For The Record (1965)

and then I have a chance to keep creating as I work on it. >> This is a constant source of idea for you. >> Yes, this is my my uh point of departure book, so to speak. Imagine how interesting it'll be a 100 years from now to have the artist story in his own words. Interviews with living artists are being carried on by the archives of American Art. [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. [Applause] I'm Dr. Harlon Phillips. I'm at Cranbrook. The purpose of my visit today is to talk with Julius Schmidt. Julius, I wonder if you tell me the origin of your interest in metals. Well, I've always had a fascination for metal. It probably goes back to very early days when as a child I uh worked with machine parts and things that my brothers gave me. >> Can you tell me the process that you go through in order to construct a column of this kind? >> Well, this is a a process that involves working in the negative and also working in section. Uh, I don't see the finished piece until it's all poured. And I'm eliminating all of the steps that traditionally a sculptor would have to go through to get a piece from his plasterine model to its finished bronze. By making my mold, I have control, complete creative control of my work from the beginning to the final taking off of the little flashing. So, I understand that your concern about metal even goes to the point of creating your own alloys. Yes, this is part of my desire to uh have complete control again right to the uh making of my own alloy to get uh a golden yellow like I have in this case >> or a very deep warm bronze like in the case of relief. >> Does an item like this begin on the drawing board? >> Not really on a drawing board, but in a in a doodle pad. Uh, I have drawings here that go back maybe 5 years. And every piece is not necessarily the end result of a very elaborate sketch, but rather a composite of maybe 50 or 100 drawings. >> This is a constant source of idea for you. >> Yes, this is my point of departure book, so to speak. This is part of a very ambitious plan to collect in one place all the source materials relating to American art from its beginnings to the present day. Why do this? Because as we look back over the history of American art, we find so many gaps in our knowledge. How much valuable information has been lost because there was no organized effort to collect and preserve it. So the archives gathers the letters, sketchbooks, cataloges, clippings, and diaries before they disappear. In the process of collecting this information, we're discovering perhaps for the first time how rich the American tradition of art really is. This letter was written over 180 years ago by the first American artist to win international recognition, Benjamin West. A Pennsylvania Quaker, he was born in 1738, only 50 years after the colony of Pennsylvania was founded. West himself celebrated the event in this great historical painting, William Penn's Treaty with the Indians. Wes grew up in a remote province far from the art centers of Europe without teachers or galleries or the stimulus of great example. He was largely self-taught. Yet he quickly surpassed the best painting being done in his own country. In his 20s, West went to Rome to study, then to London, the great art capital of the empire of which America was then a province. At 34, West was the marble of London, an intimate friend of the king, and the founder of a flourishing American school. This picture was painted by one of West's many American students. It shows the early days of the studio, which trained and influenced two generations of American artists, including such masters as Copley, Peele, Gilbert Stewart, and John Trumble. West's great talent made him a court favorite. Yet this Quaker boy from the provinces never forgot his origins or the democratic beliefs taught him by the society of friends. He often asked the king to let him paint scenes from the American Revolution. It was an odd friendship. This letter written in 1783 to a friend in America shows how West felt. Let me congratulate you and my countrymen in general on the event of the peace and the fortitude they have shown during the unhappy war. Then he expresses his pleasure that this friend, the artist Charles Wilson Peele, was to send to London a portrait of that greatest of all characters, General Washington, because people in Britain would be curious to see the true likeness of that phenomenon among men. West was applying to the right man for a portrait of Washington. Charles Wilson Peele had painted Washington's portrait many times. This picture made in 1779 shows the father of his country with a glint of humor and humanity, a far cry from the official portraits we know. The painter Charles Wilson Peele was himself a man of great versatility like Jefferson and Franklin, both of whom he knew. Peele was an artist, scientist, painter, inventor, craftsman, naturalist. Step into his museum, our first museum of natural history, which used techniques far ahead of its time. Peele would carve animals and birds out of wood with ribs and muscles meticulously contoured. These he would wrap in their proper skins and exhibit in their natural habitat. The museum filled most of Independence Hall in Philadelphia. The feature attraction was the skeleton of the masttodon which Peele discovered and described in this remarkable painting. The crude water wheel with its endless chain of buckets lifted away the mud that covered the skeleton. [Music] Peele gave his children great names to live up to. Rembrandt Peele, Reuben's Rafu, Tishan. All of them in their turn made fine contributions to American art. Americans had always been self-reliant. With independence, we became self-confident. In the early 1800s, as the frontier began to move westward, we looked less and less to Europe and more and more to our own resources. Thomas Cole, the leading spirit of the Hudson River School, was almost entirely self-taught. His pictures described the vastness, the loneliness, the wild beauty of a land where, to use his words, a man might speak fittingly to God. Cole's pictures of the American scene, as yet unspoiled by mines, factories, railroads, and cities, had enormous appeal to a people awake to the promise of their country. 130 years ago, an American in Boston or a European in Paris and London would have been electrified by a glimpse of an American Indian. Indians in the wild west fired their imaginations just as astronauts and orbiting satellites star our imaginations today. George Catelan who painted Little Wolf was the first artist reporter to penetrate the far west. Chiefs would come and stand outside his tent in full regalia waiting their turn to be painted. They thought Catelyn was the greatest medicine man of all because he could create a living being with only a brush and a box of colors. Kaplan lived with the Indians, learned their games and skills while he painted their way of life. He visited no less than 48 continental tribes, often going where no white man had been. The fur trapper was the first resident on every American frontier from Virginia to the Pacific Northwest. This way of life vanished before the gold rush. Yet thanks to the artist George Caleb Bingham, it remains vividly before us. Bingham was himself a product of the frontier, a self-taught painter in the saddle. He delighted in election scenes that showed the rough and tumble democracy of the frontier. [Music] Information about American artists comes to the archives in documents that are loaned or donated. Sometimes they're bequeathed, sometimes purchased. 5 million separate items have been processed. All have been put on microfilm for a permanent record. For example, here's a sketchbook of Worthington Whitriidge dating from the 1850s. Witridge is an important landscape artist who deserves to be much better known. We have his autobiography in which he tells us that he happened to be in Germany in 1851 and visited an artist friend Emanuel Litzer who had just started work on Washington Crossing the Delaware. Witridge tells us that Americans who might pose for the picture were hard to find in Germany. So he himself was pressed into service and posed for the figure of George Washington. The archives is interested in material on sculptors, craftsmen, and in fact all those who practice the arts. There is a mine of information in papers donated by art dealers like the McBth Gallery of New York and by art collectors. Right now the archives is gathering up tons of material that tell the story of the federal art project of the 30s when so much of art in America was under the opaces of the WPA. The scholar who uses this material is only the first among many who make us better aware of our history and ourselves. What goes into the books he writes hopefully percolates to the general public through magazines, newspapers, exhibits that use the findings of the scholar. In other words, he develops seed for others to broadcast. The archives was begun by a scholar, the author of five works in our art history, including this definitive study on painting in America. Dr. EP Richardson spent 11 years getting material together for this book. He has been director of the Detroit Institute of Arts and is now director of the Henry Francis Dupont Winter Museum in Wilmington and of archives research. Dr. Richardson, what gave you the idea of starting the archives? Two things. One was that in a lifetime of studying American art, I found that in a country so large as this, you spend too much time and too much money just locating the documents you have to study to work on an artist. scattered from Maine to California and everywhere in between. There was need for a research institute of some kind that would try to bring them together in one convenient center of study. I can understand that. What was the other reason? >> Modern technology. In other fields of thought, the sciences, war, space exploration, business, modern technology has given people wonderful new tools that enable them to break through to new levels of usefulness and make marvelous new discoveries. I thought there might be something in technology that would help the scholar in the arts and humanities. microfilm, for example, and other forms of photocopying that didn't exist a generation ago. It ought to be possible, it seemed to me, to use these techniques to bring together in one place things that are now scattered in a thousand places all over the world. How did this work out? >> For the library that has preserved valuable documents, microfilm gives a duplicate copy in case of loss or damage to the original. For the scholar, it brings together things that he would have to travel thousands of miles to see in the original. We're not in competition with anyone. We merely ask the institution that owns documents, the New York Public Library, for example, or the Philadelphia Museum of Art, let's say, to let us make their material more widely accessible. The archives is doing something that couldn't have been done 40 years ago. It seems to be an idea whose time had to come. That's how it's worked out. Charles Sheieler will be long remembered for his contribution to 20th century art. Sheer died recently after a prolific lifetime. He wrote very little and so in time aspects of his life and thought might well have become mysteries. [Music] Except for this, the archives had lengthy interviews with Sheila and they were recorded on tape >> when they were in residence there. It was very nice. It was off the beaten track in a very lovely place. 12:00 I painted those two pictures for her. And I while I was there, I was there 3 months. I went just there two before Christmas and I came back the beginning of April. And while I was there, I lived in this one of those little brick houses that sort of built into the wall of the government's palace. >> He turned out to be a fine conversationalist and a candid one whose spoken words, now permanently preserved, are a valuable record of his life and times. The archives plans to do the same with many other leading artists of our day. Another area of need which the archives hopes to fill books. See how many books have been written about Picasso and other European artists. Many of them are fine works for they are mining and sifting the same ore rich though it is over and over. While works on American artists are few and rather far between. We need to stimulate research and writing to provide a few of the books that are missing here because the information that begins in books ends in the minds of people. Books are sources for teachers in the schools, for magazine writers and editors, for newspapers and exhibits. Books are vital in creating and keeping our national tradition, which is what makes us strong as a nation. So whether you read them or not, they affect you and the life around you. To do the job that has to be done, we need funds. Funds are needed to collect and preserve the documents and save them from this. Funds are needed to continue the work of interviewing living artists and preserving their records. Funds are needed for work that has the spiritual values of America at heart. In that cause, I ask you to remember a name and address. The Archives, Detroit, Michigan. That's all the address you need. Remember it. And if you will send a contribution to its work, your funds will be used to preserve and to spread what is very precious, what critics say America lacks, our spiritual heritage. Heat. Heat. [Music] [Applause] Heat. Heat. [Music] [Applause] [Music]