- Who was a designer,
can I see you at the end?
I want to ask you something
about what you do.
Do you design anything that
also is like timelines?
- [Henry] I didn't hear your introduction.
You said I was at the
Metropolitan Museum at one point?
- It was not an introduction.
Yes, you were at the
Metropolitan Museum at one point.
How long a point was that?
- [Henry] 18 years.
- Henry Geldzahler, whose
name is familiar to all
who know or care about 20th century art
from Metropolitan Museum of Art,
where he spent 18 years
to now New York City's
Commissioner of Cultural Affairs.
He has been immortalized
from Oldenburg happenings
to Warhol's camera.
He's been carved by Marisol,
portrayed by Hockney,
cast by Siegel.
Henry Geldzahler will give shape and form
to our visual and cultural
life with uncommon vision
and width, I'm especially
pleased to have you here tonight.
- Thank you Barbaralee.
- New York is indisputably
the art center of the world.
The premiere training
ground for new talents
and the most desirable
showplace for those already
well-established.
Yet this has not been true for,
yet this has been true
for barely a generation.
And that generation was when a
vigorous native-born movement
burst forth in the 1930s and 40s.
We're talking obviously
about Abstract Expressionism.
The first such movement
that was spawned in America.
And for the first time it gave New York
preeminence over Paris.
How did modern art come to flourish?
- Well about a year and two months ago
I would have agreed with that opening,
but now that I'm Commissioner
of Cultural Affairs,
and I see the city from
a broader point of view,
I have to say that not only
did America and New York
flourish in the '40s and '50s
due to a burst of energy
that happened spontaneously
in the '30s but dance came to America
at the same time in the
person of George Balanchine
who came to America in the late '30s
and the first work with Lincoln Kirstein
in the Ballet Theater was in 1944 and '46.
New York as a visual art center
is complemented by New
York as a dance center.
It's really quite amazing.
I don't know how much
art history you have,
and I don't wanna be patronizing,
but I think it's quite
clear that what happened
was World War II, what happened was WPA,
what happened was government
support of the arts
for the first time from 1935 to 1942,
which took the artist who was isolated
and put him on projects,
where he met his fellows,
where de Kooning met Gorky,
where Stuart Davis met David Smith.
And suddenly there was a
sense not of a lonely American
artist working somewhere in a garret,
but a sense of people who were involved
in the same activity
had the same interests
and had the same problems.
They began to group themselves
in cafes and in bars,
because artists love to talk
about themselves to each other.
It seems to be the history
of art in the last 120 years
is this everybody's telling
each other how good he is,
each one telling the only
other one how good he is.
At the same time, the horrors of Hitler
brought Lesseur and
Ducha and Dali and Segal
and Seligman and Mondrian and Bela Bartok
and Balanchine, it goes on and on,
to live in New York.
New York was a cosmopolitan
city, had been forever,
but suddenly was a
cosmopolitan city of artists
who were mature and who
were working in New York.
And I call it talismanic,
it's like knocking on wood.
All of a sudden a veil fell
from the eye of the American
artist and he said to himself,
"You don't have to go to Paris
to paint a good picture."
Lesseur and Mondrian aren't worse
since they got to New York.
They're painting their best pictures here.
Maybe you can paint a
masterpiece in New York.
Maybe you can dance and leap
and pirouette in New York
as well as anybody can in Paris.
These guys didn't get worse here,
and there was a kind of freedom about it,
and the direct contact
through the few galleries,
that like Peggy Guggenheim,
that showed both
the Europeans and the Americans,
so that a Max Ernst
met a Robert Motherwell
and the contact became one of friends,
also helped pull away the veil, the scrim
that was in front of the American artist,
and he realized that world-class
art was being produced
in New York, why not produce
world-class art in New York?
- Along about the same time,
you burst forth on the scene too.
How did you come to flourish in New York?
- Hitler too, I came,
it's true, Barbara Rose calls me
the youngest refugee art historian.
I was born in Belgium in 1935.
My parents came to New
York in March of 1940,
cut off the boat in Hoboken,
immediately realized we've made a mistake
and took the path I think over here.
And I grew up in the Upper West Side.
I went to public school 166
in 89th Street in Amsterdam,
then went to Joan of
Arc Junior High School,
93rd in Amsterdam.
Then my parents began to get scared
because the schools were
beginning to get a little rougher,
and they pulled me out of that
and stuck me at a place called Horace Mann
up in the Bronx, and I cried and said
I don't want to go there
it's with spoiled sissies.
I want to be with my
friends and within a year
I was elected the president of my class
and I graduated from there I went to Yale.
While I was at Yale, I decided that I
wanted to be a curator.
It's a weird thing.
My parents said "No, no lawyer"
- [Barbara] Where did
you ever get the idea
of as a curator?
you were a volunteer.
- I volunteered the summer
of my sophomore year.
I would have led it to
the Dean of education
at the Metropolitan Museum,
volunteering my services,
which were services of a 19-year-old.
They were you know almost nil.
Actually when I look back on,
it was kind of a foot spur to
offer myself at that point.
The Dean of Education wrote to Yale,
they said this guy's all right.
I spent two months there.
I got to know four or five curators,
one of whom later became
the Director James Rorimer.
I then finished Yale,
spent a year in Paris
at the Sorbonne.
Three years at Harvard
getting a PhD in teaching
and in during my third year at Harvard,
I found out that the
director of the Metropolitan
had been following me year by year
through these institutions
and every year getting
a report that he hasn't gotten any dumber
or whatever it is.
And he came to see me because he was in
the Board of Overseers of
the Fogg Museum at Harvard
where I was studying and teaching.
And he said "Would you
like to come and work
at the Metropolitan Museum?"
I said no and he turned pale with rage,
and said, "Why not?"
I said "Because I'm
interested in contemporary art
"and you are not.
"Can you help me get
the job at the Whitney?"
(audience laughing)
He said "What are you talking about?"
I said "You're an encyclopedia."
"Encyclopedia at this skipping of volume."
The 20th century is not being collected.
You can't go into the 21st
century having skipped the 20th
and continue to call
yourself encyclopedia.
The fact that the Whitney,
The Modern and the Guggenheim
are collecting is very interesting,
unless they're absorbed
into the Metropolitan Museum collection,
they might leave town, they might fold up.
They might sell their assets,
anything could happen.
- There was a time that the
Whitney and the Metropolitan
considered merging earlier
on as you may recall.
- We will go into that.
Also there have been various
stages along the way.
Anyway he said maybe you're right,
and he wrote me a letter
asking me to come and see him
when I was in town for Christmas.
I did, he offered me $5,000,
to come as a curatorial assistant
in the American Painting
and Sculpture Department.
- What was the American Painting
and Sculpture Department
at that time?
- It had been founded
in 1949 by angry artists
who were protesting that
the most important museum
in America was ignoring the living artist.
And there were two funds
set up in 1909 and 1911
called the Heron funds,
which generated about
15-20,000 dollars a year,
which was more money than
any museum in the country
had to back in Contemporary Art
and the money was being used to buy
the brother-in-law's,
sister-in-laws cousins
schemata that was in the basement.
There was no unity about it.
The artists got together
and they wrote a letter to New York Times
and they picketed the museum.
In 1949 the museum hired
Robert Beverly Hale,
my predecessor, who was a teacher
of the Art Students League
and is close to 80 now
and is the premier teacher
of artistic anatomy in the world today.
As a matter of fact his
teacher was taught by
was taught by, was taught by,
directly the Titian.
He is a student of Titian.
A contact student of Titian.
Wait a minute.
Bob Hale who was a very sweet gentleman,
but a little bit passive
was told by the director of the Met
that this young fellow
was going to be attached
to his department.
And Bob is too polite to say,
"I don't need this whippersnapper."
So he let me come and I had an office
in the American Painting
and Sculpture Department.
It was basically 19th
century American art,
except don't forget by 1960 Bob Hale
had bought the Pollock Autumn Rhythm.
- Before we get to that point,
let's backtrack one moment,
so they can have another kind
of historical perspective.
- My father paid my rent the
first two years by the way.
I don't know how I lived
on 5000 dollars a year.
- At the time the Museum of
Modern Art was being founded.
Arthur Davies kept on complaining
that there was no institution, no place
for collectors of modern
art to leave their pictures
because according to Davies,
they were stored, anything
that was left to the Met
that was considered modern was stored in
the Met's moldiest basement.
Is that correct?
- It's true that museum,
I know was found in 1929,
but you also have to
remember that Gertrude Stein
left her great portrait by
Picasso to Metropolitan Museum
because she said in her will,
I can't leave it to the
Museum of Modern Art
because museum and
modern don't go together.
It's not a phrase, museum and modern art.
- But all the while the Metropolitan
was being somewhat derriere gard.
They did hold a post-impressionism show
in the early 20s.
I think it was 1921.
How did that fit into their
philosophical scheme of things?
- By 1921, post-impressionism was kosher.
What happens is if you have cubism,
which looks like it's shattering the world
with what they call it an
explosion in a shingle factory,
it was called by a critic in 1912.
If you have cubism then
what happened just before it
suddenly looks very calm and classical.
And I think it just seems
natural in the history
of taste in the past 100 years
that every new avant-garde
breakthrough pacifies
the public about the previous one.
So, by 1921, post-impressionism
really wasn't
a very hot issue.
- The Metropolitan also showed Shazam
before the Museum of Modern Art.
- Well Museum of Modern
Art was found in 1929.
The Metropolitan Museum
by a rare fluke of history
had Roger Frye the
great British art critic
and lousy artist as curator in 1910-1912
because JP Morgan wanted him.
And he finally quit saying
I can't work with this
man, he's impossible,
and he went back and did
those great shows in London,
all the Grafton Gallery shows
that introduced post-impressionism
to the English public
back in 1910-11, but we
had Roger Frye in New York
at a time, when if he'd been allowed to,
he could have created
an amazing collection,
and in fact would've
preempted the necessity
for the Museum of Modern Art.
- So, there we are just about 30 years ago
in the formation of the
department of 20th century painting.
- When you're talking to the audience,
how do you know how much they know?
- They know a lot, a lot.
But we'd like to bring it up to date
chronologically wouldn't we?
- [Participants] Yes.
- So, here we are in 1949,
and the establishment of
department of painting.
- And let me explain why they
picked Robert Beverly Hale.
He was related to the
trustees as a cousin.
He's a Marquand, he's JP
Marquand's first cousin
and the hero of a Marquand novel.
He is a cousin of Buckminster Fuller.
- [Barbara] Which novel?
- I can't remember what it's called now.
I'll find out.
He's a direct descendant
of Margaret Fuller,
the transcendentalist.
He is a Hale like Nathan
Hale and Rose Hale.
- We have the provenance
and we understand the point.
- Also he was teaching at
the Art Students League.
He lives in East Hampton
and he was friendly with Pollock,
and he was perfect.
The trustees felt as if they
could dine with him and yet--
- [Barbara] Comfortable with this.
- Yeah and yet here was this guy
who actually knew artists.
And what Bob did I call him Bob.
I'll tell you a story, when
I first came to work for him
in 1960, he's a very depressive man.
He was sitting there
like this at his desk,
and I've been there for about three days.
I came in and I said "Mr.
Hale what's the matter?"
He said "Mr. Hale, Mr. Hale,
it'll be Bobby next week."
(all laughing)
I promised myself that I
would call him Mr. Hale
for years and years and years.
I only learned to call him Bob recently.
What was my point there?
- He was acceptable to the trustees,
could converse with artists.
He was bridging the gap.
- In 1950, 51, and 52,
he did exhibitions of first
painting, then sculpture.
- What was the first
exhibition of that department?
Do you recall?
- I'm explaining.
He did three annual exhibitions
in '50, '51, and '52.
First painting '50, sculpture '51
and drawings and water colors '52,
in which he cast the widest net possible
from Wyeth to Pollock, from
Pime Gross to David Smith.
It was a, I cover the
waterfront kind of approach,
which is exactly the opposite approach,
which I took in 1970 with
my New York Painting Show.
- [Barbara] Not yet.
- Okay but it was philosophically
perhaps at that moment
when Metropolitan Museum
was first dipping its toe in the water,
the correct thing to do,
to say look we are babies at this.
We're not going to try to
tell you what has quality
and what doesn't.
We're going to show
you the full complement
of what it is that Americans
are doing in the visual arts.
Those are the those three shows.
- And in what year did you
come to the Metropolitan?
- July 18th 1960 and James
Rorimer was the director.
And I said to him "What should I do?"
He said there isn't much
contemporary art in the building.
I said I take that a signal
to continue my education,
and he said it was and I went down,
and this was the most
frightening moment of my life.
I got to the office at 9 o'clock
in the morning on a Monday
in July 1960 at 9 o'clock.
By quarter of 10, there's nobody there.
I called my sister-in-law
and (mumbles) out in tears.
I said "What should I do?
"There's nobody here."
She said, "They probably don't
get to work till 10 o'clock.
"Don't worry about it."
At 10 o'clock in comes in a man
called Alberta Tanak Gardner
who is a great scholar
of 19th century art.
And a very hard worker who
produced catalog after catalog
the opposite of Robert Hale,
who was a poet and a dreamer
and a rather passive personality.
And here I was, this young
curatorial assistant,
generally assigned to a department
that had one guy working
in the 19th century
and one guy working in 20th.
So, Al Gardner, whom I didn't know,
called me into his office and said,
"First I want you to help
me finish the 19th century
"drawings catalog and then we're going
"to redo the sculpture catalog."
And I said, my voice breaking,
"Mr. Rorimer," that's the director
"Assigned me to work on 20th century art.
"Let's discuss this
when Mr. Hale gets in."
If I hadn't, I'd still
be in the basement there.
(all laughing)
But at age 23, whatever it
was, looking back on it,
it was a very brave moment for me.
It was the moment when I just had decided
that I wasn't going to be,
there are two kinds of
curators and we need them both.
There's the librarian church mouse, adder
of information bit by bit, who
has no ambitions in the world
except to leave it a slightly tidier place
than he came into it.
And there's the other
kind, which is like me,
perhaps more of an
educator, more flamboyant,
more of a communicator.
And I think I make no distinctions
in value between them.
If I didn't have the
backup of the research
of a lot of other people, I
wouldn't be able to be very
clear about my fact.
On the other hand, if we
didn't have communicators
those facts would lie there
on shelves and get dusty.
So I think both are necessary
but it would have been death of my spirit
to have been stuck in the
basement with the 19th century.
- Well after you spoke with Mr. Rorimer,
in what direction did he cast?
- He left me alone and
I made up my mind that
my first job was to familiarize myself.
- [Barbara] So, you did
complete your education?
- I did, I did.
I went out and in the first two months,
I met Frank Stella, Larry Poons,
Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler
(speech drowns out speaker).
- Who was the initiator
of those associations?
- Ivan Karp, who runs
the OK Harris Gallery
was working for Leo Castelli,
and Dick Bellamy was about
to open the Green Gallery,
and the three of us were in
constant touch with each other
had nothing but time on our hands.
Every time we saw something
we like told the other
and we're constantly
schlepping back and forth.
I had the joy of--
- The three of you
obviously helped launch not
only many ideas, but many careers.
- It's funny people talk
about us discovering this
and discovering that.
You didn't say discover, you said launch,
and I'll agree with that.
It's the discover that I read in the press
that makes me nervous, because
Columbus discovered America.
America knew it was there.
If I call up Dick Bellamy
to say I'm in the studio of
Larry Poons and he's just
made a fantastic breakthrough,
come on down, the evening, the third time
I met Larry Poons, first he
was painting like Mondrian,
then he was painting less like Mondrian,
and then all of a sudden I went down,
and there was a green
painting with red dots on it
and my heart sank.
I called Marysol, Ellsworth
Kelly, Frank Stella
and Dick Bellamy and within two days,
everybody was down there.
I had bought one for $400
and Larry Poons had a show
at the Green Gallery six months later.
The excitement, there's
a book by George Kubler,
VAL art history department
called "The Shape of Time"
in which he describes
the concept of entrances.
There's a happy entrance
and there's an unhappy
entrance to be made.
If your peculiar talents
are suited to an age
and your career begins at that age,
then you made a happy entrance.
And he talks about within art history,
you could be a naturally rokoko artist,
born in neoclassic age and
not know how to fit in.
I've always said and this is not wood.
I guess this is (knocking).
- [Barbara] This must be not plastic.
- Yeah that I have been
very lucky in my entrances.
I entered the Metropolitan Museum in 1960.
I had the joy of introducing
Lichtenstein to Warhol
and Rosenquist to Wesselman
and Stella to Poons.
I was there, I was the
right guy at the right time,
being paid a salary to educate himself
and to move around quickly,
which is what I did.
And it was fabulous, it was unbelievable.
- Henry here you were raised
to speak French, Flemish.
You come to this country
and 20 years later
rather than your interest
in the most classical
of periods or art, it's
not only American art,
but of the most avant-garde,
how do you explain that?
- Well I think my, the safety I felt
and the judgments that I made,
the safety I felt and
the judgments I made,
right or wrong, was based on a very
thorough grounding in the classics.
And the fact that I had
gone to Yale and Harvard
and the Sorbonne, the fact
that I had not only been
taught the history but had
taught it to myself several times
made pop art and the new abstraction
look not at all shocking to me,
but like rather the natural next step
in a series of causalities
that could be explained quite easily
the day you looked at them.
I didn't come in from left field.
I came in through the historical way
and I think that the fact
that I was unshockable
by an artist has to do with the fact
that I know the history of art.
- A long sweep of history,
but did you ever expect
the media to proclaim
what was then called pop art
in the fashion that it did?
Do you think it helped
accelerate the movement?
- The media, god bless it,
I met Andy Warhol in July of 1960.
It took me two and a half
years to get him an exhibition.
He was turned down by Leo Castelli.
It was too much like Lichtenstein.
He was turned down by Sidney Janus.
He wasn't sure it was art.
He was turned down by Robert Alcon.
I took Andy and his work everywhere.
I brought all the
dealers to Andy's studio.
We have this image of the instant success
of this one and that one.
In late 1962, and this is
the origin of my celebrity,
such as it is, the Museum of
Modern Art held a symposium
on the question of is pop art art?
And they asked me to be on it,
and I was this young guy
from Metropolitan Museum,
coming down at the Museum
of Modern Art to defend
the contemporary movement
against the curator
from Museum of Modern Art, Peter Salz,
who's saying it wasn't art.
And I said to Jim Rorimer
the director of the Met,
"Can I go down to a symposium
at Museum of Modern Art
"and defend pop art?"
And he said sure.
- [Barbara] On their turf though.
- And I found out later
he thought I was talking
about Pop Hart, who was an illustrator.
Defend Pop Hart against what?
(all laughing)
- Henry did you feel
obliged to match these
emerging talents with galleries
because there was no possibility
of their being shown at your Museum?
- Metropolitan Museum
wasn't ready for pop art.
You know it's curious like I said this
to The Times the other day.
I thought when I changed jobs
that I was changing jobs.
Actually we always end up doing
what our fathers did before
us and we always do the
same thing all our lives.
We get divorced and marry
the same person again.
Everything is the same.
At the Met, my job was
to convince the trustees
that the artist was serious.
At the same time to
tell the artist hold it,
the trustees aren't ready for you.
And that was exactly the story.
In the Koch administration,
my job was to tell
the mayor the cultural
life of the city is hungry
and needs you desperately,
and turn around and tell the
cultural life of the city,
the city is broke, don't you understand?
- That's good training if
you're a mediator role.
Let's be discursive for a moment
since you bring up your current role.
- [Henry] I jump around a lot, I'm sorry.
- It's okay, no we have contemporary,
but we're going to go
with this current role.
Obviously you've spent
all of your professional
career at the Museum.
You are now a part of
what is commonly referred
to as the public sector.
Other than the illustration
you've given to us,
how do they compare?
- Again I'm repeating
something I've said before,
but when I left the Met, Ed Koch announced
at a press conference, Blanche Bernstein
was going to be the Human Resources
and five or six commissioners at a time.
And one reporter popped
up, how does it feel
after 17 years in the ivory tower
suddenly to leave it for politics?
And I said "Are you kidding?
"After 17 years at the
Metropolitan Museum,
"it's a pleasure to get out of politics."
A good line,
what does it mean?
- [Barbara] A year later.
- A year later what does
it mean, it's still true,
to know that you have the borrow
president of the Bronx
and Brooklyn and Queens
out there, so that you
have the Hispanic artists
and the black artists and
the avant-garde artists,
the Off-Off Broadway
Theater, the community
and neighborhood theater
to know that you have
these constituencies
that you have to serve,
that you know you have a limited
amount of money and energy,
it has to be balanced out before them,
is politically infinitely
easier than sitting
in a chair at the Metropolitan
Museum as a curator
and being knifed in the
back by the director,
by a trustee, by a colleague
that you don't know who else.
The Byzantine atmosphere of a
university, of a big company,
Hoffman la rush I imagine is the same.
- I think there's a gentleman's
agreement among politicians.
- It's out there that if
I do something terrible,
I read about it in the
Ethnic Press the next day.
I read about it in the Villager
or the west side this
or the east side that.
There is no place to hide and I like that.
I like that.
It's more fracking, it's more open.
Like at the Met I refused
to do the Andrew Wyeth show,
and the result was Tom Hoving
took my galleries away.
And the 20th century
I was in the basement.
- [Barbara] Why don't you tell
us how that all worked out?
Who made the decision to
have the Andrew Wyeth show?
How did that come about?
Was it done because of a
grant from an outside patron?
Was it done as a--
- Let me tell.
It was 1976, was the bicentennial year,
and Hoving had brought
a breath of fresh air
into the museum when he
became director in '67.
Suddenly it was much more collegial,
it was much more question of
all the curators are colleagues.
Before if you wanted to buy something,
only the director would know
and he would bring it to the trustees
acquisitions committee.
Hoving instituted dry
runs in which each curator
and there are 18 at the Met,
would bring what he wanted
to buy into the room
and we would all argue about it together.
We would say there's two
million dollars to spend,
there's four million dollars
worth of stuff in the room.
The Egyptian curator was
fighting the Islamic curator.
The contemporary curator was fighting
the arms and armor guy.
It was fabulous.
Actually so much of the
money that's available
for purchase at the Met
is directed specifically
toward one thing or another
that we weren't fighting
for the whole pot of money.
We were fighting only
for the general funds.
Then the next week, there'd
be a meeting with the trustees
and the curators who had
passed their colleagues test
would get up and talk in
front of the trustees,
and then you'd leave the room like school
and the trustees would vote and you'd find
out the next morning.
That was kinda horrible.
- How does that change?
- At the same time in this collegiality,
I'm leading up to the Wyeth show,
he put together what he called
an exhibitions committee,
so that the curators would
know about exhibitions
and vote on them as they came along.
I was put on the exhibitions committee
because I was considered a generalist.
I would often fight for the Greek thing
rather than for my own thing.
I understand what the
encyclopedic museum is about.
One day we have a general staff meeting,
Hogan comes in and says great news,
there is going to be a Wyeth show
hadn't gone through the
Exhibitions Committee.
I was a little outraged.
I thought the Wyeth show, in 1976,
the bicentennial year the
biggest show ever given to,
biggest one-man-show given
to an artist in a city
that houses in the Gucci and
de Kooning and Ellsworth Kelly,
I don't know, I said but
I'm talking to myself,
but on the other hand I am the
curator of 20th century art.
If there is gonna be a Wyeth show,
I guess someone was gonna do it.
So, after the meeting at
which Hoving announced it,
I went up to him and I
said "I guess I'm gonna be
"doing this show."
I went there and I spent two days
with the Wyeths in Chadds Ford.
They were as charming as could be.
I was told that there was
going to be a lot of material
in the show never
been seen before.
- [Barbara] Did you not
resist the idea at all?
- I tried to be open.
I thought I have the
responsibility not to prejudge.
There's a lot of Wyeth I haven't seen.
There might be the possibility of making
a show out of this material
that no one has made before.
I was told that there
was a lot of material
I had never been shown.
I spent two days down there.
Mr. Wyeth picked me up at the
railroad station in a car,
which was a Maserati Lamborghini,
something or other.
- [Barbara] He's a car collector.
- And he said this car was given to me,
and I quote "By my friend Frank Sinatra"
which point I thought
something is wrong here.
But it's all right, I mean
let me look at the art.
His wife they made crab,
which is my favorite food.
It went on and on.
Went back to New York
then I went up to see
(speech drowns out speaker).
- [Barbara] What was the work were like?
- Let me finish.
I then went up to visit
Joseph and Rosalie Levine.
Joseph Levine the film producer,
who owned 50 Wyeths and who were going
to help underwrite the show,
to see those Wyeths, which was supposed
to be the cream of the crop.
That has very good evening with them,
that their chauffeur drove us up
in the car that felt like
butter, and wined and dined.
Back to New York, and this
sounds like an exaggeration.
- Mr. Levine is also the man who bought
the house the Christina's
World House and wanted to--
- He is a Wyeth connoisseur
or a Wyeth freak,
depending on how you look
at it. (audience laughing)
A freaking connoisseur.
It sounds like an exaggeration,
but for two nights after
that I didn't sleep.
I was in such agony,
and I called Tom Hoving at
9 o'clock in the morning
of the third day and I said,
"Tom I don't know how
I'm gonna tell you this,
"but I've got to call up Andrew Wyeth
"and I've got a cultural moving,
"I cannot do this show,
"I can't do it, it's not good enough."
- [Barbara] On what basis did you decline?
- I declined on the
basis of there not being
enough new material that there had been
a Wyeth retrospective
at the Whitney in '69.
And that there was not enough new material
to justify a yet bigger retrospective
of the same kind of material
in the bicentennial year,
highlighting the fact that
the Metropolitan Museum,
the most prestigious museum
in the Western Hemisphere,
was putting its imprimatur on this man
as the American artist of our time.
I just couldn't do it.
Tom that morning, Hoving
was very reasonable,
and said "I think I understand.
"Let's work this out.
"You've been here 17
years, you never take,
"how about a sabbatical
"and I'll do the show."
This was true, how about a
sabbatical and I'll do the show?
I said "Tom I'm enormously relieved.
"I'll go to Europe and write a book.
"You do the show and the whole thing
"will pass as if nothing."
He did the show.
I didn't get my sabbatical.
He forgot that part of it.
I got punished by having
my galleries taken away
and not given back.
- [Barbara] What you mean you
had your galleries taken away?
What does that mean?
- If you remember the 20th
century galleries at the Met,
you go up the stairs to the second floor,
and you turn left and
there are five galleries.
Just at the moment when I
refused to do the Wyeth show,
there was an Impressionism
show coming at the Met,
and they decided the only place they could
possibly do it we're in
the 20th century galleries.
They could have done it somewhere else.
That meant that my pictures
went off exhibition
and into the basement.
And I'll never be able to
prove in a court of law
that there was a one-to-one relationship,
but I certainly feel that the
result of my refusing through
the Wyeth show limited
the loudness of my voice
in the upper councils of museum,
who felt as if this was a big winner,
it was a big moneymaker.
They're gonna sell
thousands of reproductions
and millions people gonna come and see it.
As a matter of fact Hoving
actually said to me,
I said "Why do the same
show that was done in '69
"at the Whitney?"
And he said "If a musical comedy is a hit,
"you revive it don't you?"
I said "Do yourself a favor
and don't repeat that."
- You come to a very fundamental issue
and that is the kind of
conflict that most museums face
these days because of
their own fiscal crises
that you are more and more familiar
with in your present role.
There is that conflict between
striving for larger audiences
and the quality that we
hope they want to convey.
How does one balance the two?
- Well there are those who
say the Metropolitan Museum
has gone too far in its merchandising,
and there are those who
say that its ability
to mount exquisite
exhibitions is indeed funded
by the merchandising.
- [Barbara] What would you say?
- As a trustee of 26 institutions,
I am now ex officio, which
means by virtue of my chair
on the boards of all the
New York City institutions
you can dream of, that get
our funding from the city.
I don't want to judge Metropolitan Museum.
I would say that the amount of energy
and the amount of capital
that it takes to produce
the revenue that they get is
getting a little out of hand.
I think it's perfectly legitimate
for a cultural institution
to be revenue producing to the point,
to the extent that it can be.
I think they're all points of vulgarity.
I think a King Tut necktie is vulgar.
Just everybody's sense of
vulgarity stops somewhere else.
I read the board minutes of a
Lincoln Center Board meeting
last night, this is off the record,
because the board meetings
don't get published.
And they're wondering how it
is that the Lincoln Center
constituency can, I
want to say cash in on,
can participate in the kind of,
income at the Metropolitan
Museum are making out
of selling reproductions.
What does the Metropolitan
Opera and New York City Ballet,
Beaumont theater and New York City Opera
and Chamber Society do to have a,
what do they have in the
store that's the equivalent?
And that's the way they're
thinking at Lincoln Center.
In other words, it's become
part of conventional wisdom--
- [Barbara] Merchandising mentality.
- Well conventional wisdom let's call it.
That it's getting more and more expensive,
that in 1964, there was no
National Endowment on the arts.
In 1964, there was no New
York State cast on the arts.
1976, there was no Department
of Cultural Affairs.
My department came out of the parks
where it sort of sat
quietly for a 100 years.
The federal state and
city funding of the arts
is something new.
The tax laws have benefited
the institutions for years.
The inflationary costs are spiraling,
curator salaries are
becoming much more in line
with their colleagues in academia.
Every cultural institution
is under terrific pressure
to increase its revenue
in all ways possible,
and I won't make the judgment
that it's wrong to have a sexy catalog
or a jazzy storm in the museum,
as long as it's kept in perspective,
and that the public visually and verbally
is led to understand that
what we're doing here is
supporting what it is that is our mission,
and that our mission is not to make money.
- Is all of that governmental presence
in funding a good and desirable thing?
- I think the various mixes that it takes
to keep an institution going
are very healthful, salubrious.
I think single funding is dangerous.
Single funding is potentially fascistic,
but if you have corporate and foundation
and private individuals
and the city and the state
and the feds, and you have
an economy that's changing
all the time, tax laws are being adjusted,
governments that are
spending less or more,
private individuals who
have more or less money.
You have a kind of a mix,
which is a natural sensor
on any one sector taking
over the intellectual
content ability to institutions.
I like the mix.
In Europe they have a different system.
In Europe you can't deduct
from your own personal taxes
the value of the gift of
a painting to a museum.
The Kristensen in Berlin, I
spent some time in West Berlin.
the government of West
Berlin gives the museum
two million dollars a year of tax money
to buy works of art with.
They don't allow the individual
to deduct from his taxes
the gift of a work of art.
They say it's one or the other.
You can't mix them.
We have incredible system in America,
where the individual
is encouraged to give,
the corporation is encouraged
to give up to 5% of its profit
before taxes to help social
welfare, education, culture,
as well as getting federal,
state and city tax money back.
We have the best of all possible worlds.
We are still broke.
- If you could remedy New York's
leading cultural deficiency
what would it be and
what would the remedy be?
- My goodness.
I would be I guess as
New York City official,
I think that fact that the
budget of my department
is 1/6 of the 1% of the New
York City expense budget,
is a bit of a scandal.
1/6 of the 1% of the
money that the city spends
gets spent on our cultural life.
That's 26 million dollars.
Curiously enough on an exercise
in a plane to Washington
a year ago, I figured out
the national endowment
in the Arts and Humanities,
if you add them up,
and take the total federal budget,
which is half a trillion dollars now,
it comes out to 1/6 of
1% of the federal budget.
It seems that there's
something ingrown inborn
in our culture that
feels that cultures worth
only 1/6 of 1%.
I think that with triple
the amount of money I have,
which would be 3/6 of
the 1% or a half of 1%,
I would be able to do
a hell of a lot to help
emerging institutions, to
help local community groups
in every planning district in the city
be able to put the same kind
of floor under the Whitney
and the Modern and the Guggenheim,
as the Met has and the
Brooklyn museum has.
- Explain to us what that
means, the same kind of floor.
- The Metropolitan Museum
and the Brooklyn Museum
are in city-owned buildings on park land.
I give through my department
five million dollars a year
to the Metropolitan Museum
and 2.5 million dollars a year
to the Brooklyn Museum.
The city is responsible for
cleaning and maintaining
and protecting those institutions
because it owns them.
It's responsible for capital improvements
if the roof goes, if elevators go,
that's in the city capital budget.
That's what I call putting a floor under.
The private sector owns the collections,
in other words the trustees
own the collections,
and pay the intellectual
staff, the educational staff.
We pay the guards.
The curators are paid for by
the trustees out of endowment
funds, which have accrued over the years.
Therefore the city builds the platform
and the private sector
determines the dance.
I think it's a wonderful mix.
It's my job to keep those places open
and clean and safe and well lit
as many hours a week as possible.
It is not my job to go in and tell them
what it is they should do.
And when the New York Times
calls me a czar, C-Z-A-R,
in a headline--
- Is it the spelling or the
(speech drowns out speaker).
- Crossword puzzles it's tsar,
'cos I can't deal with a Z.
- [Barbara] I see.
- Czar is a four-letter word
that fits into a headline.
I am not in any sense the cultural czar.
I do not go to Balanchine
and say enough Nutcracker.
Let's do Romeo and Juliet.
I don't go to the Metropolitan Museum
and say little more
Monet and a little less,
I mean that would be a culture czar.
If I'm anything I'm a facilitator.
My job is to make it
easier and more smooth,
more oiled for a Latin dance company
that wants to be forgiven a rental fee
at a city owned institution
like Carnegie Hall.
I can make a phone call
and help with that.
- You know need more money
but you need more facility
too, do you have enough authority
to carry out your really far
(both talking) aspirations.
- With regard to Ed Koch's ear.
I don't have enough mandated authority
probably in the city charter,
but that's a very
complicated legal question
that we could go into,
but if I had the money I
would take Lincoln Center,
the Whitney Museum, the
Modern, the Guggenheim Museum.
I would take the Joffrey Ballet.
I would take--
- How much money do you
need for all of this?
- I could do it for 75 million
instead of 26 million a year.
Plus I could give enough
money to the Latin
and black and neighborhood and avant-garde
and Off-Off-Broadway and
the little struggling groups
and Queens and so on, not
to support them completely.
I would never want to do that.
I don't want them to be
funded really from one slot,
but enough to leverage
corporations, foundations,
the state and the feds
come up with more money.
- Well for a city that
takes such great pride
in calling itself the Cultural Center,
now in the world.
- Ed Koch calls my department
the flagship of the city.
- Well what are we doing
to fuel that flagship?
- Moving me near the
Pinta and the Santa Maria.
(all laughing)
- New York is still the
cultural place to be,
is that the fountain header,
is it the marketplace?
- In the visual arts nobody
else has replaced us,
but we aren't as exciting
as we were 10 years ago.
- [Barbara] In the visual arts?
- In visual arts.
In the dance arts, we're the
hottest thing in the universe.
In music, people, quite
sophisticated people who've lived
in Paris and London and New York say that
New York is still the most amazing,
but New York is the only place,
I've lived in London in Paris and Rome.
New York is the only city in the world
where you feel as if you can reach out
and not touch each side and
reach up and not reach the top.
After three months in London,
you've seen the plays,
you've seen the operas,
you've seen the art galleries,
somehow or other you have
comprehended the culture of London.
The culture of New York City is endless,
it's vast, it's incomprehensible
at 15 hours a day, six days a week
for 14 months and I'm not stupid,
I still don't know everything
that's going on out there,
and that's the excitement.
- You sounded an alarming note.
You say that it's not as
exciting as it was 10 years ago.
Is it because of the very nature?
- [Henry] Is this course
basically about the visual arts?
- By and large.
- I remember when I was that narrow.
(audience laughing)
- Is it because A, you know
so much about the visual arts?
B, because the very
nature of what is going on
in visual arts is more
charitably described
as a question of plurality and diversity?
The fact that more people
live in different areas
of the United States now?
- Barbaralee and I have a problem.
We did a program once
together on television
and I talked so much, I
won't let her questions in.
- No you're doing wonderfully well.
- I always want to answer your question
as you are asking it.
This time, I let you finish it.
No it's my own ossification.
I'm 43 years old I can't see anymore.
- [Barbara] Not true.
- Not true.
- Let's try again.
- Hasn't everybody always as
gotten growing older said,
it used to be better when I was younger.
Sometimes I'm afraid that
there's an element of that
and I don't think there is.
I think there's a moment of
enormous high-pitched excitement
which wouldn't be that moment of enormous
high-pitched excitement
if it wasn't in contrast
with other periods.
And I think that was not
something happening--
- You were saying that it's
not happening in general
in the visual arts or it's
not happening in New York?
- No I think it's not
happening internationally
in the visual arts.
- [Barbara] That's a very
different impression.
- I see, I just don't see it,
and I travel much less than I did
because the mayor likes to have me
at the end of a telephone
wire, which I like.
The secret to this job by the way
is the closeness to the mayor.
If there were ever any strain
between Ed Koch and me,
if there were ever a feeling
that I couldn't call him up
and get him on the phone,
walk into his office and ask
for something extraordinary
somebody else had better be
the Commissioner of Cultural Affairs.
It's a real mayoral agency
and the city is run in a way in which
the mayor gives responsibilities
to his commissioners
to run their areas, and
he doesn't interfere.
And there was even a case which
I can't be specific about,
of someone who helped him in his campaign
and they wanted help from
my department for a grant,
and he said that's the Commissioner.
If you think that helping
me in the campaign
is going to get you some special favor,
then you elected the wrong guy
and you helped the wrong guy.
On the other hand he tells
you you make a big mistake,
your job is on the line every day.
You earn your spurs every day.
No one is a commissioner here forever.
- Let's talk about a job of
yours that was on the line.
We left you in 1976 on
your non sabbatical.
What happened after the Wyeth show?
Did you get to do many
shows at the Metropolitan?
- I crept back into something
we call the airplane hangar.
It's a gallery 200 feet long
on the northeast corner, which
was built for oriental rugs.
It has no skylight because
light is bad for rugs.
It was never used for oriental rugs,
and from time to time that would be open.
And I would put up the big paintings.
I don't know if any of you ever were lucky
enough to see them there,
but I had a 65-foot
Ellsworth Kelly that he
gave the museum a spectrum,
which I asked him to do for the 1970 show.
I commissioned that without paying for it,
and he gave it then at the end.
- Let's talk about that 1970 show.
- Anyway I crept back into little corners
of the museum until I left.
And I never really got
back into the upper reaches
of the administration.
- Now we're creeping
back to American painting
and sculpture, 1940 to 1970.
- David Hockney designed
the suit for me last summer.
I'm very proud.
- He is very pleased with his new self.
- It's Humpty Dumpty look.
- Is that a reminder?
- In the American movies the sheriff wears
the belt down here and
the belly hangs over.
I used to dress like that
my friend David Hockney,
who was drawing me very often,
said "That isn't how
you're gonna look good"
and he had me wear, I don't know
if you remember your
children's illustrations
of Humpty Dumpty always wore
suspenders exactly like this.
I'm just pointing that
out to you as an asider.
(all laughing)
American Painting and
Sculpture 1940 to 1970,
an interesting newsworthy
controversial exhibition.
Tell us the genesis and
the reception of it.
- Are you familiar with the catalog?
What happened was the Metropolitan Museum
was founded in 1870.
Centennial was in 1970.
There were five exhibitions.
I originally was to do the fourth.
One Saturday afternoon I
got a phone call at home
from Tom Hoving, eight
months before the show
finally opened and he
said we're having trouble
with the Mexican government.
Can you hear me back there?
We're having trouble with
the Mexican government
and we can't do the
Before Cortez show first.
Will you do your New York
Painting and Sculpture show first?
In other words in eight months instead
of in two and a half years.
And I said give me a minute
and I put the phone down.
I didn't hang it up.
I put it down and I thought can I do it?
And I picked up the phone
and I said on one condition.
If you let me hire Kay Bierman back
from Leo Castelli.
She had been my secretary.
She had gone and become
Leo Castelli's secretary.
I said if I could have Kaye Bierman,
who knows insurance and
shipping and bills of lading
and lists and details, and let me sit down
and think out the show, I can do it.
He brought Kaye back.
Kaye became my assistant curator.
When I left the museum,
she's now working for me
as head of institutional
services with the city.
So, I have 19 years now
of the same loyal staff.
What happened was I decided
that for celebration
what could be a better celebration
than a celebration of quality?
And what I was going to do was by myself
try to determine what
was the best American art
produced between and 1940 and 1970?
Not out of pride but out of not wanting
to share the responsibility
for word of my mistake
with anybody else.
I was not working in a vacuum.
I was working in a consensus.
I knew Clement Greenberg,
I knew Dick Bellamy,
I knew Harold Rosenberg.
I knew all the artists.
I knew how they felt about each other
and I sat down and I made lists and lists
and lists and lists,
and began to think what
is it you Henry Geldzahler
would like to see again
that you've seen before
that would excite you?
What combinations of things
would you like to see
that you've never seen or anybody
else has ever seen before?
And they gave me the entire second floor
of the Metropolitan Museum.
They took out Cezanne
and Monet and Rembrandt
and Van Dyck, the whole thing to put in
Poons and Flavin and Warhol and Rosenquist
and Lichtenstein and de
Kooning and David Smith
and Clifford Still and
Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko
and Stuart Gustin and Riley Walker Tomlin
and we got Joseph Cornell
and Jules Olitsky.
With 43 artists I decided on,
I also decided you can't tell
bupkis from one work of art.
So, I wanted rooms.
I wanted rooms where you could walk in
and be surrounded by Gothlie or Motherwell
or Joseph Cornell.
I had 22 David Smith's.
I had 25 Joseph Cornell's.
I had a room of Ellsworth Kelly drawings.
He had always refused to
show his drawings before.
I said I insist, they're masterpieces.
He showed them and they
have become very well known.
The week before the
show opened John Kennedy
in the New York Times front page of the
arts and Leisure section, wrote rumor
has it that Henry Geldzahler's
New York Painting and
Sculpture will be the
biggest boo-boo of the year.
The week the show opened
there were four articles
in The Times attacking it by Grace Click
and three by Hilton Cramer.
My father called me and
said the Vietnam War
isn't being covered like this.
(all laughing)
In the Foreign Press in
California and Europe,
it was hailed as the
triumph of American Art.
In New York City, it was
universally despised.
Amlie Genore on television practically
wished me dead about the show.
- How do you explain
that because they knew
so many of the artists, so many
personal loyalties involved,
glaring omissions by their lights.
- Glaring omissions, Robert Indiana,
Larry rivers, Louise
Nevelson, Herbert Ferber.
Everybody had a best friend
that I hadn't put in.
Everybody had a social world
that I had excluded.
Everybody had a collection
that they put together
that I was undervaluing they thought
by not including it.
I knew all this was gonna happen.
I lived through it.
I'll live through worse.
I lived through something
just as bad last week.
- [Barbara] We're gonna
get to that any moment.
- As you well know.
- This making is never
a very satisfactory task
no matter what form or shape it takes,
but if you had that
exhibition to do over again.
Let's do a little
revisionistic art history.
Who might you exclude in
the long sweep with that?
- [Henry] This is bad as who I left out.
- Who might you include on second chance?
It's pretty good to have a second chance
to redo that show.
- I would ask myself much harder questions
about Dan Flavin, that I
might have to be sure about.
I would include the work of Raoul Hague,
whom I didn't know was an
active sculptor at that time.
I would think very hard
about Reuben Nakian
and probably have
included some work by him.
I would waver a bit on
Bradley Walker Tomlin,
who still strikes me as a magical artist,
but who perhaps isn't in the
cause-and-effect relationship
in the history of art,
that I thought that I
was involved in in there.
I think maybe what he was was
a maker of beautiful pictures
at a given moment.
I'm not sure.
But for the most part I like that show.
I'd like to see it again.
- You may get that chance.
In fact you may get that
chance in one of your future
incarnations, what would
you like to do next Henry?
- Oh I don't know Ford
Foundation, Metropolitan Museum,
stayed with Koch 12 years.
All kinds of things
flipped through the mind.
For the moment I am
happy and working hard,
perhaps harder than I ever have
as Commissioner of Cultural Affairs.
I don't feel as if I've made the impact
on the cultural life of
the city that Ed Koch
has expected of me yet,
and I expect to stay where I am
at least through his first term.
As for next, I'm 43 years old,
I'm in the midway actuarially
for somebody who is born in 1935.
So, I don't know.
- Would you like to go back
to the Metropolitan Museum?
- Not as a curator.
(audience laughing)
- What does that mean?
(all laughing)
- It means under the aspect of eternity
sub specie aeternitatis they say,
I could imagine myself in a dozen years
coming back as the combined the director
and president perhaps, or something,
I just don't know.
I can imagine going down to Washington
in another administration and doing
what Liv Whittle is doing.
I can imagine all kinds of things.
I can also imagine inheriting some money
and going off and writing books,
living in a shack in Vermont
or all kinds of things.
You think I need public approval too much?
- We sure didn't want to miss you.
Do you need public approval too much?
- I am like Ed Koch in the sense of
I don't quite say how am I doing,
but I need a lot of stroking.
- Most of us do.
In a recent speech honoring Allen Ginsberg
you obviously felt that he
needed a lot of praise too,
because you announced at that
time not only your praise
of his work, but how good
he made you feel in his work
and at that time, you announced
your own homosexuality.
I wonder if you could tell us--
- What day of the week is this?
- Today is Thursday.
- A week ago tonight.
- Just a week ago tonight.
I wonder if you could
tell us what repercussions
if any, your candor has had
during the course of this week?
- Let me tell you what happened.
I was invited by the National Arts Club
to give a gold medal to Allen Ginsberg.
I was on stage with Norman
Mailer, William Burroughs,
John Ashbery and Allen Ginsberg,
quite a heady crowd,
all old friends of mine.
The New York art world
is such that the poets
and the musicians and the dancers
all know each other forever.
and I read a speech which included,
I happened bring it with me,
do you have a few minutes?
- [Barbara] Please.
- Do you have a few minutes?
- [Participants] Yes.
- It's not a long speech.
I just want to tell it like it is.
Poet of New York and New Jersey,
Walt Whitman, Louise Zukowski,
William Carlos Williams, poet of America,
Gregory Corso, Jack
Kerouac, Peter Orlovsky,
Neal Cassidy, William Burroughs,
poet of the West Coast,
San Francisco City Lights,
poet of India, Buddha, Dharma,
but finally if mid-Korea
can be termed final,
the poet again of New York,
New York City the East
Village, Tompkins Park,
the St. Mark's Poetry
Project, Nuyorican Poets Cafe.
Poet of sexuality, the
poet of politics and anger,
the poet of pacifism and meditation.
Allen announced to the world that you can
be homosexual and inclusive.
He is a poet whose truths
are described so feelingly
and tellingly, that the
particularities became universal.
A poet of human sexuality,
we all feel as we read
Allen Ginsberg, what Allen Ginsberg feels.
It is easier and more
palatable to be an American
and to be a homosexual,
because Allen has stood up and spoken out.
His eloquence allows us
to share his victory.
There was a lot of love and a lot of wrath
in Allen's poetry.
The love is light and chimes and breeze.
The wrath warns of Armageddon
and warns off Armageddon.
His wrath that the
America of the Vietnam War
and the 25 most involved
corporations is headlong
unmincing and cathartic.
Poetry to heal, to burn,
to burn off impurities by
daring to isolate their horrors
in precise, imagistic language.
Allen's final message
if I dare is acceptance
and meditation and inclusiveness.
In my name and the name
of the city of New York,
I'd like to thank you Allen Ginsberg.
Now is that a speech in which I get
up and say I am homosexual?
At the end of the speech,
somebody else got up and spoke,
somebody else got up and spoke.
And around 11:30 at
night, I get a phone call
from the New York Post.
I'm back home in bed.
Al Stringer says that you
said that you were homosexual
at the National Arts Club tonight.
You realize that you're
the highest official
in this history of the
state and city of New York
ever to say such a thing.
You deny it.
I said wait a minute, let
me read you what I read.
I said thanks Allen for the
possibility of being an American
and a proud American and a homosexual
during difficult times.
If you're asking me whether
I am myself homosexual,
I'm not going to deny it.
However I have no intention of being the
Betty Friedan of homosexuality.
I'm going to lead no crusades.
My public life is a matter
of public record and concern
and my private life is going
to remain the way it is.
Next day page six, New
York Times, Geldzahler...
- [Barbara] Post.
- Post, what it said?
- [Barbara] I didn't see it.
- I can't remember,
"Geldzahler Says He's Gay"
and then the article goes on to say
that it was a very brave move,
that nobody else had ever done it.
Put it in context of my
remarks about Allen Ginsburg
and Betty Friedan and et cetera,
and it all calmed down,
except in my immediate family,
my parents are still hysterical, true.
And the reason I was a
little shaky when I came in,
I'd just spoken to my mother, who said
"You're making your father sick."
I mean it's like that.
You're 43 years old and you
can still be manipulated
by parents, it's difficult.
- What was your most successful show Henry
and by what standard?
- New York Painting and
Sculpture, no question.
- [Barbara] Is there any
exhibition that you haven't done
that you'd really like to?
- No but I wrote an introduction
to that New York Painting show in 1969
that what I would like
is a permanent exhibition
in the city of New York.
I don't care where it's
housed, at which Museum,
even at a new museum,
that shows to every foreign visitor,
to every American from out of town,
to every New Yorker who wants to know,
to everybody who wants
to judge against the best
that's ever been made, a permanent
New York Painting and
Sculpture 1940-1970...
