Katharine Kuh, The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Artists (New York and Evanston: Harper & Row), 1962. 248 pp., illus.
POPULARIZATIONS RARELY ADULTERATE the high quality of stock on the shelves of the bookshop at the San Francisco Museum of Art, but Christmas is the great leveler, and nothing makes better Christmas fare than a book of interviews with artists.
The strange results of interviews with contemporary artists have been accounted for in several ways:
1. A prevailing bias toward measuring intelligence in verbal terms puts the artist at a disadvantage. Trained in a nonverbal medium, he naturally appears awkward when he is called upon to express himself in words.
2. “If he could put it better in words, he’d say it, not paint it.” The implication here is that there are no verbal clues to the significance of a visual experience.
3. Artists enjoy “putting the interviewers on.” They therefore say things that are silly, false or infuriating simply to expose the inability of the interviewer to separate what is said seriously from what is not.
4. The contemporary artist is deliberately anti-verbal and anti-intellectual. His best defense against an overly-sophisticated and decadent verbal milieu is a front of thickness, a feigned simplemindedness.
5. Since it is possible for an artist to create truly great work without having any insight at all into the processes governing his creative acts, what he says about his work is of no importance in either evaluating or understanding it. (This view is often extended to a disdain for the reading of titles.)
In spite of the fact that these views, and many others like them, have become a kind of standard justification for the artist to remain silent and allow his work to do the talking for him, never has he been willing to talk so much and so often. He appears at panel discussions at the drop of an invitation; it has become standard for catalogs to include lengthy quotations; and the book of interviews (or “talks”) with artists appears as regularly as Christmas, the latest being Katharine Kuh’s The Artist’s Voice.
The seventeen artists interviewed are Josef Albers, Ivan Albright, Alexander Calder, Stuart Davis, Edwin Dickinson, Marcel Duchamp, Naum Gabo, Morris Graves, Hans Hofmann, Edward Hopper, Franz Kline, Jacques Lipchitz, Isamu Noguchi, Georgia O’Keeffe, Ben Shahn, David Smith and Mark Tobey. (Why just these particular seventeen and no other remains a mystery.) The “talks” take a brisk, no-nonsense turn; the artists answer the questions as if they were being fixed by a stare from Dr. Kinsey. Personalities emerge: some are terse and intense, some are long-winded and fuzzy. At the end, one feels as if he knows not a bit more than when he started.
The problem is that there is almost as much difficulty in evaluating what an artist says as what he paints:
Question: Is there any social content in your work?
Edward Hopper: None whatsoever.
Reproduced nearby are Early Sunday Morning and Nighthawks, two paintings which provide a more lucid, painful commentary on American urban civilization than a dozen texts on the subject. Which of our five explanations covers the dilemma? Is Hopper “putting her on”? Or is it possible that he has no insight into, no knowledge of the social content in his work? Or does he just not want to go into it? Perhaps a solution might have been to reproduce photographs of the look on the artist’s face after hearing some of these questions. Like his paintings, they might have been better than a thousand words.
