Long Point Artists Sideo Fromboluti and Nora Speyer

In 2015, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum presented the exhibition “Nora Speyer and Sideo Fromboluti: A Shared Life in Art, 1975-2008.” They met at Tyler School of Art and with remarkable longevity shared a passion for painting. They were founding members of Provincetown’s Long Point Gallery. In 2024 she passed away at 101 while he died a decade previously at 94. I interviewed them at their secluded home in Wellfleet.

Sideo Fromboluti and Nora Speyer
August 5, 1984

Sideo Fromboluti In the summer of 1940 I came with ten guys. We rented a whole house for $100 so it was $10 each. Commercial Street was nothing but picket fences and flowers. There were very few shops. I put up an easel in the middle of Bradford Street. A car drove by about every ten minutes. Hans Hofmann was also on Bradford Street. I didn’t study with him. He was maybe 30 feet away with a five foot canvas in the middle of the road. It was so magnificent.

Charles Giuliano Were you in the war?

SF I was drafted in 1943 while I was in college. There were three years of war left. I stayed in America running an art department producing war manuals. We were married by then. We met at Tyler when she was 19 and I was 21. We married in 1944. We have two children, an architect, and our daughter is a painter married to a painter.

I came from South Philadelphia which is a slum area. When I married Nora I said that after the war we are going back to Provincetown. We returned in 1952 and it was so disappointing. It was no longer a quaint fishing village. By then there were a lot of galleries and the fishing industry had changed. When I was first here there were nine piers jutting out into the harbor. You can see that in a Karl Knaths night scene of the harbor. There were fishing boats tied to the piers.

Nora Speyer Every year we did landscape paintings during the summer and figure paintings during the winter. We lived in Woodstock and were able to commute to New York. From New York to the Cape was a long drive. In those days it was about ten hours. Sideo was freelancing. We would go to Woodstock for three or four days then come back. I was participating in the freelancing. The result was that we always went to very rural places with lots of trees where we could be inspired to work outdoors. We had developed a feeling for landscapes and felt it was vital to our work. We needed a place with nature and after a day’s work the camaraderie of other artists. We found that in Provcincetown.

CG Who did you show with here?

NS Tirca Karlis when we finally got here. We made a circle around the Cape and stayed on Martha’s Vineyard.  With our freelancing we stayed in Woodstock for about ten years. We went to Martha’s Vineyard because we knew artists there. We stayed there for ten years. Some of the artists were Alice Yarmon, de Kooning was staying there, Herman Cherry, Paul Georges, Wolf Kahn. It was a small community.

SF Then they started disappearing.

NS The Hamptons were a huge community. We went out there but found it disappointing for landscape as well as associations. We got fed up with the Vineyard because the artists were disappearing. It became a rather lonely position. People told us about this area so we came here. We rented a house in the woods where we are now. Sideo could drive into Provincetown and we could work out here.

CG You like to be isolated?

NS We do.

SF When we are working we like to be immersed in nature.

NS I stress that this is a small community.

SF It’s a repeat of our NY life because there we’re involved with hundreds of artists, hundreds of galleries, hundreds of activities. Everything we do is related to the artists we know.

CG Who do you show with?

SF The last gallery we showed with, for about ten years, was Landmark in SoHo. We showed with Virginia Zabriski. We both arrived in New York in 1948. In 1950 I showed with Artists’ Gallery. There were very few galleries so it was important. Adolph Gottlieb and John Grillo showed with them as well as Michael Low and Lester Johnson. I showed there three times then a few of us went to Zabriski.

CG I loved what you showed at Long Point (early work) and the thick paint you were using at that time.

SF I studied with Alexander Abels in Philadelphia. He was a descendant of Max Derner the German scientist of color. He was the Freud of pigment. He was tremendously knowledgeable and advised the WPA on their mural program. What to use and what not to use. We became close and I learned a lot from him. I got to know the properties of thick paint. You can’t paint thickly if you don’t understand the drying qualities of colors. Some dry more quickly than others. If you put yellow ochre into cadmiums there will be curling because of their different drying qualities.

I keep my palette very small just four of five colors which dry evenly so I can put them on any way I want. The other thing that’s dangerous is the medium. If you use dammar varnish as you build up heavier and heavier it’s a perfectly good medium. But if it’s heavy it causes curling problems but not cracking. Then you can go on with that. Nora and I worked together all these years and it came down to just turpentine. There’s enough linseed oil in the paint to control this so it’s a perfect medium. In those early paintings I could paint as much as an inch thick and never had cracks. Those oil paintings are as good as new.

CG They are remarkably fresh.

SF We still paint heavy but no where near as much as we used to. The reason was that we came out of an academic tradition. We studied with Franklin Watkins, Alexander Abels, Alexander Brooks, Louis Boucher people who were old time academicians. When we got to New York there was so much excitement about abstract expressionism, the freedom of paint, and so on. Nora and I felt it was shaking up the deadness in art. We joined but all I can say is that it wasn’t our revolution. It was something we loved and accepted but it wasn’t our revolution. We both retained a love of imagery. I continued on with it but our stock was expressionist with heavy paint.

NS We were inspired and challenged by the opportunities of someone like Jackson Pollock. It opened the possibility of working in the freest possible manner. We adopted a manner of central expression in paint.

CG Nora can you talk to me about the painting of two figures in the Long Point exhibition?     

NS It’s from 1962. It was an expulsion theme which I am still working on. People who were driven out like the hippies. On an emotional level.

SF As  you can see (from slides) I kept the figure within the paint. That was important and a vital meeting of the two thought processes; the paint world which I adored on its own terms, and the figurative which I am extremely involved with. Those two things are interlocked.

CG With the rise of abstract expressionism the figure was largely abandoned but never disappeared. The figure was being reexamined on its own terms.

SF There is a traveling show curated by April Kingsley on just that point. At that time there was Nora and myself, Lester Johnson, Bob Thompson, Emilio Cruz, Larry Rivers. They had a private love of the figure.

CG At that time who were you in contact with that was painting the figure?

SF Nicholas Africano.

NS We were always outsiders.

SF We had each other and didn’t need whatever it was.

NS We weren’t that outside. We knew everyone but the critics. The attitude in our work is different from most people. Even in the early days this (points) looks free. It’s from 1962 but is considered and orderly compared to what was going on. Even with all that paint, if you look at our work it has nothing to do with Hofmann. We have huge, brilliant colors which come way off the canvas. Although the plane is flat it’s not an evenness.

Our work has a solid well knit system. There isn’t that dichotomy which goes on with abstract expressionism. Even with the figure, like Nicholas Africano, who is a fine figurative painter, he is closer to abstract expressionist, free flowing use of drawing, with a back and forth, extreme use of contrast. Our work had a higher rate of finish.

SF There are several important things that we felt involved with that’s different from other artists. I felt an involvement with the figure in a brand new, abstract expressionist spatial image. Space was no longer reality, rather, an invented space. It made the image much more interesting.

I’ve got paintings of the figure sitting in front of a window which is all around and envelops the figure. It’s a contemporary way of looking at space. There is something else about invented space which is the modern Freudian age. I did a series of sleeping women. If you took a Titian sleeping woman, if you can put the head into the space and the space comes out in front of it. You sink it deeper into mystery than if it were lying on the surface like a Titian woman who is lying on a couch. You start playing psychologically and create great mysteries. Giacometti really capitalized on that marvelously with great drawings and paintings. It’s a twilight world where people are in or out. You don’t know exactly where they are standing.

CG You both work in a similar manner.

SF That’s true and it never bothered us. It’s wonderful to be married to an artist that you agree with.

NS It’s been nothing but helpful. As Sideo said it wasn’t our revolution but we loved it, ate it, digested it and made it our life. We developed this together. It was personalized and projected into the work. It was more a school of thought than that we paint alike. When I or Sideo have a solo show it’s a different attitude. If you are not familiar with the art it’s because it’s not a school of art that has extended its tentacles to other people. We stand alone which makes it more similar than if you have a group of people who have been influenced by us. Neither of us has ever taught.

SF In the end what makes great art is individual expression pouring through. I was stunned by a show of Seurat and his followers at the Guggenheim Museum. I never got over the fact that I could walk around and immediately spot at Seurat. Not because he was using dots. They all did that. It was a matter of his intensive personal poetry pouring through that nobody else had. That’s what informed the artist. It was not about his technique.

People would find it interesting if they could see us drawing the figure. Nora is five inches from the model. They have become so nervous that they quit because they can’t take it. Me, I sit back and don’t give a damn about the model although I am completely aware of her. I’m totally involved with myself.  

CG You support yourself entirely on the work?

SF No, we have an income which we rely upon but that only started when I was 45 or so. Until then I supported myself by selling paintings and through commercial work. We were raising two children. After that I quit commercial work and devoted myself to painting. 

CG It’s interesting that you have never taught.

SF I have two teaching degrees; a BFA and a MFA. Today, if we needed money, I would rather teach than do commercial art. At the time I was dividing my time with great care. In the morning I would work for three hours on commercial art. Nora would be getting jobs for illustration. In those three hours I made enough that the rest of the day I could paint.

CG Did you share your interests with Jan Muller and other Provincetown artists?

SF I knew Jan Muller but didn’t know Bob Thompson. I knew Lester Johnson and other artists from our time in the city. In those days we were all members of the Artists’s Club.

CG Did you know Peter Grippe? (A sculptor and my Brandeis professor.)

SF Yes, I knew him. We were in Zabriski Gallery.

CG Did you discuss the figure with those artists?

SF With most of the artists we talked very little about the figure. We were all going in our own directions. But we allied ourselves in a very quiet sort of way.

The artists went to the Cedar Bar every night. We went about once a week when we could get a baby sitter. That was our only night out. On Friday’s we went to the Artists’ Club then the Cedar Bar.

NS We loved all of the new concepts. We sat around for hours talking about them. We did not talk about the figure as such. Although we kept it we didn’t feel that it was an important part of our work. Now we talk about it a lot because we realize that it was a big difference.  It isn’t something to forget in terms of construction. We had our landscapes which were never totally abstract.

It was an important part of our work because we went outside and painted. You tried to match yourself against the elemental feeling of nature. It was the paint quality where you were trying to give yourself a surprise. Matching your sense with what was out there caused very unexpected sensations. We developed a lot of things in our work that we could carry through.

SF That’s a very good point. If you look at a Pollock it’s a tangled mesh. There’s a strong subconscious there even if he was not involved with it. A strong feeling of nature lies there. He used to go to Martha’s Vineyard where there are scrub oaks and bramble meshes. I always believed that the three barber poles (“Blue Poles”) were those trees. In the tangled mesh one could see that there was nature in Pollock. You can also find nature in Rothko. My studio has a bar across the window. I could see the different times of day in terms of light coming in. You can become quite spiritual looking out a window. Through abstract expressionism we were able to develop the sensory, qualities through paint that we were able to absorb from nature.  How, for instance, do you paint dampness? When you’re dealing with nature it’s just a still life object like an apple. What makes it meaningful is smells and wind. There’s light pouring over it and on your skin. Those elements come together and become almost religious in a way. You develop an awe which with respect unites you into a creative being. Not in a powerful sense but in a humble one. When we work out there on landscapes you feel quite humble.  In the city we paint figures in our 22nd street rat trap studio which we work in all winter long. We’ve had the same studio for 40 years.

CG Don’t you get tired of each other?

NS As I said, it’s a very good relationship. We’re always talking about art and our headaches.

SF I was having dinner with John Grillo and Al Jensen. They turned to me and said “How can you paint with a woman?” They just couldn’t believe it was possible. I said “I don’t know how you can feel that way. If it’s a matter of competition I’m competing with you as much as I’m competing with her.” Art is not about competition it’s a matter of finding your own way and expressing feelings about the life you are living. That’s what’s important. Our relationship wasn’t the issue. Of course, were she not equally talented, there might have been problems. Nora’s a fighter. If I got ahead she got ahead. There was always a united effort moving forward.

CG Lee Krasner was a great artist overshadowed by Pollock.

NS We didn’t know she was working. We didn’t know them as a couple. She didn’t seem to work as much as her husband. I don’t know what happened between them but after he died she knuckled down more. 

SF We don’t know that.

NS No, we don’t. I remember Pollock as running to the bath room at Cedar Bar to let out more of his liquor. From what I remember he was always drunk. He was a very difficult man, a sweet man, a lovely person.

CG Who did you know at the Cedar Bar?

SF We sat with John Lester and Ray Heller, Philip Pearlstein, Wolf Kahn. They were people our age. Pollock and the abstract expressionists were twenty years older than us. They were artists we looked up to. I knew de Kooning but he didn’t know me.  Ones I knew better were Rothko and Franz Kline.

CG They were heavy drinkers.

SF Everyone was.

CG Were you drinkers?

SF No, because we had kids. We kept that secret because people wouldn’t associate with us if they knew we had children. It was a period when you sacrificed everything for art and we did.

CG It’s been said that there were few women on the scene.

SF That’s not true. There was Louise Nevelson, Louise Bourgeois, Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, Nora.

NS It’s my opinion that women were looked down upon. They were not taken seriously because up to that time there had not been any important women artists. The men felt that the women artists were not serious or committed. That changed when a group of us came along; Marisol, Helen Frankenthaler, Louise Nevelson, Louise Bourgeois, Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan. 

When they started these women had a difficult time. They managed to impress themselves on the hard boiled male artists. There was Mary Frank and Dody Muller was a serious artist. There were strong women who really worked and carried the ball. They were every bit as serious and committed as the male artists. Galleries didn’t change their attitude for a long time. That’s changed today except, perhaps, for Mary Boone.

SF We were at a restaurant this winter and Mary Boone was there with five of her male artists. Perhaps she doesn’t want the competition of another woman. She likes being surrounded by the boys  We built our life around art. We were good parents but didn’t force our ambitions onto our children. Our kids were raised well and are happy. We gave them the tools to go out and succeed on their own. You can’t pass the buck. Each of us has to contribute.

CG Can we talk more about the figure?

NS I’ve always dealt with myth. In terms of content it opens avenues for me. It creates truths that I can put down that reveal my feelings about people. I like to draw people and get their inner psychological being. Then I like to take that and out it into a theme. That creates a greater dramatic attitude; sexual passions, sorrow, nightmarish foreboding. It’s a way of bringing a whole world into your work.

CG Is Balthus an influence on your work?

NS It’s interesting that you ask that. We have been compared to him a lot. A long time ago we saw a show of his and don’t know the work that well. It was early on for us and I don’t think we liked it that much. Then we saw a very fine show at Matisse Gallery about ten years ago. We saw a huge retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum. I now realize that he shares many of our thoughts. As an important contemporary artist that we relate to, that makes us less mavericks. We belong to attitudes that exist in contemporary society.

SF He came out of cubism but made his own way. Nora and I came out of expressionism and yet maintained our own individuality.

NS That’s very important to our work, the feeling of contemporary concepts of pain. Balthus had a great feeling for the past and brought that into his work. 

SF (Shows his catalogue) This could be Balthus like but I had no direct connection.

CG Everyone seems sad in these pictures.

SF It’s the models, they were all girls with serious problems, and I absorbed their sadness. I have always had a feeling for the plight of women. I dressed them in costumes like Pagliacci the sad clown. The models were dolled up to look sexy, jazzy and everything else. But they would come and pose feeling miserably unhappy worried about their boy friends or where they were going to get the rent.

CG You don’t exploit them as erotic objects? 

SF Not at all. That’s the last thing on my mind. I just don’t care.

NS Scale plays an important role.

SF I have a respectful attitude toward women and can’t stand men who talk about them with hostility.

CG Is I erotic to work with models?

SF It’s the difference between Titian and Matthias Grünewald. Titian is not painting a beautiful woman. He is conveying a beautiful attitude toward life. Whereas the view of Grünewald is disturbed. I think what’s important is not the subject matter but the emotions you are pouring out. Chardin could paint a still life that conveyed more despair than the social realists of the 1930s. There’s one person who left an impact on me, he is a social realist. I won’t mention his name because he is a friend. He painted a man with one leg sitting in a door of a Bowery flophouse. The problem with the painting was that it was painted like a beautiful Renoir still life. He wasn’t feeling it at all. He was pouring out his love and the image was just a superficial part of it. In most art the image is a superficial part.

NS From the beginning I adored painting the figure.

CG You just paint women.

NS No, I paint males as well but not as many as I would like to. I draw from the figure then paint them. Male models are harder to come by. I can’t find as many men to paint. I paint couples as well as lone men and women. I work on a painting for a long time.

SF Neither of us paint from models. We just use them for drawing.

CG The drawings seem more observational and detailed than the paintings. 

SF Very true.

CG Do you have individuals who respond more to the drawings or paintings?

SF The drawings are a different trip. You have a line, then a blank, then another line. To create the form the lack has to be accounted for. Automatically that makes it a different world. It’s two entirely different things. Look at the quick and spontaneous way that Rembrandt draws. Then consider the layer upon layer, plodding of the paintings. That sucks out all the psychological force that the paintings have. Nora and I can do a drawing in an hour, whereas it takes a month or more to do a painting.

CG What about the drawing in the gallery?

SF That’s a drawing for a large painting so it took me eight hours over two sessions because I become exhausted. It takes tremendous tension.

CG Do you and Philip Pearlstein use any of the same models?

SF We criss-cross because we’re close friends. We used to draw together. With time our approach and attitude changed. He got more involved in the subject than either Nora or I did. He went more to the tradition of it. I don’t think of it that way and have no feeling for realism.

NS I have no feelings about realism and don’t think you can be realistic. I’m not even interested. When I paint, reality doesn’t come into my mind. I may work on all kinds of descriptive areas to focus on something. You can get a sense of what I’m trying to put on canvas. Reality does not enter my mind.

CG How did you get involved with Long Point and what does it mean to you?

NS To begin with there was Tirca Karlis and other good galleries. It does a lot for artists and the community for artists to have places to show, places to gather and talk about the work. When Cape Cod National Seashore (U.S. National Park Service) came here that brought additional blight. There was increased tourism and a real estate boom. The galleries were closing. There was little left in terms of what we wanted as an artists’ community. That was eight years ago when a group of us got together.

CG After Karlis died there was no major gallery.

SF Motherwell has been here for 40 years and Budd Hopkins has been here a long time. At 17 years we are relative newcomers. Three or four artists got together, Leo Manso, Hopkins, Fritz Bultman. They started choosing artists and called us.

It’s a versatile group but we are mature enough not to quibble. Nobody storms out of the room over something petty. We have been through that when we were younger. Now we let things slide.

NS There were all these galleries showing candles, seagulls and sailboats. There was a desire to set standards. That was one of the reasons for Long Point.

CG What has Long Point meant for you?

SF It brought together some very fine people who we all have respect for.

NS It’s very stimulating because we have all kinds of shows. We bring our work each summer and plan a season.

CG Liz (Elizabeth O’Donnell the gallery director) said that there will be a Red show next summer. 

NS We have a lot of red paintings.

CG During abstract expressionism there were emerging artists painting the figure which was anathema to Clement Greenberg and main stream critics. These artists have been marginalized.

NS Outstanding work can be overlooked during any period.  Even when everyone assumed that they knew what’s going on. It’s easy to ignore what you’re not interested in.

CG What do you think of the  neo expressionists- Chia, Clemente, Schnabel- who are now prominent? 

NS I have mixed feeling about the work but glad because I did not support Pearlstein and the realists who were arid and dull.

SF I would say that if it is not coming from a past tradition they are pushing a new image onto the scene. De Kooning put it well when he said “When I came to art, art was already there. All I could do was add something onto it.” The artists of significance are always the ones that carry on. Cezanne carried on with what came before him and Picasso took it from there. I have to add to what came behind me.

NS If you were involved with the abstract tradition there was no way to be involved with what Sideo and I were doing.

CG How were your reviews?

NS The earlier ones were interesting. In the 1950s the critics liked our work and we got good reviews. But they would say things like that we were confused between abstraction and subject matter. They always wanted a clean package.

SF It reversed itself with the Philip Pearlstein school in the days of Hilton Kramer with the dry and cool school. There was too much emotion and paint. We never fit in. The Europeans came, through the gallery system, and blew up a lot of concepts which had been hanging heavy. Now we have a ridiculous art scene with a lack of judgment or standards. Compared to the way it was going I didn’t like at all. I prefer it now.

CG Carmen Cicero (Long Point artist) is responding to what’s going on with neo expressionism. 

NS He’s very much into the new way of working.

CG Looking at the work you would assume the artist is in his 20’s.SF He’s a jazz musician and very young in spirit. He had a lot of recognition in the 1950s. I didn’t know him but we were showing at the same time. He was with Peridot and I was with Zabriski. All of the Long Point artists have had reputations. Leo Manso was a very popular artist and Fritz Bultman has always been respected. Budd had been respected as have been all of the artists. We are artists past 50. The shows are interesting because we are all good painters. We have a complete understanding of each other.