Leo Manso  (1914-1993) was widely regarded as a leading influence on the art of collage. Robert Motherwell called him “one of collage’s masters.” Dedicating an exhibition of Manso’s works in Provincetown in March 1991, he said, “Seductively beautiful as the work is at first sight, it holds its own like iron, a visual poetry that never compromises, never loses its inner life.”

In 1947 he started to spend summers in Provincetown. With Victor Candell they ran a summer art school for18 years beginning in 1958. Rather than give up the magnificent space, in 1977 Manso recruited several like-minded artists to form Long Point Gallery. He joined other influential cooperative galleries including American Abstract Artists (AAA) which was founded in New York in 1937. It was notable for the leftist politics of its members. 

His son Peter Manso (1940 –2021) was an American writer and journalist known for definitive biographies on Jackie Stewart, Norman Mailer and Marlon Brando.

While Manso participated in major Provincetown events, during a contentious interview, he dismissed them as well as other artists with a focus on commitment to his own work. “I’m 70-years-old and still painting like hell,” he told me.  For many years he served on the board of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, championing the work of younger artists.

Leo Manso
August 27, 1984

Charles Giuliano When and why did you come to Provincetown?

Leo Manso I came to Provincetown in 1947.

CG The same year as Paul Resika.

LM I don’t know about Paul but that’s when I came.

CG He came to study with Hofmann that summer.

LM I didn’t come to study. I came to work. If Paul came, or Moses, or Jesus Christ came doesn’t make any difference. I didn’t come because of Paul. I came looking for a place. I had been in Mexico in 1946 and then had gone to Monhegan Island which I liked very much. It was an island without cars and way out in the Atlantic. It was very beautiful, rugged and masculine in character. By then we had a child and were looking for a place that was suitable for family and working. Many of our friends had been coming here. 

CG Who were they?

LM There was an older painter, Saul Wilson, who had been here by way of Gloucester. He has a studio next to mine in New York and said why don’t you try Provincetown? My studio was on 6th Avenue near 16th street. Peter Busa was an instructor with me at Cooper Union and we came together that summer. I bought a house and he bought a house.

CG How old were you at the time?

LM If I get the math right, 33.

CG Were you an established artist at that time?

LM No, I was a young painter and had a one man show.

CG Where had you studied?

LM I studied when I was a good deal younger. I went to the National Academy at night.  When I was in high school a teacher assigned us to go the museum and copy a painting. I chose Renoir’s “Madame Charpentier and Her Children” but never completed it because I discovered El Greco. I found Renoir boring and was interested in a more expressive approach. I discovered that the visual arts could be as powerful as music. I was already very moved by music. By 15 I had discovered that art could be very expressive. I began to look at art, mostly at the Met. Every time I went to paint the Renoir I took a different route. I discovered the Italians and Spanish. I went nights to the National Academy until we were expelled because of an eraser fight. It happened because we were bored with a teacher who was late. We were bad schoolboys amusing ourselves. In walked our teacher to a barrage of erasers and we were thrown out.

Then I went to the New School to study with a man who wasn’t much of a teacher but who had the sexiest models. I drew all the time. I used to draw on the subways and in the streets. I loved being on the Lower East Side so the subject matter was what I saw. It was expressed with a sympathetic point of view. I discovered aesthetics, form and so on. As you know, it’s a long story. 

CG Was there an artistic tradition in your family?

LM My father was a craftsman and my mother’s brother was a woodcarver and sculptor and stage designer. My mother sang beautifully. Her father was a carpenter.

CG So it wasn’t unnatural for you to be an artist.

LM It’s never unnatural for someone to follow their instincts. What’s unnatural is to deny them. I don’t know if it’s genes or whatever but my intelligence is oriented to the visual.

CG Your family was supportive?

LM My father would have liked me to be a dentist or doctor or a lawyer. Being hit by the depression he didn’t have much choice. I was on my own and went my own way.

CG When you arrived in 1947 can you give an impression of what you found here?

LM Impressions are always marred by the momentary necessities. Nostalgia is a liar. I remember Provincetown being far less crowded. That’s obvious. It was far more relaxed. If you wanted to make a campfire in the dunes you could do it without restrictions. As a young artist I recall that there were many of us in the community. The energies released by the end of WWII were abundant everywhere and this place was a nexus.

CG Were you in the Army?

LM I’m glad to say that I wasn’t. This place was very open and gave you a sense of freedom. The Art Association was the center. It was also like the Academy as those who didn’t make it in juried shows were out. So we started a cooperative gallery called 256.

I was in Forum ’49 which was separate from the Art Association. Larry Kupferman brought me into that. Through the publishing business I knew an organizer Cecil Hemley. I made a buck designing the occasional book cover. Cecil Hemley and Weldon Kees were the primary instigators of the thing. 

CG What about 256?

LM That happened the next year in 1950. It was in the lower floor of what later became a movie house. I think there is a café there now. It’s close to town hall.

CG Café Blasé.

LM Yes, that’s it. Judge Welch owned the property and said “You can have it for $400.” When we went to sign the lease he tried to raise the rent to $500. So we had a big law suit. Anyway the artists were Myron Stout, Kenneth Campbell, Peter Busa, myself, Harry Botkin, Seong Moy, and later Will Barnett. I don’t remember all of the artists.

CG Isn’t that where Ivan Karp later had a gallery?

LM He worked for Sam Kootz for awhile and had that space, Nat Halper’s space (HCE), which is now a guest house or hotel. Later it was taken over by artists but, for a time, it ran for three years with a new show every ten days. It was a coop. I brought John Frank up who became the director. He slept in the back. We put in a cot and a curtain. That’s where he stayed. It was run as a Salon des Refusé showing artists who couldn’t get into the Art Association. We had forums and jazz concerts as well as a very good photo exhibition of Arnold Newman’s work. It was very lively. He has a place up the street. Shows often sold well.

CG So you’ve been here every summer since 1947.

LM I had a very good school here. It was known as the Provincetown Workshop. In I think, 1952, there was a big spread on Provincetown in Horizon Magazine. It covered the Art Association, groups, and individual artists like Hofmann, Dickinson and Hopper. We were featured as a major school. It was after Hofmann stopped teaching which was in ’54 so the article had to be dated to ’55 or ’56.

CG When did you start your school?

LM 1954.

CG Was it in the space that is now Long Point Gallery?

LM Yes, we ran it for 18 years. My partner was Victor Candell.  When he died I tried to have someone came in to work with but a third of the school was on scholarship. We had a marvelous school. It was one of my great experiences. 

CG Who were some of your students?

LM Melissa Meyer who won a Prix de Rome. Generally I don’t remember our students.

CG Most teachers have that problem.

LM We had very good students including Fulbright winners. We had students from BU, the Art Students League, The Art Institute of Chicago, Cooper Union. They came from all over.

Victor was Hungarian with a very delicious accent. He had a relatively formal personality. I met him through a friend who was into classical music. We both enjoyed the music and got started talking about art. I knew him since 1940.

I taught at NYU and he taught at the Brooklyn Museum School. We started the school partly to subsidize our summers here. It seemed like a good idea at the time. 

CG What did you make?

LM It’s hard to recall. That first year we made perhaps $800 bucks. 

CG What did you charge students?

LM We charged $300 for the season. There were about 40 students. We never took a raise and 18 years later we were still charging the same money. It wasn’t a money making venture. For us it was an act of love. The school was open seven days a week from 8 AM to midnight. We each taught two days and we had a monitor system. Let’s talk about something else as that part of my career is past.

CG What was your involvement with Forum ’49?

LM Only to be invited to show paintings. It was a way to become acquainted with certain people. I knew Adolph Gottlieb very well. Beyond that I can’t say much. It wasn’t a big thing in my life. Other things were bigger.

CG Such as?

LM That I’m 70 years old and still painting like hell. I don’t think that Forum ’49 was the greatest thing that happened. It was pretty good and a symbol of post war liberation. Provincetown was a kind of center for advanced art for a short time. You knew that abstract expressionism was burgeoning. But what was happening in New York was far more important. I’ve always been involved in cooperative groups because I believe that artists have to take their destiny into their own hands. Leaving it to dealers is a lot of garbage.

CG What were the NY coops you were part of?

LM Here we had 256 and in New York in 1948 I was a member of American Abstract Artists (AAA). It had John Ferren and people you don’t know because they have passed out of the picture. It was a very good group and we showed at the New School for a couple of years. Philip Guston came to our shows as he was very interested in the group.  There was a lot of circulation and contact with vigorous ideas. It was an exciting time.

(AAA held its inaugural exhibition in 1937 at the Squibb Gallery in New York City. This was the most extensive and widely attended exhibition of American abstract painting outside of a museum during the 1930s. The majority of AAA members worked in either a Cubist inspired idiom, a geometric style with biomorphic forms, or Neoplasticism. The group officially rejected Expressionism and Surrealism. Ibram Lassaw was the only sculptor to be represented in the first AAA exhibit. For the 1937 exhibition AAA produced its first print portfolio of original zinc plate lithographs, instead of documenting the exhibit with a catalog. George L. K. Morris, an exhibitor and founding member of the AAA, purchased 10 pieces from the show. Morris had established the Gallery of Living Art in 1927, a public collection of modern art in New York City. Future exhibitions and publications would establish AAA as a major forum for the discussion and presentation of new abstract and non-objective art. 

There was extensive hostile criticism of AAA exhibits in New York City newspapers and art magazines of the time. The most influential critics dismissed American abstract art as too European and therefore “un-American”, a term that meant suspected of having communist ties. In the 1930s American Abstract Artists was divided on political grounds with disagreements among Communist Party members who demanded AAA advocate political positions. Some artists who joined AAA were interested in Trotskyism, and there was turbulence between the group’s Trotskyist and Stalinist members. AAA still exists.) 

CG You and Bob Motherwell are approximately the same age. Did you know each other then?

LM No, I met him here. I met him a long time ago here in the 1950s but we kept our distance. That’s the way life ran. When we formed Long Point we became pretty good friends.

CG You mentioned Weldon Kees bringing you into Forum ’49.

LM Cecil Hemley. I mentioned Kees but it was Hemley and Larry Kupferman a painter from Boston. 

CG I’ve met him and his wife the artist Ruth Cobb. Their son is also an artist.

LM He had a show recently in Wellfleet.

CG Did you go to any of the symposia of Forum ‘49?

LM I didn’t go to any of them. Socially I’m pretty solitary.

CG The following summer they invited the Irascibles the artists who protested against the Metropolitan Museum.

LM It helped them like a hole in the head. It was just a way of getting action.

CG In 1950 they were invited to show at the Art Association. Do you recall what you showed in Forum ’49? Do you have any recollection of that work?

LM No, none at all.

CG In the Long Point show this summer you included early work.

LM That’s a work from ’56. My work, like everyone else’s shifted over time. Not only are you affected by what’s around you but by styles, movements and concepts. My work has gone from an abstract impressionist, nature-based orientation to a kind of abstraction, toward what you saw in the gallery.

CG Has anything of the early period survived?

LM I have some things in the studio.

A lot of important people were in Provincetown over a long period of time; if you were to go back to when Stuart Davis (1892-1964) and Morris Kantor (1896-1974) were here. It was an important part of the release of post WWII energy. Housing was relatively cheap and you could make a summer of it. That drew a lot of artists to a relatively free environment.

CG In 1954 when you founded a school how many artists were there at that time?

LM Hofmann had already given up his school. I think Davidson was still going as was Henry Hensche. There have been six or seven schools in Provincetown.

CG Mervin Jules is thinking of doing an exhibition based on the schools.

LM That was my idea which I have been taking about for three years. It’s an impossible job. It would be interesting if they did it because the history goes all the way back. If someone undertakes it they do so with my blessing and gratitude.

CG Can you describe the differences between the schools and the kind of students they attracted?

LM Our school was one-to-one. There was no house style and you could work however you pleased from figuration to abstraction. We were dealing with ideas that were current at the time. Morris Davidson taught a form of truncated cubism. Hensche taught concepts of color that derived from Hawthorne. He had been his class monitor. About the others I don’t know.

CG It’s amazing that these schools existed simultaneously.

LM There was a larger art following then. The change has a lot to do with cost of living and housing. It’s very expensive to stay here which is one of the reasons why I gave up the school. Scholarship students had to spend too much time outside the school making a living. I didn’t see myself bringing indentured labor to this place. It was time to end it and start Long Point. 

CG Was it your idea to start Long Point?

LM Essentially, it was.  I spoke with Budd Hopkins and Fritz Bultman. We decided to invite a few other artists.

CG What were your criteria for inclusion?

LM People we respected. Not necessarily liked, but respected. 

CG Can you explain the difference?

LM There are artists in Long Point who I feel no affinity with but respect their endeavor and professional attitude.

CG Everyone I’ve spoken with refers to it as comradeship.

LM Yeah, we’ve become good friends, right.

CG People make the point that Long Point has done a lot to revitalize the art scene. 

LM Frankly, I don’t give a damn. I’m interested in my own work. If Long Point gives me incentive, not that I need it, but if I have a few friends who I respect and they respond to my work, that’s quite satisfying. That’s a stimulant but I would work anyway. That wouldn’t make a difference. There’s a lot of misinterpretation about that. We didn’t found Long Point to revitalize Provincetown. That would be sanctimonious. We got together because we wanted to have a good gallery. Everything is cause and effect so I suppose that’s what happened. To assume that we are saviors of Provincetown is nonsense. The presumption that we uplifted Provincetown is untrue.

CG In fact it has exerted leadership.

LM Well, as I say, it’s a part of all that.

CG But it was not the intention.

LM How could it conceivably have been? It was too good a space to give up for yet another nifty gifty shop. We just decided to make a gallery of it. I’m afraid I’m debunking something but that’s all right.

CG Do you make a habit of debunking things?

LM Not particularly.

CG From the 1950s to the present are there changes in the Provincetown scene that you care to comment on?

LM You have to go beyond the Provincetown scene. I think we are in an era that is regressive intellectually and artistically. It’s manifest in a political sense and filters down into society. There is a lot of artistic regression back to safe anti-intellectual positions. That has happened in Provincetown as well.

CG Can you be specific?

LM Not particularly. We don’t have as many young people involved and coming up. The winter program at Fine Arts Work Center is helping. Overall, it was just easier in the past to survive a summer in Provincetown. It’s more difficult now if not impossible.

CG You mentioned being on the exhibition committee. What has been your involvement with the Art Association?

LM I’ve been a member since 1947. It’s an important association in the community and I have been involved in one way or another. As a member, at times I have been active and at other times, not so. For the past few years I have decided to throw whatever skills I have into the hopper to help them.

CG Are you encouraged by the direction it has taken?

LM It has improved.

CG Along what lines?

LM I think in every way. The standards are higher and the exhibitions are better. Mervin Jules is doing a bang up job and Ellen O’Donnell is doing a hell of a job. Committees have been enlarged to involve more people. The problem is that we don’t have any money.

CG Do the fights between abstraction and figuration continue?

LM I don’t feel that way perhaps because I am aloof and don’t get involved with that nonsense. The only thing that counts is quality and intelligence. 

CG Over the years who have been artists you felt close to and inspired by?

LM He didn’t come here.

CG Who?

LM Caravaggio. There are artists I drew inspiration from but they are not from Provincetown. My inspiration came from artists greater than those that have lived here.

CG What has been your relation with peers?

LM Moderately friendly with standoffish attitudes on the part of both of us.

CG What was your take on Hofmann?

LM I liked the man and hated the work which was bombastic and crude. I prefer work that’s more refined and possibly more intellectual.

CG Did you ever sit in on one of his crits?

LM Yes, I sat in on them. He had a lot of magnetism and a dynamic personality. His greatest power was an ability to get students to respond. His explanations were impossible to understand because his language was difficult. He was a nice man and great father figure for a number of people. But I must say that I saw a lot of his exhibitions and never liked any of them.