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PARTISAN REVIEW
York enjoyed from the museums and the other institutions. We tend to
think now that The Museum of Modern Art, particularly, was right in
there, shoulder to shoulder, with every new innovation. But I remember
very vividly the first panel I was ever invited to participate on, chaired by
Johnny Myers, at the Artists' Club. Johnny Myers was then your dealer at
the Tibor de Nagy Gallery.
It
was a panel on what was then called the
New Figurative Painting, which Johnny Myers's gallery was very much a
part of, with Grace Hartigan, Larry Rivers, and others. The panel con–
sisted of Clement Greenberg, Alfred Barr, Frank O'Hara, and myself,
with Johnny Myers as moderator, and I was very daunted by the prospect.
I was sort of new to the scene, and I said to Johnny Myers that I did not
think I had time to prepare an adequate presentation. He said, "Oh, my
dear, you don't have to prepare anything but your ideas."
But the reason why that evening was so memorable, quite apart from
my own nerves, was the statement that Alfred Barr made that evening.
Now Alfred, I should interject, is a man I hold in the highest esteem and
in sacred memory, but we've all made mistakes. And Alfred was, I think,
enchanted with Larry Rivers's painting of Washington crossing the
Delaware, which had just entered the collection of The Museum of
Modern Art. I don't think that Alfred quite understood the Rivers paint–
ing was a kind of camp play on the famous nineteenth-century American
painting of the same subject. That is, he certainly knew it was based on
the earlier painting, but I don't think he quite understood the attitude to–
ward the original that the Rivers' painting displayed. Alfred said that
evening that he thought that abstract painting was now coming to an end
and that the next phase of American painting would be, like the Rivers
painting, in the direction of a revival of history painting.
In the fifties, there was quite a lot of that kind of thinking. Almost
every other year, there was an announcement, usually in
The New York
Times)
saying that abstract art was over and that we were now going to do
this, go back to that other thing. Do you want to say something about the
atmosphere then, since, after all, that was the atmosphere in which the
first decade of your most important work was produced?
HF:
Yes, what you're describing was there, the attitude of "figurative
painting is in." In part, The Museum of Modern Art might have been the
power behind it. The Museum wielded great power, and depending upon
whether or not one was in the "Fourteen American Artists" exhibition,
one was supposedly sort of "made" or broken by it. If the general sympa–
thy was not with abstract art, it was because people couldn't get an easy
handle on it. You are much more left with
yourself,
when confronting an
abstract picture and determining whether you like or dislike it. For false
