Provincetown Long Point Artist Judith Rothschild

Judith Rothschild
August 5, 1984

Judith Rothschild (1921-1993), a brilliant colorist with a keen eye for composition, gained success as a young artist in New York in the 1940s. Following her graduation from Wellesley in 1943, she studied at the Art Students League with Reginald Marsh, at Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17, and in Provincetown with Hans Hofmann and Karl Knaths. She married and later divorced the novelist Anton Myrer. Relatively unrecognized in her lifetime, a foundation to promote undervalued artists of her generation was created. The asset to create it was her personal collection then valued at $33 million. There were also properties including a Park Avenue complex, sold eventually for $15 million (it housed the foundation for a number of years), a country home in Kinderhook, N.Y., which sold for $4.1 million in 2008 and a Cape property.  She owned works among others by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, ten by Piet Mondrian, a portfolio by the futurist Giacomo Balla and “Muse” by Brancusi. She appointed a friend, Harvey S. Shipley Miller, as sole trustee. 

The catalogue by Jack Flam, was published in 1998 by Hudson Hills Press for a major traveling exhibition: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York: Judith Rothschild: An Artist’s Search, May 19–September 6, 1998. Traveling to The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., May 15–August 15, 1999 and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California, October 25, 2001–January 2002. 

Charles Giuliano We are looking at a group shot from Forum ’49 can you identify the individuals?

Judith Rothchild On the back is the identification of everyone. But let’s not take tape time now. The paintings on the wall, right to left are, mine, the next Weldon Kees, Pollock, one of the first he included in a group show, then two by Karl Knaths. It was an invited show mostly from New York galleries, Charles Egan, Sidney Janis, Samuel Kootz, Betty Parsons and Rose Fried where I showed. Karl, as one of the most important local artists, was included in what was an old garage (200 Commercial Street). It was an anti Art Association project. There was still the effect of terrible battles of the 1930s that Karl would tell us about. He didn’t have much to do with the Art Association and considered it pretty much old hat. It was very antique. 

That was the idea that motivated Weldon Kees and Fritz Bultman. The concept was to have a kind of weekly forum of various aspects about not just the arts but the culture of our time. There were important people from various fields; psychoanalysis, architecture, film. There were readings of James Joyce and T.S. Eliot. There was a panel on painting with Knaths and Hans Hoffmann. Then Weldon hosted an evening of jazz. He was the driving force behind it. He kept it all together with tremendous energy, sweetness and enthusiasm. 

CG He designed the poster and Reggie Cabral owns the original.

JR Do you have the photo of him seated in front of the poster? 

CG He is included as a formative member of the abstract expressionists. (He was one of the Irascibles who signed a letter of protest against the Metropolitan Museum for shunning emerging artist from its annual juried exhibition.)

JR I wouldn’t say he was formative. I would say that he was absolutely secondary, not at all central. But he was accepted and showed with them, and was a part of the group. But he was far from being seminal or an influence on other people. Visually, I don’t think he was. He was a force because of a very wide range of knowledge, tremendous enthusiasm, and a sense of the importance of the arts and communication of the arts. He had the ability to get people, in this situation, to get people to participate. 

For the last Forum, at the end of the summer (September), I don’t think anyone else will tell you about this, at the very end of the summer we had an extra week somehow. Some people had defected (gone home from vacation) and we didn’t know what to do. So we decided to call it “Everybody’s Forum.” And anybody who wanted to could speak for three minutes. To make sure it was lively we invited some people to speak. I remember Elaine de Kooning was down at the end of the summer. Weldon asked her if she wanted to speak on the role of women artists. I had never met her and didn’t know her at all. I had met him (Willem) but didn’t know her. She stood up and was very nervous. She had written a paper. Her hands were shaking and she sounded like a little school girl. She read this kind of history of women in art. It is incredible now to recall her being so shy and diffident and sort of nervous about presenting that subject. 

I don’t know if Weldon chose the subject or she did. If you know her it would be fun to ask her about it. I don’t remember the whole thing. It was kind of a free for all. 

CG Forum ’49 had nothing to do with the Art Association?

JR Absolutely not. 200 Commercial Street was a garage in the center of town. They painted it all white. It was so popular we sold tickets. (sixty cents) Ester Gottlieb and I were at the gate. We had to ask a guy to help because people were forcing their way in because we were sold out. 

For the speakers we offered a bottle of liquor of their choice as our thanks. They did it for nothing. Afterwards, we would have a party and go out to drink somewhere. It was incredible. 

CG How did you come to participate in Forum ’49? 

JR We had been in California and came East. When we arrived we were new to everything. Nobody knew us. Nobody knew my husband (best selling author, Anton Myrer). So we didn’t get into Forum ’49 until it had been settled. Weldon asked me to participate. There was a lot of physical work to do. My husband also participated. There was a lot of crating to handle, carting things around, and managing guests. There was a lot of arranging to do.

CG Do you recall who was in the show? Was Lawrence Kupferman involved?

JR Yes, he and his wife Ruth Cobb. Lawrence Campbell was sitting next to me. Hofmann was in it. Pollock was in the show but not in Provincetown at the time. Franz Kline was not in the show but came later. Some of the work we got from NY dealers. Adolph Gottlieb was active in Forum ’49. His wife Ester and I worked a lot together. He had an uncle or cousin or something, who had a house on the West End, and may have given some money to help it out. 

We invited Paul Mocsanyi who runs the art program at the New School for Social Research.

CG He wrote on Karl Knaths.

JR The very same. There was a battle during the course of the summer, which I wasn’t a party to, and only learned of it through Weldon. It was the question of the position of advanced American vs. European art.

CG Was that the theme of Forum ’49? 

JR No, but that’s what they had a great argument about. Fritz (Bultman) and (Hans) Hofmann had an argument about that. Fritz pulled out around the beginning of August. 

(They issued the following statement.)

Protest Against Ostrich Politics in the Arts 

The estate of the arts should never be narrowed to a national basis-particularly by the artists.

The greatness of Paris is to offer an invitation of participation to the spirit. If the United States has assumed, as in the past few years, the same free and open attitude, this warrants great promise in the arts. Paris’s humanism  has given the opportunity for free development of the artists as the Spaniards- Picasso, Gris, Miro; the Swiss- Klee, Corbusier, Giacometti; the Russians- Kandinsky, Chagall; the Rumanian- Brancusi; the Irishman- Joyce; the Americans, Stein, Man Ray, Carles; the Pole-Lipschitz; and many others.

Still today many of them are living masters of Paris. We earnestly hope that the artistic creation in America will develop the same fruitful ground to equal such a great example. 

Hans Hofmann,  Fritz Bultman

CG What was the purpose of Forum ’49?

JR At that time there was a great sense of real excitement in many of these fields. Everything seemed to be opening up. 

CG I understand that Norman Mailer and Robert Motherwell came that summer. 

JR I didn’t hear Mailer but Bob gave a very good talk. I had met him in New York. After the talk Weldon and Robert came back to our place in the West End, an old net mending shack opposite the Hofmanns. We had drinks together. Bob was likely in East Hampton. He probably rushed back. Probably gave the talk and rushed back. They came to our place for drinks but not for hours and hours. I suppose he had a plane to catch.

CG Kees appears to have committed suicide in San Francisco. (His abandoned car was found next to Golden Gate Bridge. A body was never recovered.) Did he strike you as a depressed person?

JR No. I’ve talked a lot to both men who are working on his biography. Weldon, I think, was a person with an enormous love of life and appetite for life which you could see when he played jazz. He made up incredibly funny songs. He was a very good jazz pianist. He composed, like when driving in the country, he made up funny, ridiculous songs. “Newton had a trauma/ Got it from his mama/ a woman who distorted many lives/ and the family water closet/ she used to deposit objects/ like cleavers and knives…”

Then he wrote a wonderful song when he was living in Point Richmond. That was when Ford Motors was expanding. There was a little town Mill Pete which had been a nothing town until Ford took it over. He wrote a sweet little ditty based on “Manhattan.” All I remember is “Now town is sweet/ as that Old Mill Pete is.” He had a great sense of fun. 

CG People say he killed himself. Was he depressed? 

JR The measure of his despair was the height and intensity of his hopes. I don’t think he was at all depressed. The human condition being what it is, and he being as sensitive as he was, Weldon was increasingly despairing at what was happening in the arts.

CG He was very handsome.

JR Like Zachary Scott. People were attracted to him. I never thought of him as sexy and I don’t think people did. Not that anyone thought he was homosexual, but you felt warmth, electricity and involvement. When we met I was newly married and not into that kind of thing. But I don’t think that was his quality. He was not a macho guy. He was gentle and his movements were gentle. He was small.

CG What was he painting?

JR They tended to be abstracted biomorphic forms, from ‘49 to’50, on dark backgrounds, usually with quite a bit of texture involved; sometimes using a lot of palette knife.

CG Do you own one?

JR No. Fritz bought one recently and I saw a slide of it. I don’t think it was great but it’s not fair to judge from a slide. Then he was in California. Jim Reidel who is working on a biography has been trying to collect some. (“Vanished Act: The Life and Art of Weldon Kees,” 2003.) He has four or five. There are some in the University of Nebraska. What I liked best of Weldon’s were a large group of collages that he did in the early 1950s for the Palace of the Legion of Honor. They were luminous, wonderful, mostly yellow and white. They were not at all unhappy and full of sunlight. Charming. A little like the early Motherwell collages which were shown at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery. Probably, actually, a lot like that. He was probably influenced a lot by Bob’s early work. 

CG Was Pollock around in 1949?

JR He had left. He had been here, I think, in ’45 or ’46. There is uncertainty about that. Franz Kline bought the same property. Pollock rented it, and then the next summer I rented it, or the summer after. By the time I was in the West Kline bought the whole property and built his studio there. 

CG Was Kline around for Forum ’49?

JR No, Kline came after that. I never knew him because he wasn’t here. Barnett Newman was here, I know because I’m a good friend of his wife. 

CG Was he in Forum ’49?

JR I don’t think so. 

CG What about Edwin Dickinson? 

JR I don’t imagine he was. In those days he was rather aloof. He was not a part of this kind of mood. I think that Nat Halper showed him at HCE Gallery. Milton Avery wasn’t here that summer. 

CG But Knaths was.

JR What everyone thought in those days was that there were two important artists in town; Karl Knaths and Hans Hofmann.

CG Not Dickinson. He was often linked with Knaths and Ross Moffett. 

JR Dickinson was in Wellfleet not Provincetown. Hopper was also here but I don’t recall much talk about him. That’s my opinion and other people may think differently. We tended to think that Hopper was a part of the past. Even though Knaths was somewhat figurative there was a lot of feeling in town of a polarity between Hofmann and Knaths. They were competitors and had to be kept apart. They did not dislike each other and both were very shy, really. They were not averse to seeing each other. It was a curious thing. 

You have these two men who were both German, they spoke with German accents and both were hard of hearing.  

It reminds me of what Pierre Matisse told me about arranging for Joan Miro and Henri Matisse to meet in Paris. He tells it charmingly. It was a big deal to get these artists together. They met in a café that was decided upon and introductions were made. They ordered drinks. They discussed the weather and events going on in Paris. They finished the drinks then politely shook hands and left. Miro was overjoyed and delighted to have met Matisse whom he greatly admired. That was it and a bit like when Hans and Karl were together. While always polite I don’t think they had much of a conversation.

In the fall of ’59 we rented the house across the way from here, Jack Hall, and stayed for the winter. We had been all summer and decided to stay on. That winter we went once a week to see Karl. All summer we just had three sessions, translations, that sort of thing.

CG You were in the group with Myron Stout, Joan Wye and Jim Forsberg.

JR That’s right. There was someone I wanted to ask you about, Max Gould. He had been chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and a Marxist. He was a complicated, interesting guy. He was fired.  He was head of the SEC during the Roosevelt administration but probably not for long. Max was basically a linguist. After he was fired he had enough to live on but under a cloud. He was around the summer of ’49 when we met and did translations. We used to meet at our place. I was wondering if he or his wife Ester studied with Knaths? They lived in Washington. Ask Myron 

(Stout) if he knows what happened.

CG What were you translating?

JR I’m trying to remember. It wasn’t all translating we were also reading. I wonder if we were reading Joyce that summer. There was usually a final version typed by me or my husband. That meant deciphering people’s handwriting.

We were working on Carl Einstein from a series in German on Cubism. Einstein was a friend of (Daniel Henry) Kahnweiler (Picasso’s dealer) and there’s a lot that’s significant. People were interested in what Einstein said about Juan Gris’ method. What Karl always clung to was that Gris said he started with the abstract and worked toward the concrete. Toward the specific I should say. It’s a very complex thing to decide; if that was the way Karl worked, or he wanted it to be true. I think, if you look at his work over a period of time, the period when charts were made, what I see is that he started with something much more concrete, more real, let’s say a rooster, a real rooster, then tried to relate it to a method. Later the whole process became much more one. But until way after the war I think, that wasn’t true. I don’t know when Karl encountered that quote from Gris. When I knew him this is how he worked, the way that Gris did.

Will Barnett was also in those sessions which were a lot of fun. But nerve racking because we all considered Karl to be the center and bowed as much as we could to his preferences except when it came to something that was actually intellectually important where you couldn’t. His understanding of German was hit and miss. Sometimes it was very good and other times not so. My husband majored in history and lit at Harvard, specialized in German lit, and had had a lot of German. So he knew the language pretty well. Max Gould knew the language very well. On the other hand those two people didn’t know the art side. So there was a terrific battle among people who were ill equipped for the task at hand.

CG So you met every Thursday evening?

JR No, in the afternoon because Karl went to bed early. Sometimes we met at Jim Forsberg’s. Then there was a summer when we didn’t translate but did readings. We met at different places and read a lot of Blake. Someone who liked to read would do so aloud. One was Gloria Linner who knew Karl and later married Dwight McDonald. Her then husband, Linner, was a poet. 

The first show I had was at Jane Street Gallery, a cooperative in the Village. Karl and Agnes (Weinrich his sister in law) came to see the show. I didn’t know him and it was before I met Anton. He liked my work and I was very excited. I didn’t know his work very well.

Nurendorf, who introduced Paul Klee to America, bought a work from my first show and his friend Neuman from my second. They came down to this little gallery and made that commitment. I didn’t know them.

By chance that Spring I went to the Guggenheim which at the time was run by Hilla Rebay (1890-1967). You could present work to her and if she liked it receive a little stipend around $20 a month. I had a commercial art job and thought this would help so I went for it. Agnes Weinrich brought some work for her to see. You went at an arranged time and she would do this periodically. I showed her my things and she liked them very much. At the end of the session she said “Go to my secretary.” That was tantamount to saying that I was on the “A” list.

Agnes was late. It was very informal. We were all standing around and she would say “OK, you’re next.” One of the last people, a woman, presented a small work. She was telling a long story about Kandinsky not working on painting for ten years so he would know the exact thing to do. Rebay was drawing on the woman’s work to illustrate her point. By this time I didn’t like her at all. I said “I don’t think you should be drawing on someone’s work without their permission.” I could see that the woman was upset and this was a terrible thing to do.

There was a terrible silence and she went on to the next person. At the end of the session she came over to me and said “You needn’t see my secretary.” Agnes came over, deeply moved, and introduced herself. She probably told Karl about the incident. I always thought that Helen (sister of Agnes and wife of Knaths) had a nervous breakdown and Agnes saw herself as a protector. I think Agnes was in love with Karl. When he spoke about Agnes there was a lot of emotion in his voice.

Agnes died in the Spring of ’46 of a heart attack. I didn’t know her very long. I got married and we moved West.

CG Joan Wye recalls that Karl was involved with Agnes and asked her to marry him. Her reply was that “I could never marry you because it would take me away from my career as an artist. Being married would mean that I would have to take care of you and that would take me away from my work. But why don’t you marry Helen? She would make the perfect wife. She’s more the kind that would marry.” He said to Joan “So I married Helen.”

That sense of “So he married Helen” is such a lack of psychological insight, typical of Knaths’ bumbling primitivism. Even telling that story decades after the fact, who else could say that without any introspection?

JR There is the tale of a man who married the oldest daughter in a family. Of four girls he fell in love with the youngest. The mother and sisters manipulated him into marrying the oldest girl. Karl, I always thought, had been manipulated into marrying Helen for whatever reason. Subsequently, he had no introspection about that. He just took it as it happened at the time. 

They were very nice people and decided to be together in some way. Certainly, for instance, he was very protective of Helen as a pianist.

CG Did you ever hear her perform?

JR Not perform but I heard her practice. During our Thursday meetings she would never play if she thought someone was listening. I took piano lessons so I knew about music. She usually practiced in the afternoon when Karl took a nap. It was arranged when we would arrive, say 2 P.M. Sometime he would be upstairs finishing a nap and she would be playing. The first time I heard her play I thought it was the radio. She had amazing manual facility. Helen had a repertoire of things she knew. The way her fingers tripped over the keyboard was manually quite good, but skittery. She would play Mozart in the most ladylike, unprofound way, but surprisingly well. That’s what’s interesting and her phrasing was good. It was intelligent but not interesting playing I would say. I never heard her play an entire piece from beginning to end.

CG I heard that when she was supposed to give her graduation recital she froze and couldn’t perform.

JR Who told you that?

CG Joan Wye. Karl insisted that she continue to play.

JR He got very interested in music theory. I might be explaining something about music, about harmony or something, and I would say “Maybe we should ask Helen?” He would say “No, no, no.” He did not want to involve her in any way which I still don’t understand.

CG He was living with sisters, one an artist, and the other a musician. They had studied in Europe. There is the sense that Agnes introduced him to modern theory. Her work was more advanced than his. It’s said that Agnes got him interested in Cubism. Imagine the three of them sitting around at night talking about art and music.

JR That reminds me of his early days and his stories from before he met them. I don’t think he was a virgin and there were women before them. There was a wealthy woman in Chicago who encouraged him in some way. As far as what started (Cubism) he saw the Armory Show in Chicago and it was a revelation. (He worked as a guard for the show.) It was seeing the Cezannes in that show that started it. By the time he came to Provincetown he was committed to modernism. I think he was drawn to Agnes and those two women because he felt that this was his contact with the big time and what he admired. I don’t think that Agnes introduced him to Cubism. She did introduce him to the specifics and the whole Juan Gris thing.

CG Because she had studied with Gris?

JR That’s right. I got from him, through her, the Gris notes. 

CG Do you still have them?

JR I may, I know I loaned them to some archive. I’ll make a note to look for them before we break.

CG Do you have a Weinrich in your collection?

JR No, I wish I did.

CG When we were talking on the phone you said that you have three works by Knaths. Can you tell me which ones?

JR One you saw at Wellesley called “Dusk.”

CG That was shown at the Whitney. Was it in the annual?

JR No, that show of Knaths’.

CG The Four Americans show?

JR Yes. One was called “Spearing Eel” which I can get you a picture of if you need it.

CG There’s another version of that which Henry Delawrence owns. Did you see the movie on Knaths? He tracked it down. Three of us saw it; Henry and Bob Brown from the Archives of American Art. The screening was at the Boston Public Library. It was awful. It started with views of the docks and fish with schmaltzy music. Unfortunately it was not an interview. Interestingly it had a version of “Eel Spearing.” Henry knew of it sitting in someone’s cellar.

JR Is that the green one? One that he did was very green.

CG I couldn’t say because the color of the film was so deteriorated. It was all red and purple. It was a very disappointing Knaths incident.

JR He had bad luck. Like when Arnold Newman was going to photograph Karl. (“Karl Knaths, Provincetown Studio”. Photo by © Arnold Newman, for the article written by Robert Hatch, “At The Tip Of Cape Cod” July, 1961 issue of Horizon, a hardbound magazine.) He got a stye in his eye and was very upset. I don’t know if it shows in the image. He felt unhappy about that photo being taken at that specific time. He had a lot of that kind of bad luck. The third painting I have is an unfinished portrait of the man I was married to. He did very few portraits. They were not like his other paintings. They were portrait sketches.

CG Marcel Duchamp came to your show.

JR He came to my first show at Jane Street Gallery. He liked the show and we talked. I guess he was excited about it. He asked if I knew the work of Kurt Schwitters? I don’t know by chance how he came to my show. The night before, I had seen a book with collages by Schwitters. His collages excited me. I had collages in that show, perhaps just one.

He said “There’s a gallery uptown that has Schwitters and you should go see them.” It was the Rose Fried Gallery. As you know, at that time he was helping Katherine Dreier assemble her collection (later donated to Yale University). He was helping prune the collection. I had sold something from the show for $115. She had a very nice 1920s Schwitters for $135. I told her all I had was $115 so she sold it to me for that price. Subsequently it was sold because we needed money. It was a small cubist work.

It was a very good classical one. Actually, that’s how I got into Rose Fried Gallery through Duchamp. She really listened to him. The Schwitters was the first modern thing I collected.

I was going to talk about Karl’s method. The reason that he chose Ostwald over others color theories was because Ostwald based his system on pigment not light. As you know, he was a painter.

(Friedrich Wilhelm Ostwald 1853-1932 He recommended a systematic arrangement of colors and a standardization of colors used. He believed colors should only be used and selected from a finite collection. He acknowledged that his system left out some intermediate colors between the ones he selected, but he did not work to include them in his color space. The system provides a single, midpoint interpolation between adjacent colors. It does not have an easy way of recording millions of colors. 

The Color Harmony Manual is made up of charts of colored chips representing a color space. The overall shape of a chart is an equilateral triangle made up of 28 samples. Each chart is made up of samples of approximately the same hue. Each chart has one sample with the greatest purity. This sample is the far point of the triangle. A series of five samples with increasing reflectance and decreasing purity are on the upper edge of the triangle. It ends with an almost-gray modification of the original pure hue. A series of five samples with decreasing reflectance and decreasing purity are on the lower edge of the triangle. It ends with an almost-black modification of the original hue. Between these light and dark series are other samples of intermediate reflectance and purity.

All color samples on the same chart have almost the same dominant wavelength. All color samples in the same vertical row have almost the same dominant wavelength and purity, making the only difference the reflectances.

Color samples made from clear cellulose acetate sheets with one side coated with an opaque colored lacquer. This ensures that both sides are the same color while one side is glossy and the other is matte.)

Ostwald wanted to make a useful color-step manual. It is more useful than other systems because it is based on the actuality of twenty four steps around the color circle. It was a natural progression for Knaths as we have a twelve tone scale to connect it to the Western keyboard. I made a little sketch of it before you came just to show you simply. If you take the color circle as full intensity, this being the circle, one would be yellow and 13 would be its opposite, a bluish purple. Numerically one is the note C. C sharp would be 3, D would be 9, F being a half note would be 11, and G being a half note is 13. It’s one octave and G, 13, is the tonic. Seven would be 23 up here.  The 7th on the keyboard.

C is the tonic, the note C. Let’s say you want to do a major chord in C in music it’s C E G. So C is here or 1. E is here which would be 9. G is here which would be 13. Let’s start and keep it simple. Let’s not talk about the geometry which is another complication. That’s what he worked out much later and I have a chart of it somewhere. If you look at his work there is a pinpoint and lines radiating out. That’s all connected with this.

(Knaths used the Laws of Dynamic Symmetry. Convinced that design was not purely instinctive, Jay Hambidge (1867–1924) searched for the technical bases of design. He found his answer in dynamic symmetry. The study of Greek art convinced him that the secret of the beauty of Greek design was in the conscious use of dynamic symmetry — the law of natural design based upon the symmetry of growth in man and in plants. He worked out a series of root rectangles that the artist, using the simple mathematics supplied in his book, can apply. Part I sets forth the fundamental rectangles with their simple divisions based on the proportioning law found in nature; Part II explains compound rectangles, many of which were taken from or suggested by analysis of objects of Greek art.)

Let’s say this is yellow or C in Karl’s musical system. This would be pure yellow of the maximum intensity. This is pure black and this is pure white. This would be the scale of grey. There are 27 steps of this mixture being of less and less hue and more and more white with no black. This would be the same thing going toward grey with no white. Each of the 17 steps is numbered. If you knew the Ostwald system the green it’s mostly 24. You could identify everything in the room. Anything you see.

CG Did he teach you this? How did you learn?

JR By osmosis. That winter when we visited him each week I knew a certain amount by that time. But I learned by osmosis as much as anything else. This is not what he was using later on. He was using a more simplified geometric thing. He was also interested in various relationships like the Fibonacci sequence.

(In mathematics, Fibonacci is a sequence in which each number is the sum of the two preceding ones. Numbers that are part of the Fibonacci sequence are known as Fibonacci numbers, commonly denoted Fn . The sequence commonly starts from 0 and 1, although some authors start the sequence from 1 and 1 or sometimes (as did Fibonacci) from 1 and 2. Starting from 0 and 1, the sequence begins 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, …)

He used the Golden Sector a lot. (A ratio, observed especially in the fine arts, between the two dimensions of a plane figure or the two divisions of a line such that the smaller is to the larger as the larger is to the sum of the two, a ratio of roughly three to five.) It related to the color harmony he set up. What I just described would be like a melody. It has nothing to do with the harmonic structure. Let’s say it was a particular five notes. That would determine what colors around the circle he was using; which hues. Then you have to discuss what gradation or intensity, which has to do with the harmony within it.

In other words they were not all equally important. And when you looked into his chest of drawers, or closet you saw the clam shells. (mixed paint)

Elaine de Kooning must have seen it when she did an article on him. Maybe that was the occasion when he did the portrait.  (“Knaths Paints a Picture,” by Elaine de Kooning, Art News, v. 47, n. 7, pt. 1, November 1949 “Meet Romantic Cubist Karl Knaths”)

The subject (in the article) is a woman but it isn’t identified as Elaine de Kooning. In the article she didn’t discuss his color or compositional theories. I think she says “If you open the chest you see.”

CG I would have to go back and check but it’s not an insightful article.

JR I don’t think she was drawn to his style or his method as it was alien to what she was used to.

CG Florence Grippe (wife of my Brandeis professor, sculptor Peter Grippe) told me that she wrote an article on Knaths and submitted it to Art News, but they chose Elaine’s. 

JR There are several paintings that he did in the 1960s with a horizon line motif which is three or four colors horizontally. That would be like a chord. In some cases that chord pulled against a huge amount of movement on the other side. Those colors might be yellow, nine being a blueish-red like a cerise which would be 9 on the Ostwald scale, which would be 3 musically. And maybe a blue would be 5. Then maybe a very strident green, a yellowish green which would be a 7 leading back to the tonic like a very important chord pulling back to the harmony, on the other side of which, you might have the same tones in it but presumably would not be, at this point might all be in the triangle, because you have very small amounts of it in it. There’s tremendous contrast and it’s meant to hold against all this complexity. The other part would move around, very likely, in the grey scale and in the other area of the circle. The only way you can analyze it is, maybe take a couple of the pictures, and identify all of the colors. Then you’ll see clearly  what the structure is.

CG Can you identify this picture?

JR It’s not a good example because it’s too over simplified. It’s unusual for him as there is no blue in the picture. He used blue or bluish purple a lot to anchor things. There’s a little shadow on the face but it’s minimal. It’s almost an either or kind of thing. It might be almost, very atypically, a sort of red contrast. If you are going to do a circle of it, I’ve never looked at it this way before, the red is probably 5. Of course there are all these greens. All this pinkyness is probably 9. It is unusual for him to have all this contrast. The grey was probably 13. The grey was probably 13 but it’s all very minimal. I think I have analysis I did of “Adam Zero” and a couple of other things that would be useful to you. (“Number Zero Adam,” Karl Knaths, 1948, Albright Knox Museum)

CG It’s one of his most important paintings. 

JR This is all about his method. We used to tease him because he would work on a picture for a very long time. Certain colors which were prominent in the beginning would gradually disappear. I would say “Karl, wait a minute, I thought this whole thing was based on a wonderful Russian melody. Now I don’t see any of that.” He responded by showing me the underpainting and how he had to work some things out. When his work went well he used it, then forgot it, as he painted. It was like a security blanket for him. He would get all this out, then when he got into it he felt pretty free doing whatever he wanted to do. It is kind of a very strange process. I don’t think it always worked for him. At times it really trapped him.

CG Did anyone try his system?

JR All of his students in Washington (Phillips Collection) tried with little success. It really wrecked my painting for awhile. I remember once we decided to use the same exact notes, use the same exact structure. I still have the painting which is not a disaster. We selected a Russian melody. Karl had a lot of interest in numerology. The melody had exactly 21 notes. That had mystical significance. We made a deal. I said that he picked such bad music that nobody could make a good picture. We were good enough friends that I could say that jokingly. Nobody could make a good picture out of those bad melodies. So we made a deal that we would both make pictures based on a Mozart motif that I would pick out and that winter we did.

When we went over he would show me what he had worked on that week and we discussed it. I could never get over how impersonal he could be discussing his work. It was so different from the Hofmann romantic thing in which it’s all very mysterious and the process comes from the unconscious and who knows what else. His attitude was that it all may be happening but the other thing is something you can talk about. So we would look at it and I think he came to rely a lot on my judgment because he really looked forward to showing me the work. I don’t think he had much of a sense of an audience at that time. He was so isolated here. When he came to New York he didn’t have a lot of artists that he had a great rapport with.

One of the sad things that happened to him during the years that I knew him was how his old friends, like de Kooning, became so successful. In New York they used to get together at the old Waldorf cafeteria. De Kooking was one of his regular contacts and they always met at the Waldorf. When de Kooning really hit it there was a rift. Deeper than Hemingway and Fitzgerald, a real cleavage. Sometimes Karl met with Mondrian.

CG Among the Knaths materials in the Archives of American Art are manuscripts that show up. There’s a Mondrian manuscript and de Kooning lecture. There’s a Malevich piece. There is no explanation of what they are doing there.

JR That’s likely something we worked on translating. Was it on Neo Plasticism?

CG I don’t recall.

JR When I was in NY during the war most of those writings had not yet been translated. We started translating all that stuff from Europe. I had the idea that it should be available to other artists. In those days you could go to MoMA, and if they knew you, take anything home. I would take things out, translate them, and then bring them back. If they knew you that was OK. I got things from the New York Public Library. Of course that was subsequently translated by other people. The Mondrian and Hofmann I’m sure I translated. The Malevich, I don’t know. That was probably in Agnes’s papers. I’m sure somebody has told you about the chimney. 

(Knaths inscribed the names of important artists and influences on it.)

Are you going to interview Anton Myrer because we would know the names on the chimney? He’s difficult to reach but I urged the men who were researching Weldon Kees to contact him.  He had the letters between Weldon, Anton and I. When I left I didn’t take them.

CG I’m trying to get through his book.

(His first novel, “Evil Under the Sun,” published in 1951, was about a war veteran convalescing at a Cape Cod artists’ colony…The artificial worlds-within-worlds of narcissism, sexual obsession and license among a group of artists, which are examined through the eyes of several Greenwich Villagers, seasonally transplanted to a summer colony.)

JR I think the protagonist in the novel is a combination of Knaths and Hofmann. The book had some really good writing in it. You should contact Anton but it’s best if you do it on your own. He knew Knaths ever since he was a little boy. His mother studied with Knaths.

In think until 1955 or so Knaths looked on him as the closest thing to a son. I think Karl became more fond of me as time went by. What I didn’t see at the time was that Anton was pulling away from what Karl thought was the point of the game of art wanting more money and things. I think his attitude changed a lot.

(Off the record observations.)

CG You have so many interesting things in your collection like the little Picabia.

JR That’s one of my favorites.

CG You had Gris and futurism like the series of prints by Balla.

JR Actually, they’re not prints.

CG I had a tour of Lois Torf’s print collection with MFA curator Cliff Ackley. For futurism there was a Severini and a Boccioni which was redrawn at the Bauhaus so it was not really a Boccioni. I asked him why don’t you have more futurist work? He said “The futurists didn’t make prints.” I told him that I knew of a series of prints by Balla. He said that he had never heard of them.

JR He was right they are not prints though they look like lithographs.

CG Which is what I assumed they were.

JR Balla had a portfolio which I have the cover of which he made himself. Every now and then he made something to put into the portfolio. It started in 1911 and continued I think until 1919. We did not get all of them which I tried to do. I know a woman with two of them and I think that’s the complete set. She won’t sell them. It’s interesting how he did them. I think it’s fascinating.

CG I like the collection because it’s so personal and eccentric. I’m not sure what word you would choose.

JR I know what you mean. They are all the things that are absent from the collection now. We gave the largest Mondrian to the National Gallery.

(There were ten works by Mondrian in the estate.)

CG You had early Mondrian landscapes.

JR When I was elected into American Abstract Artists I was the youngest member at that time. Then it was a really great thing though now AAA has fallen on sad times. Mondrian was a founder as was Burgoyne Diller. He showed with Rose Fried which was before she took me on.

(The Rose Fried Gallery (1936-1972) was instrumental in introducing the American public to many abstract painters, including Mondrian and Kandinsky. The Gallery remained operational until Fried’s death in 1970.)

Hofmann used to talk to me about Mondrian (1872-1944). That was before his show at MoMA. At that time it was only artists that thought about him. James Johnson Sweeney had a great Mondrian.

(James Johnson Sweeney (1900-1986) was an American curator and writer about modern art. He graduated from Georgetown University in 1922. From 1935 to 1946, he was curator for the Museum of Modern Art. He was the second director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, from 1952 to 1960.)

CG In his personal collection?

JR Yes. Do you know how he got it? They were friendly and Sweeney invited him to dinner. At the last minute Mondrian thought that I can’t go there without anything. Should I bring a bottle of wine? So he brought a painting. That’s the way it really was.

CG What will you do with the collection?

JR I haven’t decided.

CG Do you have children or heirs?

JR No, not really. Nothing compulsive that I have to do. I’ve thought about it a great deal. I’m not sure what’s the right thing to do. For instance, museums change so. In some ways they are so dependent on the human situation at some time. I’m a great believer in teaching museums. I think what has happed to museums is apocalyptic and horrifying. Did you read the Hilton Kramer piece in the New Criterion?

CG About MoMA?

JR He touches on a lot that’s significant. I mean we are now in the mass oriented museum setup. It’s really impossible to see paintings in the typical museum. The next thing they will do is put you on a moving belt. You are being programmed in such a way that you can’t change the order, can’t stay with one thing. There’s only one room with seats in MoMA. It’s very scary because the pictures that we study, that I most love in art history, the more time that they take the more I love them. As an artist there are very few pictures that I like and draw upon, that matter to me. But the whole process is making it impossible to see those pictures. So are you going to give them things like Gris who said that every picture was an idea and it wasn’t completed until the idea was completed? Nobody is looking to see what the idea is. Can you see it that long now? The new wing in Boston is deadly that way.

CG I don’t agree. I own the Juan Gris “Portrait of Picasso.” I bought the print when I was in college for $50. It’s a beautiful print which I love and look at every day.

JR Sure, you’re seeing it at home which is how it is meant to be seen. You’re saying the same thing as me.

CG Let’s get back to Knaths. When did you arrive in Provincetown?

JR I visited in ’46 but my first summer was ’47. I had met Karl and Agnes in New York so I went to see him. I think I went by myself. I was supposed to go with Anton’s mother but that didn’t happen. At that time I didn’t know him well and then we went West returning after a year and a half.

CG People comment that he didn’t like company.

JR Oh but he did. He was embarrassed by all that “stuff” as he put it. When visiting you would walk into this narrow room. It was the only living room that they had because the larger room was where Helen had her piano. It was very stiff there with an arch over the fireplace.

CG I visited him once in 1966. I was hired by Paul Haldeman of the United Church of Christ. He was putting together a portfolio of Biblical images to distribute to the churches. I was hired to select and visit the artists. A mandate was that they be figurative though I included Jules Olitski and Esteban Vicente. Paul rejected Olitski. Karl was one of the artists as well as Sister Corita Kent, William Gropper, Balcolm Greene and others. I knew Karl’s work from “Lilacs” in the MFA. (Later deaccessioned by Ted Stebbins.) I remember Helen looking in from another room. The stone was shipped to him and Paul liked the print. I believe it inspired Knaths to do other lithographs.

JR I witnessed their will in I believe winter 1959. Before signing they had a discussion about items in the will. Karl was convinced that Helen would outlive him. That was weird as she was 15 years older than him.

CG She died at 103.

JR I know. So they were discussing the will. There were quite a few important things that were not resolved. He would say, “See Helen what are you going to do?” She would say “I don‘t care. Let them fight over it.” She had an incredibly tough side. I was really shocked. She was talking about her niece and his nephew. It was completely unclear who would get what when they died.

Karl managed the home, He washed their clothes. He had an incredible thing about cleanliness and was extremely neat. He always got the exact same things, he knew what they were and washed well. His clothing was cotton or wool and washed well. It was only in later years that they had help. They didn’t have a washing machine he washed in the sink.

Once when we were there he was so tired. I asked a personal question. “What are you eating?” He told me and it was low fat yogurt, cottage cheese and lettuce. He had a woman once a week before Joan (Wye?) and she cooked. We persuaded him to eat some meat. Then he felt better, more lively. He was fading away, not that he was losing weight but very low in energy.

CG I got the impression that Helen didn’t do much.

JR She didn’t and became weaker and weaker, a little leaf.

CG Joan (Wye) described that he would take a morning walk then start work. When I asked what she did the answer was “sit.”

JR She blinked slower than anyone I ever saw in my life. Her blinking was like opening and closing her eyes. It was incredible. At the same time she exerted a lot of possessive pressure on him. He worried about being away from her for very long. She would frighten him about what he could eat and drink. He got this idea that he couldn’t drink coffee so he had no stimulants.

When we were in New York, in the same building that Weldon and Ann were in, Karl would see us once a week. We lived on Stanton Street in the Lower East Side.

He and Helen would come for about six weeks in the winter. They stayed at the Albert Hotel (23 E. 10th St, the hotel and apartment complex was popular with artists.) Later they stayed on the West Side in the 90’s. I remember trying to get them something more comfortable. I think we once persuaded them to stay at the Adams.

(1049 Fifth Avenue is a 23-floor luxury condominium apartment building located in the Upper East Side, New York City. Built in 1928 as the Adams Hotel, the building underwent extensive renovation in its conversion to residential condominiums during the years 1990-1993.)

That’s how he got off on Mondrian. His various friendships changed as other people became more successful. I don’t think Karl was ever bitter about his lack of success. We certainly talked about it a great deal. The trips to New York became less and less rejuvenating because he didn’t have wonderful times with his colleagues, which is maybe why he became very fond of me.

Occasionally we would introduce him to artists who admired him. There was an artist, Hy Solomon, who I had known since James Street days who admired him enormously. Karl came to Stanton Street and we traveled by subway over to Hy’s. In his studio he must have shown us 40 pictures. Karl didn’t say a single word. Finally he said “It’s a matter of interest” and we left. Karl obviously thought the pictures were horrible. Hy was heart broken and I was furious. He couldn’t even thank him (for showing his work). It was just horrible. In some ways Karl was gauche and very obstinate.

I was talking about food. Stanton Street was in a Jewish neighborhood. The first time Karl visited I had gotten a really gooey coffee cake which he loved though it was off limits. I made coffee and he got this idea that I did something different with it. That was his story to Helen. So all the bad things were filtered out and it was OK for him to drink my coffee.  So from then on whenever he came he would say “I can drink your coffee because you do that thing with your coffee.” I think it was leftover coffee and that was it, the dregs had settled. The interesting thing was how nervous he was that he would have coffee and Helen would disapprove. He was much in bondage to her views. Maybe that was what he wanted.

CG People have commented that marrying Helen was not a bad deal. The Weinrich sisters were well off and could take care of him. Later his work began to sell. In the beginning he did odd jobs and built their home from wood scavenged from abandoned buildings. 

JR People say that. But before the Weinrichs, there was a crazy Chicago woman (Zona Gale from Wisconsin) who was very wealthy and in theatre. It was through her that he briefly came East. Then back to Chicago (New York) then finally here for good. It wasn’t as though he was a poor farm boy who had never had a woman and thought “Hey, I better latch onto one.” I don’t think that was Karl’s way at all. He was not an opportunist, to a fault, he was incapable of that.

His whole relationship with (gallerist Paul) Rosenberg, for instance, was pathetic if not tragic, as far as the life of an artist went. 

CG Can you elaborate.

JR Rosenberg liked Karl’s work passionately. Neumann (his third gallerist) had been emotionally generous. Rosenberg was more business like and got him when he was ascending and winning prizes. (1946 First Prize, Carnegie Institute International Exhibition). Rosenberg had a tight contract with him. Karl called him Rosie. I thought that Rosenberg was bad for Karl. When collectors came he held back the best pictures. Perhaps he viewed them as long term investments. When that subject came up I would encourage Karl to push the gallery to sell more work.

CG Some good works ended up in museums.

(Whitney, “The Mexican Blanket,” MoMA, “Giorgioni Book,” 1941. Duncan Phillips was an avid collector. The Albright Knox acquired “Adam.” The Metropolitan owns “The Blue Platter.” In the 1980s I saw his “Day of Atonement,” a large, two-part 1939 work on Masonite in the basement of the MFA. It now hangs in the Lane Gallery.)

JR You have to look at the whole oeuvre for important works that are not yet in good collections. There must be a lot of inventory held back by Rosenberg Gallery.

How many times have I suggested his name when there is something coming out about Provincetown. The list always includes E. Ambrose Webster, Charles Hawthorne and Hans Hofmann and I will add Knaths. By the time it gets into print, more often than not, Knaths has been left out. There is always a reason why his name didn’t make it.

I am concerned that his manuscript for “Ornament and Glory” (a summary of his theory) may no longer be intact. I was corresponding editor for Leonardo. 

(The journal, Leonardo, was established in 1968 by artist and scientist Frank Malina in Paris. Since 1968, Leonardo has published writings by artists who work with science- and technology-based art media. Journal operations were moved to the San Francisco Bay Area by Frank’s son Roger Malina, an astronomer and space scientist, who took over operations of the journal upon his father’s death in 1981. In 1982, the International Society for the Arts Sciences and Technology (Leonardo/ISAST) was founded to further the aims of Leonardo by providing avenues of communication for artists working in contemporary media.) 

The main thrust of Leonardo was to publish articles by artists without any critical intervention. It didn’t always work out as purely as was hoped but that was the general idea. We invited artists to write about their work.

I got the idea that little by little, unedited, we could print the entire “Ornament and Glory,” in the exact way that Karl wanted. That meant the pages facing each other in the exact format and size that he had designed. It was the size of his favorite sketch pad with spiral binding. Here being the spiral and two pages facing like this.

He created many versions of “Ornament and Glory.” And we worked with him many times on versions. We helped him to rewrite as much of it was very, very cryptic. He started out doing it for himself. Then he started to use it as a teaching manual when he was in D.C. at the Phillips, or Bennington. (He taught there during WWII. I later visited Paul Feeley (1910-1966) who was director of the Art Department at Bennington College during the 1950s and early 1960s.) I wrote to Karl and asked if Leonardo might use it? I had contacted the publisher who was enthusiastic. 

(1982 Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, “Karl Knaths: Ornaments of Glory,” curated and edited by Linda Weintraub, published his manuscript in its catalogue. An edited transcription includes facsimile reproductions of about half the manuscript pages published by Jean and Jim Young, in the Bard catalogue. Jean had studied with Knaths and they bought a number of works in the estate from Ed Shein.)

Frank Milina, the owner of Leonardo died suddenly three years ago. His son came to see me and it may be revived. The son is a scientist who lives in California. It’s a very expensive thing to do and a full time job. I don’t know if it will be reborn. The founder of the magazine was a fascinating man.

Frank had agreed. We met in Paris and it was all set up. I wrote to Karl and he granted the rights, me, or the magazine. I don’t remember which but I had the letter, rights and two pages of the manuscript that he sent to me. I have it at home (New York) but I’m not sure whether they are original or Xerox. By then there were a lot of versions around. My father-in-law, Raymond Myrer, was trying to get Harvard University Press to publish it. I am sure he was going to put some money into it but then Harvard reneged. 

The young man who was running the press moved on and the new man didn’t want to do it. So it was more bad luck. When Karl died it was all set for Leonardo but I had concerns that publishing it in a magazine would keep a commercial press from doing it. I spoke to a friend (Whittemore) about doing it but he wasn’t interested.

I wrote to the bank executor, whoever this man was. (Ken Demaris of Cape Ann Bank and Trust). I asked if they would go forward with funding this as it was in the best interest of Karl. I got back a very cold, brief response, just a short note on a small piece of paper saying that they would prefer not to have anything published. They had a lot of plans and this might disrupt anything they might do. By no means should we proceed. So we didn’t and of course nothing ever happened. (It was around the time of the Bard show and publication that she didn’t mention.)

CG Demaris mentioned to me that you had approached him. He said that he had made the decision not to be in the art business. The bank decided that they had the option of promoting his career which meant organizing exhibitions, publishing catalogues, things like that. Basically they opted to liquidate assets including his work and properties.

JR In this case they wouldn’t be promoting his career. I didn’t even need permission from the estate. I had permission from Knaths.

CG He said you wanted money to do the book.

JR That’s absolutely impossible, you’re not to trust that man.

CG I can show you on tape that they were asked for funds from the estate to publish the book.

JR They might have me mixed up with somebody else. I think that’s what it is.

CG The Youngs also asked him for money.

JR That’s what it is; very likely.

CG He said, as I recall, that several individuals had approached him about publishing catalogues. So it’s possible that several projects were conflated into one statement. I don’t think the bank officer was pulling any hanky panky. He acted in what he viewed as the best interest of the estate

The estate was worth more than a million dollars. It seems that Helen owned a farm with several hundred acres in Wisconsin as well as the house in Provincetown. Knaths wanted a third to go to the School of Art Institute of Chicago, where he studied, a third to the Phillips Collection which supported his work, and the rest to their heirs and relatives.

JR As far as my part it was concerned, Leonardo was funded by Frank Milinia. It was a super idealistic non-profit venture. Nobody on the masthead including Nobel Prize winners got money for anything. Frank paid for everything and I want that to be clear. There was no thought about money. There would be no increment (honorarium) from publishing as to who would get money from the magazine. My concern was that there be a first class publication of “Ornament and Glory” as Karl had intended it. I didn’t want it published on less beautiful paper. With Leonardo, which was a quarterly publication, it would have taken about two years because they weren’t going to commit the whole magazine to it.

We were going to have four pages per issue. In those days Leonardo had wonderful color reproductions.  I thought it would be a dignified presentation.

CG Overall today how do you evaluate Knath’s position in the art world?

JR When I met him he was in the position of an eminent older artist. If you had to say who was more important between say Knaths and Milton Avery, at that point (1950s), it would have been a toss up. Knaths was part of the main stream and, to me, more important. He was more true than Avery and unsentimental, a tougher kind of artist. It is impressive that Knaths never became bitter or self deprecating- or distrustful of his talent.

He would see old friends like de Kooning who no longer had the same feelings toward him. It became bitter tea for Karl to see old friends in New York. 57th Street was a different world than it had been ten years before. His idealism and generosity to other artists remained unwavering. He had a stack of gallery post card announcements that he would go through. Some of those cards were relegated to the bottom of the stack when the artists didn’t continue to live up to his expectations. He believed that what was good would be seen and what was not would fall by the wayside. He didn’t loose that sense of belief.

CG When a mediocre exhibition is mounted it takes a generation to set the record straight. That was true for the 1973 traveling show “Karl Knaths: Five Decades of Painting” curated by Charles Eaton and edited by Isabel Patterson Eaton.

The Bard show was dense and fascinating but did not have the budget to secure major loans. That was the case for the show that I curated in 1986 for the Boston University Art Gallery. Most of the work was borrowed from the Fuller and Danforth Museums with a prize winning work loaned by Henry Delawrence. On short notice I was given the slot when another show was cancelled. My curatorial essay was published in  Provincetown Arts Magazine. 

(On the occasion of its 100th anniversary in 2014 the Provincetown Art Association and Museum mounted “Karl Knaths: Between Form and Freedom.” David Maril, wrote in the exhibition catalogue. “(He) was a person you knew you could trust. He had a strong, distinctive, slightly gruff but reassuring voice. Although he was a rugged looking individual, he had a laid-back, gentle demeanor, almost like a deer in one of his cubist paintings.” Josephine Del Deo wrote in the catalogue, “Nothing could be more true of Karl Knaths than that he was a man of matchless diligence in the pursuit of his art and his way of life.”)

CG Marcel Duchamp came to your show.

JR He came to my first show at James Street Gallery. He liked the show and we talked. I guess he was excited about it. He asked if I knew the work of Kurt Schwitters? I don’t know by chance how he came to my show. The night before, I had seen a book with collages by Schwitters. His collages excited me. I had collages in that show, perhaps just one.

He said “There’s a gallery uptown that has Schwitters and you should go see them.” It was the Rose Fried Gallery. As you know, at that time he was helping Katherine Dreier assemble her collection (later donated to Yale University). He was helping prune the collection. I had sold something from the show for $115. She had a very nice 1920s Schwitters for $135. I told her all I had was $115 so she sold it to me for that price. Subsequently it was sold because we needed money. It was a small cubist work.

It was a very good classical one. Actually, that’s how I got into Rose Fried Gallery through Duchamp. She really listened to him. The Schwitters was the first modern thing I collected.

I was going to talk about Karl’s method. The reason that he chose Ostwald over others color theories was because Ostwald based his system on pigment not light. As you know, he was a painter.

(Friedrich Wilhelm Ostwald 1853-1932 He recommended a systematic arrangement of colors and a standardization of colors used. He believed colors should only be used and selected from a finite collection. He acknowledged that his system left out some intermediate colors between the ones he selected, but he did not work to include them in his color space. The system provides a single, midpoint interpolation between adjacent colors. It does not have an easy way of recording millions of colors. 

The Color Harmony Manual is made up of charts of colored chips representing a color space. The overall shape of a chart is an equilateral triangle made up of 28 samples. Each chart is made up of samples of approximately the same hue. Each chart has one sample with the greatest purity. This sample is the far point of the triangle. A series of five samples with increasing reflectance and decreasing purity are on the upper edge of the triangle. It ends with an almost-gray modification of the original pure hue. A series of five samples with decreasing reflectance and decreasing purity are on the lower edge of the triangle. It ends with an almost-black modification of the original hue. Between these light and dark series are other samples of intermediate reflectance and purity.

All color samples on the same chart have almost the same dominant wavelength. All color samples in the same vertical row have almost the same dominant wavelength and purity, making the only difference the reflectances.

Color samples made from clear cellulose acetate sheets with one side coated with an opaque colored lacquer. This ensures that both sides are the same color while one side is glossy and the other is matte.)

Ostwald wanted to make a useful color-step manual. It is more useful than other systems because it is based on the actuality of twenty four steps around the color circle. It was a natural progression for Knaths as we have a twelve tone scale to connect it to the Western keyboard. I made a little sketch of it before you came just to show you simply. If you take the color circle as full intensity, this being the circle, one would be yellow and 13 would be its opposite, a bluish purple. Numerically one is the note C. C sharp would be 3, D would be 9, F being a half note would be 11, and G being a half note is 13. It’s one octave and G, 13, is the tonic. Seven would be 23 up here.  The 7th on the keyboard.

C is the tonic, the note C. Let’s say you want to do a major chord in C in music it’s C E G. So C is here or 1. E is here which would be 9. G is here which would be 13. Let’s start and keep it simple. Let’s not talk about the geometry which is another complication. That’s what he worked out much later and I have a chart of it somewhere. If you look at his work there is a pinpoint and lines radiating out. That’s all connected with this.

(Knaths used the Laws of Dynamic Symmetry. Convinced that design was not purely instinctive, Jay Hambidge (1867–1924) searched for the technical bases of design. He found his answer in dynamic symmetry. The study of Greek art convinced him that the secret of the beauty of Greek design was in the conscious use of dynamic symmetry — the law of natural design based upon the symmetry of growth in man and in plants. He worked out a series of root rectangles that the artist, using the simple mathematics supplied in his book, can apply. Part I sets forth the fundamental rectangles with their simple divisions based on the proportioning law found in nature; Part II explains compound rectangles, many of which were taken from or suggested by analysis of objects of Greek art.)

Let’s say this is yellow or C in Karl’s musical system. This would be pure yellow of the maximum intensity. This is pure black and this is pure white. This would be the scale of grey. There are 27 steps of this mixture being of less and less hue and more and more white with no black. This would be the same thing going toward grey with no white. Each of the 17 steps is numbered. If you knew the Ostwald system the green it’s mostly 24. You could identify everything in the room. Anything you see.

CG Did he teach you this? How did you learn?

JR By osmosis. That winter when we visited him each week I knew a certain amount by that time. But I learned by osmosis as much as anything else. This is not what he was using later on. He was using a more simplified geometric thing. He was also interested in various relationships like the Fibonacci sequence.

(In mathematics, Fibonacci is a sequence in which each number is the sum of the two preceding ones. Numbers that are part of the Fibonacci sequence are known as Fibonacci numbers, commonly denoted Fn . The sequence commonly starts from 0 and 1, although some authors start the sequence from 1 and 1 or sometimes (as did Fibonacci) from 1 and 2. Starting from 0 and 1, the sequence begins 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, …)

He used the Golden Sector a lot. (A ratio, observed especially in the fine arts, between the two dimensions of a plane figure or the two divisions of a line such that the smaller is to the larger as the larger is to the sum of the two, a ratio of roughly three to five.) It related to the color harmony he set up. What I just described would be like a melody. It has nothing to do with the harmonic structure. Let’s say it was a particular five notes. That would determine what colors around the circle he was using; which hues. Then you have to discuss what gradation or intensity, which has to do with the harmony within it.

In other words they were not all equally important. And when you looked into his chest of drawers, or closet you saw the clam shells. (mixed paint)

Elaine de Kooning must have seen it when she did an article on him. Maybe that was the occasion when he did the portrait.  (“Knaths Paints a Picture,” by Elaine de Kooning, Art News, v. 47, n. 7, pt. 1, November 1949 “Meet Romantic Cubist Karl Knaths”)

The subject (in the article) is a woman but it isn’t identified as Elaine de Kooning. In the article she didn’t discuss his color or compositional theories. I think she says “If you open the chest you see.”

CG I would have to go back and check but it’s not an insightful article.

JR I don’t think she was drawn to his style or his method as it was alien to what she was used to.

CG Florence Grippe (wife of my Brandeis professor, sculptor Peter Grippe) told me that she wrote an article on Knaths and submitted it to Art News, but they chose Elaine’s. 

JR There are several paintings that he did in the 1960s with a horizon line motif which is three or four colors horizontally. That would be like a chord. In some cases that chord pulled against a huge amount of movement on the other side. Those colors might be yellow, nine being a blueish-red like a cerise which would be 9 on the Ostwald scale, which would be 3 musically. And maybe a blue would be 5. Then maybe a very strident green, a yellowish green which would be a 7 leading back to the tonic like a very important chord pulling back to the harmony, on the other side of which, you might have the same tones in it but presumably would not be, at this point might all be in the triangle, because you have very small amounts of it in it. There’s tremendous contrast and it’s meant to hold against all this complexity. The other part would move around, very likely, in the grey scale and in the other area of the circle. The only way you can analyze it is, maybe take a couple of the pictures, and identify all of the colors. Then you’ll see clearly  what the structure is.

CG Can you identify this picture?

JR It’s not a good example because it’s too over simplified. It’s unusual for him as there is no blue in the picture. He used blue or bluish purple a lot to anchor things. There’s a little shadow on the face but it’s minimal. It’s almost an either or kind of thing. It might be almost, very atypically, a sort of red contrast. If you are going to do a circle of it, I’ve never looked at it this way before, the red is probably 5. Of course there are all these greens. All this pinkyness is probably 9. It is unusual for him to have all this contrast. The grey was probably 13. The grey was probably 13 but it’s all very minimal. I think I have analysis I did of “Adam Zero” and a couple of other things that would be useful to you. (“Number Zero Adam,” Karl Knaths, 1948, Albright Knox Museum)

CG It’s one of his most important paintings. 

JR This is all about his method. We used to tease him because he would work on a picture for a very long time. Certain colors which were prominent in the beginning would gradually disappear. I would say “Karl, wait a minute, I thought this whole thing was based on a wonderful Russian melody. Now I don’t see any of that.” He responded by showing me the underpainting and how he had to work some things out. When his work went well he used it, then forgot it, as he painted. It was like a security blanket for him. He would get all this out, then when he got into it he felt pretty free doing whatever he wanted to do. It is kind of a very strange process. I don’t think it always worked for him. At times it really trapped him.

CG Did anyone try his system?

JR All of his students in Washington (Phillips Collection) tried with little success. It really wrecked my painting for awhile. I remember once we decided to use the same exact notes, use the same exact structure. I still have the painting which is not a disaster. We selected a Russian melody. Karl had a lot of interest in numerology. The melody had exactly 21 notes. That had mystical significance. We made a deal. I said that he picked such bad music that nobody could make a good picture. We were good enough friends that I could say that jokingly. Nobody could make a good picture out of those bad melodies. So we made a deal that we would both make pictures based on a Mozart motif that I would pick out and that winter we did.

When we went over he would show me what he had worked on that week and we discussed it. I could never get over how impersonal he could be discussing his work. It was so different from the Hofmann romantic thing in which it’s all very mysterious and the process comes from the unconscious and who knows what else. His attitude was that it all may be happening but the other thing is something you can talk about. So we would look at it and I think he came to rely a lot on my judgment because he really looked forward to showing me the work. I don’t think he had much of a sense of an audience at that time. He was so isolated here. When he came to New York he didn’t have a lot of artists that he had a great rapport with.

One of the sad things that happened to him during the years that I knew him was how his old friends, like de Kooning, became so successful. In New York they used to get together at the old Waldorf cafeteria. De Kooking was one of his regular contacts and they always met at the Waldorf. When de Kooning really hit it there was a rift. Deeper than Hemingway and Fitzgerald, a real cleavage. Sometimes Karl met with Mondrian.

CG Among the Knaths materials in the Archives of American Art are manuscripts that show up. There’s a Mondrian manuscript and de Kooning lecture. There’s a Malevich piece. There is no explanation of what they are doing there.

JR That’s likely something we worked on translating. Was it on Neo Plasticism?

CG I don’t recall.

JR When I was in NY during the war most of those writings had not yet been translated. We started translating all that stuff from Europe. I had the idea that it should be available to other artists. In those days you could go to MoMA, and if they knew you, take anything home. I would take things out, translate them, and then bring them back. If they knew you that was OK. I got things from the New York Public Library. Of course that was subsequently translated by other people. The Mondrian and Hofmann I’m sure I translated. The Malevich, I don’t know. That was probably in Agnes’s papers. I’m sure somebody has told you about the chimney. 

(Knaths inscribed the names of important artists and influences on it.)

Are you going to interview Anton Myrer because we would know the names on the chimney? He’s difficult to reach but I urged the men who were researching Weldon Kees to contact him.  He had the letters between Weldon, Anton and I. When I left I didn’t take them.

CG I’m trying to get through his book.

(His first novel, “Evil Under the Sun,” published in 1951, was about a war veteran convalescing at a Cape Cod artists’ colony…The artificial worlds-within-worlds of narcissism, sexual obsession and license among a group of artists, which are examined through the eyes of several Greenwich Villagers, seasonally transplanted to a summer colony.)

JR I think the protagonist in the novel is a combination of Knaths and Hofmann. The book had some really good writing in it. You should contact Anton but it’s best if you do it on your own. He knew Knaths ever since he was a little boy. His mother studied with Knaths.

In think until 1955 or so Knaths looked on him as the closest thing to a son. I think Karl became more fond of me as time went by. What I didn’t see at the time was that Anton was pulling away from what Karl thought was the point of the game of art wanting more money and things. I think his attitude changed a lot.

(Off the record observations.)

CG You have so many interesting things in your collection like the little Picabia.

JR That’s one of my favorites.

CG You had Gris and futurism like the series of prints by Balla.

JR Actually, they’re not prints.

CG I had a tour of Lois Torf’s print collection with MFA curator Cliff Ackley. For futurism there was a Severini and a Boccioni which was redrawn at the Bauhaus so it was not really a Boccioni. I asked him why don’t you have more futurist work? He said “The futurists didn’t make prints.” I told him that I knew of a series of prints by Balla. He said that he had never heard of them.

JR He was right they are not prints though they look like lithographs.

CG Which is what I assumed they were.

JR Balla had a portfolio which I have the cover of which he made himself. Every now and then he made something to put into the portfolio. It started in 1911 and continued I think until 1919. We did not get all of them which I tried to do. I know a woman with two of them and I think that’s the complete set. She won’t sell them. It’s interesting how he did them. I think it’s fascinating.

CG I like the collection because it’s so personal and eccentric. I’m not sure what word you would choose.

JR I know what you mean. They are all the things that are absent from the collection now. We gave the largest Mondrian to the National Gallery.

(There were ten works by Mondrian in the estate.)

CG You had early Mondrian landscapes.

JR When I was elected into American Abstract Artists I was the youngest member at that time. Then it was a really great thing though now AAA has fallen on sad times. Mondrian was a founder as was Burgoyne Diller. He showed with Rose Fried which was before she took me on.

(The Rose Fried Gallery (1936-1972) was instrumental in introducing the American public to many abstract painters, including Mondrian and Kandinsky. The Gallery remained operational until Fried’s death in 1970.)

Hofmann used to talk to me about Mondrian (1872-1944). That was before his show at MoMA. At that time it was only artists that thought about him. James Johnson Sweeney had a great Mondrian.

(James Johnson Sweeney (1900-1986) was an American curator and writer about modern art. He graduated from Georgetown University in 1922. From 1935 to 1946, he was curator for the Museum of Modern Art. He was the second director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, from 1952 to 1960.)

CG In his personal collection?

JR Yes. Do you know how he got it? They were friendly and Sweeney invited him to dinner. At the last minute Mondrian thought that I can’t go there without anything. Should I bring a bottle of wine? So he brought a painting. That’s the way it really was.

CG What will you do with the collection?

JR I haven’t decided.

CG Do you have children or heirs?

JR No, not really. Nothing compulsive that I have to do. I’ve thought about it a great deal. I’m not sure what’s the right thing to do. For instance, museums change so. In some ways they are so dependent on the human situation at some time. I’m a great believer in teaching museums. I think what has happed to museums is apocalyptic and horrifying. Did you read the Hilton Kramer piece in the New Criterion?

CG About MoMA?

JR He touches on a lot that’s significant. I mean we are now in the mass oriented museum setup. It’s really impossible to see paintings in the typical museum. The next thing they will do is put you on a moving belt. You are being programmed in such a way that you can’t change the order, can’t stay with one thing. There’s only one room with seats in MoMA. It’s very scary because the pictures that we study, that I most love in art history, the more time that they take the more I love them. As an artist there are very few pictures that I like and draw upon, that matter to me. But the whole process is making it impossible to see those pictures. So are you going to give them things like Gris who said that every picture was an idea and it wasn’t completed until the idea was completed? Nobody is looking to see what the idea is. Can you see it that long now? The new wing in Boston is deadly that way.

CG I don’t agree. I own the Juan Gris “Portrait of Picasso.” I bought the print when I was in college for $50. It’s a beautiful print which I love and look at every day.

JR Sure, you’re seeing it at home which is how it is meant to be seen. You’re saying the same thing as me.

CG Let’s get back to Knaths. When did you arrive in Provincetown?

JR I visited in ’46 but my first summer was ’47. I had met Karl and Agnes in New York so I went to see him. I think I went by myself. I was supposed to go with Anton’s mother but that didn’t happen. At that time I didn’t know him well and then we went West returning after a year and a half.

CG People comment that he didn’t like company.

JR Oh but he did. He was embarrassed by all that “stuff” as he put it. When visiting you would walk into this narrow room. It was the only living room that they had because the larger room was where Helen had her piano. It was very stiff there with an arch over the fireplace.

CG I visited him once in 1966. I was hired by Paul Haldeman of the United Church of Christ. He was putting together a portfolio of Biblical images to distribute to the churches. I was hired to select and visit the artists. A mandate was that they be figurative though I included Jules Olitski and Esteban Vicente. Paul rejected Olitski. Karl was one of the artists as well as Sister Corita Kent, William Gropper, Balcolm Greene and others. I knew Karl’s work from “Lilacs” in the MFA. (Later deaccessioned by Ted Stebbins.) I remember Helen looking in from another room. The stone was shipped to him and Paul liked the print. I believe it inspired Knaths to do other lithographs.

JR I witnessed their will in I believe winter 1959. Before signing they had a discussion about items in the will. Karl was convinced that Helen would outlive him. That was weird as she was 15 years older than him.

CG She died at 103.

JR I know. So they were discussing the will. There were quite a few important things that were not resolved. He would say, “See Helen what are you going to do?” She would say “I don‘t care. Let them fight over it.” She had an incredibly tough side. I was really shocked. She was talking about her niece and his nephew. It was completely unclear who would get what when they died.

Karl managed the home, He washed their clothes. He had an incredible thing about cleanliness and was extremely neat. He always got the exact same things, he knew what they were and washed well. His clothing was cotton or wool and washed well. It was only in later years that they had help. They didn’t have a washing machine he washed in the sink.

Once when we were there he was so tired. I asked a personal question. “What are you eating?” He told me and it was low fat yogurt, cottage cheese and lettuce. He had a woman once a week before Joan (Wye?) and she cooked. We persuaded him to eat some meat. Then he felt better, more lively. He was fading away, not that he was losing weight but very low in energy.

CG I got the impression that Helen didn’t do much.

JR She didn’t and became weaker and weaker, a little leaf.

CG Joan (Wye) described that he would take a morning walk then start work. When I asked what she did the answer was “sit.”

JR She blinked slower than anyone I ever saw in my life. Her blinking was like opening and closing her eyes. It was incredible. At the same time she exerted a lot of possessive pressure on him. He worried about being away from her for very long. She would frighten him about what he could eat and drink. He got this idea that he couldn’t drink coffee so he had no stimulants.

When we were in New York, in the same building that Weldon and Ann were in, Karl would see us once a week. We lived on Stanton Street in the Lower East Side.

He and Helen would come for about six weeks in the winter. They stayed at the Albert Hotel (23 E. 10th St, the hotel and apartment complex was popular with artists.) Later they stayed on the West Side in the 90’s. I remember trying to get them something more comfortable. I think we once persuaded them to stay at the Adams.

(1049 Fifth Avenue is a 23-floor luxury condominium apartment building located in the Upper East Side, New York City. Built in 1928 as the Adams Hotel, the building underwent extensive renovation in its conversion to residential condominiums during the years 1990-1993.)

That’s how he got off on Mondrian. His various friendships changed as other people became more successful. I don’t think Karl was ever bitter about his lack of success. We certainly talked about it a great deal. The trips to New York became less and less rejuvenating because he didn’t have wonderful times with his colleagues, which is maybe why he became very fond of me.

Occasionally we would introduce him to artists who admired him. There was an artist, Hy Solomon, who I had known since James Street days who admired him enormously. Karl came to Stanton Street and we traveled by subway over to Hy’s. In his studio he must have shown us 40 pictures. Karl didn’t say a single word. Finally he said “It’s a matter of interest” and we left. Karl obviously thought the pictures were horrible. Hy was heart broken and I was furious. He couldn’t even thank him (for showing his work). It was just horrible. In some ways Karl was gauche and very obstinate.

I was talking about food. Stanton Street was in a Jewish neighborhood. The first time Karl visited I had gotten a really gooey coffee cake which he loved though it was off limits. I made coffee and he got this idea that I did something different with it. That was his story to Helen. So all the bad things were filtered out and it was OK for him to drink my coffee.  So from then on whenever he came he would say “I can drink your coffee because you do that thing with your coffee.” I think it was leftover coffee and that was it, the dregs had settled. The interesting thing was how nervous he was that he would have coffee and Helen would disapprove. He was much in bondage to her views. Maybe that was what he wanted.

CG People have commented that marrying Helen was not a bad deal. The Weinrich sisters were well off and could take care of him. Later his work began to sell. In the beginning he did odd jobs and built their home from wood scavenged from abandoned buildings. 

JR People say that. But before the Weinrichs, there was a crazy Chicago woman (Zona Gale from Wisconsin) who was very wealthy and in theatre. It was through her that he briefly came East. Then back to Chicago (New York) then finally here for good. It wasn’t as though he was a poor farm boy who had never had a woman and thought “Hey, I better latch onto one.” I don’t think that was Karl’s way at all. He was not an opportunist, to a fault, he was incapable of that.

His whole relationship with (gallerist Paul) Rosenberg, for instance, was pathetic if not tragic, as far as the life of an artist went. 

CG Can you elaborate.

JR Rosenberg liked Karl’s work passionately. Neumann (his third gallerist) had been emotionally generous. Rosenberg was more business like and got him when he was ascending and winning prizes. (1946 First Prize, Carnegie Institute International Exhibition). Rosenberg had a tight contract with him. Karl called him Rosie. I thought that Rosenberg was bad for Karl. When collectors came he held back the best pictures. Perhaps he viewed them as long term investments. When that subject came up I would encourage Karl to push the gallery to sell more work.

CG Some good works ended up in museums.

(Whitney, “The Mexican Blanket,” MoMA, “Giorgioni Book,” 1941. Duncan Phillips was an avid collector. The Albright Knox acquired “Adam.” The Metropolitan owns “The Blue Platter.” In the 1980s I saw his “Day of Atonement,” a large, two-part 1939 work on Masonite in the basement of the MFA. It now hangs in the Lane Gallery.)

JR You have to look at the whole oeuvre for important works that are not yet in good collections. There must be a lot of inventory held back by Rosenberg Gallery.

How many times have I suggested his name when there is something coming out about Provincetown. The list always includes E. Ambrose Webster, Charles Hawthorne and Hans Hofmann and I will add Knaths. By the time it gets into print, more often than not, Knaths has been left out. There is always a reason why his name didn’t make it.

I am concerned that his manuscript for “Ornament and Glory” (a summary of his theory) may no longer be intact. I was corresponding editor for Leonardo. 

(The journal, Leonardo, was established in 1968 by artist and scientist Frank Malina in Paris. Since 1968, Leonardo has published writings by artists who work with science- and technology-based art media. Journal operations were moved to the San Francisco Bay Area by Frank’s son Roger Malina, an astronomer and space scientist, who took over operations of the journal upon his father’s death in 1981. In 1982, the International Society for the Arts Sciences and Technology (Leonardo/ISAST) was founded to further the aims of Leonardo by providing avenues of communication for artists working in contemporary media.) 

The main thrust of Leonardo was to publish articles by artists without any critical intervention. It didn’t always work out as purely as was hoped but that was the general idea. We invited artists to write about their work.

I got the idea that little by little, unedited, we could print the entire “Ornament and Glory,” in the exact way that Karl wanted. That meant the pages facing each other in the exact format and size that he had designed. It was the size of his favorite sketch pad with spiral binding. Here being the spiral and two pages facing like this.

He created many versions of “Ornament and Glory.” And we worked with him many times on versions. We helped him to rewrite as much of it was very, very cryptic. He started out doing it for himself. Then he started to use it as a teaching manual when he was in D.C. at the Phillips, or Bennington. (He taught there during WWII. I later visited Paul Feeley (1910-1966) who was director of the Art Department at Bennington College during the 1950s and early 1960s.) I wrote to Karl and asked if Leonardo might use it? I had contacted the publisher who was enthusiastic. 

(1982 Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, “Karl Knaths: Ornaments of Glory,” curated and edited by Linda Weintraub, published his manuscript in its catalogue. An edited transcription includes facsimile reproductions of about half the manuscript pages published by Jean and Jim Young, in the Bard catalogue. Jean had studied with Knaths and they bought a number of works in the estate from Ed Shein.)

Frank Milina, the owner of Leonardo died suddenly three years ago. His son came to see me and it may be revived. The son is a scientist who lives in California. It’s a very expensive thing to do and a full time job. I don’t know if it will be reborn. The founder of the magazine was a fascinating man.

Frank had agreed. We met in Paris and it was all set up. I wrote to Karl and he granted the rights, me, or the magazine. I don’t remember which but I had the letter, rights and two pages of the manuscript that he sent to me. I have it at home (New York) but I’m not sure whether they are original or Xerox. By then there were a lot of versions around. My father-in-law, Raymond Myrer, was trying to get Harvard University Press to publish it. I am sure he was going to put some money into it but then Harvard reneged. 

The young man who was running the press moved on and the new man didn’t want to do it. So it was more bad luck. When Karl died it was all set for Leonardo but I had concerns that publishing it in a magazine would keep a commercial press from doing it. I spoke to a friend (Whittemore) about doing it but he wasn’t interested.

I wrote to the bank executor, whoever this man was. (Ken Demaris of Cape Ann Bank and Trust). I asked if they would go forward with funding this as it was in the best interest of Karl. I got back a very cold, brief response, just a short note on a small piece of paper saying that they would prefer not to have anything published. They had a lot of plans and this might disrupt anything they might do. By no means should we proceed. So we didn’t and of course nothing ever happened. (It was around the time of the Bard show and publication that she didn’t mention.)

CG Demaris mentioned to me that you had approached him. He said that he had made the decision not to be in the art business. The bank decided that they had the option of promoting his career which meant organizing exhibitions, publishing catalogues, things like that. Basically they opted to liquidate assets including his work and properties.

JR In this case they wouldn’t be promoting his career. I didn’t even need permission from the estate. I had permission from Knaths.

CG He said you wanted money to do the book.

JR That’s absolutely impossible, you’re not to trust that man.

CG I can show you on tape that they were asked for funds from the estate to publish the book.

JR They might have me mixed up with somebody else. I think that’s what it is.

CG The Youngs also asked him for money.

JR That’s what it is; very likely.

CG He said, as I recall, that several individuals had approached him about publishing catalogues. So it’s possible that several projects were conflated into one statement. I don’t think the bank officer was pulling any hanky panky. He acted in what he viewed as the best interest of the estate

The estate was worth more than a million dollars. It seems that Helen owned a farm with several hundred acres in Wisconsin as well as the house in Provincetown. Knaths wanted a third to go to the School of Art Institute of Chicago, where he studied, a third to the Phillips Collection which supported his work, and the rest to their heirs and relatives.

JR As far as my part it was concerned, Leonardo was funded by Frank Milinia. It was a super idealistic non-profit venture. Nobody on the masthead including Nobel Prize winners got money for anything. Frank paid for everything and I want that to be clear. There was no thought about money. There would be no increment (honorarium) from publishing as to who would get money from the magazine. My concern was that there be a first class publication of “Ornament and Glory” as Karl had intended it. I didn’t want it published on less beautiful paper. With Leonardo, which was a quarterly publication, it would have taken about two years because they weren’t going to commit the whole magazine to it.

We were going to have four pages per issue. In those days Leonardo had wonderful color reproductions.  I thought it would be a dignified presentation.

CG Overall today how do you evaluate Knath’s position in the art world?

JR When I met him he was in the position of an eminent older artist. If you had to say who was more important between say Knaths and Milton Avery, at that point (1950s), it would have been a toss up. Knaths was part of the main stream and, to me, more important. He was more true than Avery and unsentimental, a tougher kind of artist. It is impressive that Knaths never became bitter or self deprecating- or distrustful of his talent.

He would see old friends like de Kooning who no longer had the same feelings toward him. It became bitter tea for Karl to see old friends in New York. 57th Street was a different world than it had been ten years before. His idealism and generosity to other artists remained unwavering. He had a stack of gallery post card announcements that he would go through. Some of those cards were relegated to the bottom of the stack when the artists didn’t continue to live up to his expectations. He believed that what was good would be seen and what was not would fall by the wayside. He didn’t loose that sense of belief.

CG When a mediocre exhibition is mounted it takes a generation to set the record straight. That was true for the 1973 traveling show “Karl Knaths: Five Decades of Painting” curated by Charles Eaton and edited by Isabel Patterson Eaton.

The Bard show was dense and fascinating but did not have the budget to secure major loans. That was the case for the show that I curated in 1986 for the Boston University Art Gallery. Most of the work was borrowed from the Fuller and Danforth Museums with a prize winning work loaned by Henry Delawrence. On short notice I was given the slot when another show was cancelled. My curatorial essay was published in  Provincetown Arts Magazine. 

(On the occasion of its 100th anniversary in 2014 the Provincetown Art Association and Museum mounted “Karl Knaths: Between Form and Freedom.” David Maril, wrote in the exhibition catalogue. “(He) was a person you knew you could trust. He had a strong, distinctive, slightly gruff but reassuring voice. Although he was a rugged looking individual, he had a laid-back, gentle demeanor, almost like a deer in one of his cubist paintings.” Josephine Del Deo wrote in the catalogue, “Nothing could be more true of Karl Knaths than that he was a man of matchless diligence in the pursuit of his art and his way of life.”)