this so -called school of New York or abstract expressionism you mentioned once that while you were still in the service in 1945 you saw at the Peggy Guggenheim Gallery your first exposure to Jackson Pollock yeah what did you think then I couldn't make much sense of Pollock at the first I just couldn't read Pollock although that was the paintings that she had there then which had been in his first one person show in May of that year and there were still a few of them around the gallery

the show traveled to San Francisco where it was shown at the San Francisco Museum of modern art and where San Francisco bought several of the key works for almost nothing they were selling for around five hundred dollars then so I didn't see the full range of the work but it was difficult work for me very difficult I had much less difficult the time with with Rothko I actually had been quite influenced by Rothko very early on you have at the University Art Museum a little water color from Colorado Springs which is quite surreal which was done while looking at reproductions of Rothko and others Basiotes and Gottlie by suppose who had been who had come out of surrealism into abstract

expressionism and Rothko had been in California yes yes yes yes I had not met him then I later met him and had a long long very interesting conversation with him at Robert Motherwell's house but that wasn't until the 50s mother well you mentioned to me in one of our many conversations that you saw in Los Angeles an exhibition which Motherwell either put together or wrote the catalog essay to of New York school he wrote an essay which I think he was first used in some context in New York and then revised it for the catalog of a show at the Frank Pearl Scallery in Beverly Hills

Frank was a relative of the Pearl's family that also ran the Pearl Scallery in New York and was a close friend of Matisse and Picasso and a Pierre Matisse and Frank organized the show Motherwell as a matter of fact took criticism from some of the painters because he let the their work had been left out and in Clifford still's case because the work had been put in and still hadn't given his permission but Frank did the show but it was and the show was impressive it wasn't the first time I'd seen a full spread of abstract expressionist paintings the Los Angeles County Museum had done a show earlier than that but Motherwell's statement really was as important as the Langsner statement that we talked about to me very

revealing as to the ideas of the abstract expressionist artist and I found that I although I wasn't making pictures like they were making the ideas at Motherwell Express were the ideas with which I was working so it was simply that they were coming out in a very very different vein so you connected with the ideas if not yeah I remember I remember reproducing the statement that Motherwell had written and handing it out to my classes at UCLA and what since did you have as a California born California trained California residing artists of being in the same community of artists as the New Yorkers or for that matter the Europeans

it's hard to think of the artists of the United States as an art community the artists of Europe you can think of an art community because it was a Spaniard working in France Brock was a Frenchman so was Matisse etc. Miro was a Spaniard Morandi was an Italian Max Beckmann was a German etc. but you don't think of of those national lines really you think of modern art is a European phenomenon Broncosi the great sculpture was a Romanian so and there were many many Russians involved in the movement early on so it's a European phenomenon it was sort of one community Paris was perhaps its center but it

wasn't it wasn't intrinsic that the artist had to be in Paris says on could work in Exxon Province and with no difficulty the United States was very different and I think when Motherwell called his called the show was School of New York he found a better label than abstract expressionism because it was very much a New York phenomenon and if you weren't in New York you just didn't exist I mean an artist in California had one hell of a time what did you have you had Felix Lando or you show yeah and Pearl's gallery and West Coast version and Paul can Paul canter or Pearls was the separate gallery Paul canter does El Hatfield who showed

many of the more digestible modernist painters Utrilo Modigliani etc etc. and I don't think if if when we're painted a thousand paintings in his lifetime three thousand of them were in Southern California right we says a little bit about their authenticity what about chocolate for what about an artist now in New Mexico I think it's still a tremendous problem I was in correspondence with the present president of the National Academy of Design Gregory Aminoff and pointed out to him that there are only two artists in Southern California who are members of the National Academy of Design both of whom were distinguished in the California Watercolor Society movement back in the

30s but are still alive sheets and Miller's dead but many of the really important California artists like Lorsor Fidelsen and John McLaughlin and for that matter even the Paris gallery group Ed Rouchet etc etc none of them remembers the Academy New Mexico which has a moment three members of the Academy probably has more than any other Western state except California California there are a number of members from the Bay Area but Garland Treeson and Lena Goodaker and I are three members here in California in New Mexico. The other day you were

at your old curmudgeonly best looking over a recent list published in Time Magazine of the most influential artists of the 20th century yes yes there was only one artist whose main body of work was prior to 1960 as I recall that was Marcel Duchamp that's right and everybody else was was working today who I know you hate these list but when they did earlier on it a more complete list of the inventors of the arts they only had one artist in a very fine sculptor but they had no painters at all they had a couple of photographers but no painters at all just as insignificant to them time of course is I hope not a reflection of

American taste and understanding well nobody ever went broke as the great throw out some names who's underappreciated in your among the contemporary American artists working today popular in the 18 in the 1990s in 2000 etc or earlier 20th century because I was going to have a hard time saying that anybody there is is underestimated right the cult of the cult of the yeah yeah earlier in the century I think that finally and I think it is finally that hopper and Stuart Davis John Marin and a few others are gaining the recognition that they should the problem I think in general is that the

public tends to look at artists and not just American artists in terms of the kind of exotic excitement of their lives rather than of their work so that there's the fascination with Van Gogh great a painter that he may be but not a better painter than says on certainly by any measure but there's the fascination with Van Gogh because he caught up his ear and he had epilepsy and there's the fascination with Go -Gown sort of moon and six pints in the South seas and we've seen that too I think in the recent fascination with Jackson Pollock superb film and quite truthful film that Ed Harris made but the fact that Pollock lived that kind of Baroque life it's part of the reason that he's better known than let's say Rothko and others of

the group who are equally fine artists well Rothko committed suicide so he was working on it something also though perhaps to do with the images again Clint the the the more famous artists tend to have left more of themselves maybe physically on the canvas what do you mean physically I mean the paint the built -up gestural paint surfaces seemed now to be seem yeah there's been this notion I think it comes out of a lot of art education teachers saying be free splash on the painted kids don't you don't splash it on etc. which leads to a kind of misconception because if

one really looks at the history of painting that's not what one often sees it's true Rembrandt and Hals used considerable impasto as did Goya on occasion as did Delico but rarely as did Van Gogh certainly as did Picasso occasionally but the major continuity is that that that's not a key factor until you get to Hans Hoffman with whom I had contact early on because he taught in California before he opened his art school in the East until you get to Hans Hoffman and and De Cuning who used the impasto very effectively as a a kind of tool that they were using along with all of the others in terms of making a painting

I made a note here just in case you brought it up about mother well statement in which he said that with these few means by which he means structure and rhythm and color and spatial interval and I think he could add to that physical presence of paint with these few means abstracted from the complex of relations that constitute the external world because he's still acknowledging that there are in the external world abstract ideas which one gets by looking at lots of things if you look at a bed of flowers the poppy field in California you realize that to paint that flatly in a polished surface is not going to give the character of it which is the reason that the best of the old California painters of the 19th century worked in

an Impressionist manner even a semi -phobist manner in which the the rough paint helped to give the kind of glitter of color that comes from the light falling across these waving blossoms etc. because the poppies are always constantly in motion so that kind of idea which is an abstract idea not a depiction might occasionally require a kind of impasto I haven't found it so for me that my ideas require that and of course in watercolor it's impossible and for the last 20 years 15 years I've worked principally in watercolor but you have worked at times with spontaneity and

improvisation and expressionistic group yes there were a group of washes that I did in Kentucky that were very quick and very immediate I had to do them sort of between committee meetings as it were certainly of that or between classes and I had a little studio on the campus and I would go in there when I could escape for a couple of hours tell my secretary to tell people I just left for his hands a bar and I work very rapidly on these things and on the case of the oil paintings I worked with a palette knife and just direct dobs sometimes fairly thick of paint it was very therapeutic it didn't lead to any

great paintings then later than that in the early 60s the Metamorphosis series the Requiem lithograph those don't have the the the impasto you're talking about but they create the illusion of having it and they have the looseness and they have the illusion of impasto but actually if you run your hand across the surface it's flat don't ask the former museum director to run his hand across the surface please but let's put one on those up on all right oh we were going to put up Requiem and a little painting Genesis and then yeah and I think if you put them side by side we're not going to use Metamorphosis well give us about 10 seconds and it's all yours here

in 1963 or thereabouts you're working in perhaps your most expressionist vein and the little Genesis painting is as the name implies one of the first it's the first and there were no drawings I said well I there might have been a drawing the size of a postage stamp I had the notion of this split and this irregularity on either side of the split it probably does have an origin in nature but it's distant and in the past in the late 1950s I was teaching in Florida and we were driving back and forth to California to spend summers because nobody in his right mind spends a summer in Florida certainly not in Gainesville and I drove

through the lava fields near Grants and did a series of paintings there called Broken Land and New Mexico landscape etc. I wasn't living in New Mexico I had no thought that I would be living in New Mexico but all these New Mexico titles have confused a couple of people writing about my work because they think I was here in New Mexico then and I wasn't but their old US 66 was a narrow straight line through the irregularity of the rocks on either side and I think probably that was buried somewhere in consciousness and suddenly now it's turned on edge and the vertical line is seen in both the painting Genesis and the lithograph that we're looking at the band in the center has taken on a certain width and

behind it is this circle which is cut off however as if the irregularities on either side were in front of the band whereas the band is also obviously in front of the irregularities so there is a kind of tension between two conditions both of which cannot be true and which is a genuine ambiguity which can't be resolved and that intrigued me and I went on to do a series of paintings of which Genesis was the first and because it was essentially a color and paint idea pen drawings would have made no sense they wouldn't have had the the kind of possibility of extending the thing and I began working on canvases not this one Genesis was just on whatever little canvas I had around at that time and it has a white

ground and it's painted in the traditional way but in the second or third or fourth of these I forget which I began to work on a stained canvas which I did not put the ground on and just began to stain the canvas directly with acrylic colors which stretches the canvas at the same time on starts the painting and permitted kind of overflow and fluid flow which is a redundancy but nonetheless a kind of fluid flow of the medium in relationship to the fluidity of the ideas so so accident and chance played a major role and I accepted those accidents happily when I came about the best of the first group these were all fairly small the first group it was a painting called metaphor which is now in the Amon Carter Museum and which a

purchaser with a good eye Ruth Johnson who was president of the Amon Carter at that time Ruth Carter Johnson picked it out of the show before the show even opened good for her good for you yeah yeah and metamorphosis that metamorphosis is the one that has always been my favorite of the group came much later because it was only after I'd finished seven eight nine paintings at smaller sizes but I went to this size and painted another eight or ten paintings about this size and metamorphosis has always been my favorite of that group and the lithograph Requiem came about midway I was scheduled to go out to Los Angeles for a meeting with June Wayne about Tamron matters in November

1963 and the meeting had been scheduled partially because George O 'Keefe was working there and I had known George from curating her first exhibition here in New Mexico which was at the University Art Museum and I had been up to have a cue to select some of the paintings for the show or rather to prevent her from selecting one or two and Georgia was at Tamron and Nathan Olivera the very fine painter printmaker taught at Stanford was there also working and just before I left Albuquerque in a department chairman's meeting that I had to have that morning before I caught my plane John Kennedy was assassinated

so it was a sad trip and a sad arrival at Tamron everybody just sort of sitting and standing around the afternoon of November 23rd and O 'Keefe was in no condition to work she eventually just abandoned what she'd started and went back to have a cue Nathan Olivera did a wonderful portrait of her which is in the university collection partly from memory but just seeing her in her black dress sort of floating through the shop but Nate was in no condition to work either so urban Hollander the master printer then turned to me and said Clint nothing else is going on neither

of us feels very happy but let's go back to the shop and how do you like to make a lithograph so I do recommend I imagine in something under a half an hour we proved it made a few changes but accepted most of the accidents that had happened the accidents come about in this case because I was working with a lithotine -based touche which is rather like kerosene lithotine -based touche and I threw water into it and I did a little crayon work and I just threw some salt into it and let nature take its course and we made a few changes and we proved it again and I think probably three hours later had an addition which appropriately I called Requiem

I think I can get back to the mother just so I can ask that question while we got these cameras rolling um actually let's all stop for a second you