BARBARALEE DIAMONSTEIN
377
graduation, except for the conviction that there was something else
somewhere else. I stayed put, by going on to the Graduate School of
Philosophy at Harvard. (Philosophy is the academic subject
par
excellence;
moreover, university art schools before World War II
were citadels of provincial painting.) The stand-off with my father
was finally resolved by my rejecting the offer of a high-paying job
(during the depths of the Depression), and accepting his alternative
proposition, that in return for my getting a Ph.D. as an insurance
policy, he would give me $50 a week indefinitely. On that amount I
spent ten years in New York married during the entire 1940s (the $50,
after my father's premature death during the war, being supplied
until 1950 by an adventurous dealer, in return for my entire output).
In 1950 I had
to
augment my income and was given the task of
wholly revising the graduate school at Hunter College, a period
during which I had both a step-daughter and two daughters of my
own. My university clothes lasted well those twenty years, and
California wine was less than a dollar a bottle... .
At Harvard I had specialized in aesthetics, more particularly, in
The Journals of Eugene Delacroix,
under D. W. Prall and Arthur O.
Lovejoy. On their suggestion, I had spent fifteen months in France,
on research ostensibly, but actually making painting. I had my still–
born, first show at Raymond Duncan's left bank gallery in Paris in
May, 1939. Mainly, I think, on the grounds that I was a fellow
Californian.. . .
In Paris I had met a young composer, Arthur Berger, who was
studying with Nadia Boulanger. He suggested that I complete the
Ph.D. at Columbia, instead of Harvard, with Meyer Schapiro, a most
crucial external suggestion. Not so much because of Schapiro, who
treated me as kindly as he could-but because otherwise it never
would have occurred to me to settle in New York, let alone at
precisely the right moment (with the emigration of modern Eu–
ropean artists) for an aspiring young painter. I happened
to
take a
room with French doors on the garden in the old Rhinelander
Garden apartments on West lith Street, not far from where Schapiro
lives. In my far-western innocence, I had no idea of how busy
celebrated New Yorkers are; on occasion in the night I would knock
on Schapiro's door to show him a painting I was making. Finally his
patience broke, and he suggested introducing me to other artists, I
having made it clear that I wanted nothing
to
do with social protest
painting or regional realism or naturalism in any form. Through
him I also came to know and like the
Partisan Review
crowd, despite
