Artist as Reporter, The
You I I I I An auto graveyard in Wisconsin In Sumner, Mississippi Moses Wright shakes off 200 years of history and rises to point out the men who came to his house to take the boy Emmett till a drawing made on assignment for Life magazine at Les Graz Tavern in Cairo, Illinois the ghost hunters gather for breakfast in Bengal, India the Indian mystic Vinoba Bhave Searcher after land for the peasants of India addresses the assembled throng This painting appeared in Fortune magazine Another drawing made that afternoon was published by a World Book yearbook the insides of a Victor Comptometer and some of the people that put it together a Street in Hong Kong.
This was a part of a story on population for World Book yearbook and another Street in Calcutta that was part of the same story the Keefauver hearings into professional boxing Sports Illustrated Berlin in September of 1961 I was in Berlin three weeks after the wall was erected and the vote pose were stringing the barbwire Berlin drawings were published by the Chicago Sun -Times Birmingham, Alabama the head of the Chamber of Commerce discusses the freedom riders invasion of Alabama and the burning of the bus at Anniston and The businessmen's attempt to set up new lines of communication with the Negro community in Tokyo Tatsuo Peter Cardinal Doy officiates at a confirmation ceremony This is part of a series on Japanese Catholics for Jubilee magazine board the USS wasp the recovery of Gemini 4 This painting was made for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration st.
Peters October 11th 1962 the opening procession of Vatican Council to This was published in the Saturday evening post in Ansley, Alabama part of the Birmingham Industrial Complex the kids go to school and on March 15th 1965 a confrontation in Selma, Alabama What I'm obviously suggesting here is that the artists should not spend too much time in the studio You should get out and look around and see what's going on Too often artists and I'm speaking here of painters and the so -called fine artists and commercial artists as well Too often it seems to me.
We are too concerned with how a picture is done not enough with what it has to say Painters talking almost always about the surface of the canvas how the paint is applied And we have the commercial artist.
It seems to me doing the same thing you talk to a group of Illustrators they don't talk very much about What's in the picture what the ideas are they talk about the surface the wash and how it's applied and whether there's light paint Over the dark paint and so on seems to me that more important than that is what's in the picture So I think that most of the painters and the so -called commercial illustrators are closer together than they might ever imagine In fact, they're each doing the same thing It's been thought by many people that Photography would tell the story of our time There have been dramatic developments in handheld cameras and fast films and there have been dramatic photographers to go along with them These photographers have approached their subjects with high artistry But the artist meanwhile has kind of given up and gone back into the studio and is interested mostly in the surface of the canvas My own work I might say is for magazines publications annual reports advertisements In other words, I've been working in the circumstances which are directly parallel with those of a photographer And I've often been involved with photographers and involved with the same magazines that have so celebrated the photographer And I've become convinced that when you get to a place There's a photographic approach to the problem and there's an artist's approach and that the artist hasn't been asked to go Mostly because he hasn't demonstrated that he's able to pull out the story and second of all because the editors have accepted the viewpoint That photography is the answer What I'm suggesting is that there is this second look at a subject a different look and That this is worth the exploring and that the artist can find out and pull out of the subject things which a photographer cannot also, I think there are certain subjects that the Editors of the big national magazines haven't been covering simply because they're not interesting photographically It's important for instance to know what's going on down in Birmingham when they turn the hoses on the people but equally important Perhaps or more important It's know what's going on in the minds of the people of Birmingham before they get to the stage of turning the hoses on It seems to me that the artist can explore these more difficult subjects can do something with them can make them more visually interesting What we've been seeing in the magazines In other words what an artist does who goes out on a thing like this he heightens the reality Makes the reality sharper than can be experienced in another way he walks around the subject takes with him the cubist idea of looking at the subject from all sides and Showing many facets of it in the same picture.
He carries with him the color of the fauves.
He can heighten the color He carries with him the action painters concept of the motion of the idea or the action Down from the brain down the arm at the end of the brush to the canvas This is the way an artist works.
This is the excitement of art that you sit there You stand there and you make the picture it happens just that way But more important perhaps than this action is the interaction of the artist with a meaningful subject I've talked to art directors clubs and others often and I Tell them a Berlin San Diego Acapulco yacht race Land reform in Iran population problems of Asia First question they always ask is What kind of pencil do you use? Well, it's a it's a 315 very nice pencil Very black And I come back into it with a charcoal pencil When the pencil dulls down I sharpen it with a razor blade When I sit down I I sit on this It's Not too comfortable, but the position of the artist has never been too comfortable in American society And I'm not I'm not sure you're supposed to be too comfortable When you're at a place, let's say you're in a political convention There's a kind of excitement and interaction with those people and the stool like this helps an awful lot when you're teetering on the brink For instance when they when they carried the seats out at the recent Democratic Convention the Mississippi seats I was coming back from a rally on the other side of the of the place and suddenly they were carrying the seats out you know well, this was to me a big idea was the biggest idea of the convention and Visually, I mean it's a big visual idea and not only that the guys that were carrying out with Negroes You don't ask yourself then at that time, you know Is this the right kind of a piece of paper is this this pencil, right or I mean they walked out with them and they turn around they came back and they walked out with a few more in other words It had to be done.
It was done at that time because of this kind of excitement of the moment The Vatican Council for instance the interaction of the place and the artist is a very important When you're working there's this kind of emotional involvement with the subject that you have because you're there You simply can't cook up in the studio This is the death of Pope John And this is the Capitol Rotunda on the night of November 24th 1963 I Like to talk today about two stories Goose hunting in Cairo, Illinois and the European Common Market I should explain that I'm delighted when somebody calls on the telephone It's a very exciting moment as it is for most artists but I Have two other methods of working and that is to query somebody when I think there's a pretty good idea And another is to go ahead and do it and then find a place for it Well in the second category of querying people Evolved this story of goose hunting in Cairo, Illinois You know, I bought a new house and I was working with a painter friend of mine.
He's a painter and And then we went out and we sat on the on the terrace and Goose came down over the house and went out into the Lake and he said well boy if I had my gun I'd blast that old honker Well, I I'd never heard language like this, you know, and I I said well, what do you mean? and he said well didn't you ever hear of goose hunting in Cairo, Illinois boy if I I'd rather be down there than painting this house so I asked him about and he told me about what where he'd been down there the year before and We went back to work and about three o 'clock.
It suddenly began to turn over in my mind This called the mysterious idea getting process began to turn over in my mind that That this would be a pretty good story for Sports Illustrated Dick Gangl is the art director at Sports Illustrated and he'd been doing some kind of exciting things and I thought this would be Kind of thing that might interest him.
So I dropped a note in the mail to Gangl and and the next day He was on the phone and said sure that he'd He'd like to have me do it.
I said well you're gonna put a rider on this and He said oh, no.
No, you know all about goose hunting you go ahead and do it Well, what you do is you get down there and you kind of skulk around, you know the First thing you learn is that it's pronounced Cairo.
This is Illinois in the Mississippi and not Egypt in the Nile.
I checked into the Chamber of Commerce and then I Checked in with some of the newspaper guys it happened that one of the newspaper guys was going out to the hunting clubs to talk to some of the Fellas out there and he said I'll give you a lift out So well, this is Horseshoe Lake, which is an ancient turn in the Mississippi and the Geese come up out of the lake and fly over the hunting club.
This is the Hoosier hunting club Which is run by a fella named too tall Yates the hunters put up for the night at the hunting club and the day of the afternoon before they They stand out and kind of check the geese as they're going over they the geese Know that this that the daily season is over at three o 'clock and at 3 o 'clock they all come up out of the place and fly over to get the corn in the fields, you see so These guys check them in the way that they're flying the night before determines how they're going to fly the next day The next morning or well then another thing they do is they plant their their fields in relation to the geese you can't you can't bait the the blinds, but you can plant the Proper Green stuff in and around the blinds and you can adjust your field You see not so much for the crops that are in it But for the geese that are going to come over then at 4 o 'clock the next morning they get together some of them for breakfast at Les Gras This is as you can see a family style breakfast for a dollar There's a triumvirate of three guys down here that are very important to goose hunting in Cairo, Illinois baby eights Spice Yates and two tall Yates I went over to Spice Yates this place and there were two guys in a pit This fellow on the left is Tiny Crippen and the guy on the right is Slats Melton They're two guys from down in Cairo and And it's interesting to sit with a couple of guys like this because they talk, you know about How's Genevieve and how's Gwendolyn and George still with his wife and so on so forth They say because of course there's a goose going over and This upsets you the first time this happens, you know, but and otherwise gentlemanly conversation and They did eventually get one and Tiny said to Slats, oh Slats, I can't get that goose You better go across the field there and get him.
So Slats went across and got him They come back then to the to the club of course and make fun of the guys that are still out in the pits they can see the geese flying over the guy's pit and and they see the guy blasting away, but if he misses the goose, there's a Jubilation back at the ranch house This is Kenneth Martin who makes the goose calls He's got a place up over his father's a hunting club and he turns these on a lathe and Tunes them up just so that they're perfect for luring the geese down This is the game warden checking the geese of a couple of guys it's a Hutchison's goose I don't know exactly what kind that is, but I guess it was legal.
He didn't at least arrest him while I was there This is mrs.
McCoy who picks the feathers These two people in the back of this Jeep are from Birmingham, Alabama They were they were up hunting in Cairo people come from all over the country to hunt there This woman had never been goose hunting before but she said her her husband's daddy and her husband had always been Goose -hunting and she figured if you can't beat him you join him and of course in the evening they gather in the Cairo Hotel and Relive the day's experiences and there's a kind of nightlife down there that makes it important for a lot of these guys to come As a matter of fact, some think that's the only reason they go down.
I Did make a painting of the keys, but I? Was more interested in in the people and the guys that come down there and what they what they're up to when they get there and so on Another kind of job as I've described is a kind in which you you go ahead and do it See if you can find somebody interested afterwards What seemed to me that that an artist report on the European Common Market would be a useful kind of a? demonstration of a difficult subject and so in 1961 I went to Europe and Set out to make a series of drawings concerning the European Common Market Just how to begin is the real problem because you're kind of on your own on the vast continent of Europe trying to figure out What's visually interesting so I started at the Paris Boors figuring that that the stocks had improved and they had Because of their relationship to the Common Market and also that on the on the Paris Stock Market They were listing more stocks from other countries than previously Then I went to Brussels where I made this drawing of a department store the fact was that at that time a woman could buy Paris ready -made gowns in a Brussels department store at approximately 30 % less Than she would have bought it before the Common Market mechanism reduced the tariffs between these two countries in Luxembourg I made this drawing of an outdoor market Italian fruit and French cheese and so forth the traffic on the rime was of course to me an important picture because I've just done some drawings in the Mississippi, and this is a great and wonderful river But until you've seen the traffic on the Rhine this artery that joins up all of these Countries you don't feel what a what a river really means to the economy of a nation and a group of nations this is the euro mast in Rotterdam the Dutch have Decided that Rotterdam will be the port of Europe and have opened euro port and The mast is put there to symbolize this port in Luxembourg the new products are traveling over the ancient routes and In Luxembourg as well on the French border is the border crossing idea guys who work in one country and live in another This customs guy here didn't check anybody until he saw I'd made a drawing of him sitting there smoking his pipe And then he jumped up and stopped a couple of guys who were so surprised that they'd never been stopped before I think more important of course than than just these Exterior visual ideas is who are who are the guys who are the the Europeans? I use the word European as a guy who has adjusted himself to being a citizen of Europe He's no longer just a Frenchman or a German or a Belgian We think of Europe as Europe, but the Europeans clearly haven't thought of it that way so There was a meeting going on and what happens at these meetings is they don't they don't let you make a draw drawings during the meeting But you can go in in the five minutes before the meeting and quick make a drawing before they throw you out I was aiming for drawing of the major Europeans who were attending the meeting They were they're discussing at this time whether Britain should be allowed to make overtures toward joining the common market It wasn't a question of whether Britain was going to get in It was a question of whether they would allow her to even think about it The one of the important Europeans was of course Paul -Henry Spock who was a Belgian foreign minister and a significant European another is professor Walder Hallstein here on the left.
He's president of the common market What happens is while you're making these drawings most of the time you're skulking out in the hall you know because they won't let you in and and the guys come out and they talk to The press and then the press spends 20 minutes discussing it among themselves to see what the guy just said.
I Felt that this was an important symbol of the complication of this matter Jean Monnet has been called by many the father of the common market.
I went to see him I wasn't able to make a drawing inside so I made the drawing of the building with Monet coming out This is a young man from Italy working in the German at the crop plant in Essen the idea of importing labor from other common market countries and This is the Court of Justice in Luxembourg where they settle the disputes of the common market What happened though is that I ended up with a whole series of drawings and I still felt that I needed some drawing that was symbolized and what is this Europe idea Well, there's a press relations guy there.
I met with this guy and we talked about the drawings He liked the drawings and so on but he didn't seem to be coming up with anything well, he got a phone call and and he turned and he answered the phone and Riley was talking on the phone.
I looked out the window and When he turned back I said to him well what's on the back of the car there and he said it is nothing It's the European license plate.
Well, what this means is that a guy who has decided that he's a European That he's no longer only a citizen of Belgium or Germany or so forth puts on his car a European license plate It's a symbol of this.
Well, clearly you see this was it was a big visual idea And if the guy hadn't gotten a phone call, I don't know if I'd ever seen it It seemed to me that this was the key drawing of the series.
This is the reason you go This is the reason you keep your eyes open and it's and it's a kind of sudden and exciting payoff I was making the drawing he got another call.
I started making the drawing while he was still on the phone So you ask yourself? Well, okay These are guys who are for the common market who's against it Well, I happen to be going to London and so I I heard the name of Lord Hinchingbrook Well, I figured in the whole world if there's anybody who would be against something like this It would be Lord Hinchingbrook who was in fact a conservative member of Parliament I went to London and talked with Lord Hinchingbrook and he turned out to be a perfectly wonderful guy Severe but pleasant and served excellent sherry what happens when you're working on something like this You not only make the drawing but you you write down what he says.
It's kind of like a comic strip There's a balloon up over his head and I made two drawings They're loaded with notes on either side concerning his views He said I'm fundamentally of the view that the common market will Break up owing to the residual nationalism of the constituent countries these British guys do in fact talk this way and he said the New generation is superficially international with their travel and schools and so forth But the common market is the ideal of pre -war statesmen who have entered into it as an act of contrition this of course was a mouthful and I quick scribbled it down and came back to the States I Stopped off in New York and showed this around Real question is now you've got all these drawings.
What are you going to do with them? You know, I talked with several people fortune Life look so forth others art directors.
The fact is that most of the art directors I was talking to hadn't the foggiest notion there was such a thing as a common market or if they did they weren't confronted with that problem at that particular week Dave's statured life is a good friend of mine and he's the kind of a guy who call in an editor Called in his foreign editor was of course well aware of the whole thing They they kept the thing for quite a while and I began to get a little panicky about it But they didn't they didn't publish it thing is life after all is pretty well committed to photography And group journalism this kind of one -man effort doesn't doesn't fight its way in there too often But then there was something else that took place President Kennedy about the first of the year gave a kind of major speech in which he discussed American involvement with the common market and Shortly after that fortune decided to publish my drawings The layout was made by Walter owner fortunes art director They let off with the license plate the one I've described as being the most important in my opinion Spock you see and Hallstein Monet below modern goods traveling over the ancient routes Euromast border crossing idea and the Paris Boors Traffic on the Rhine the Luxembourg outdoor market and the Brussels department store And they closed with these guys trying to figure out what the whole thing was all about Lord Henshingbrook in fact Never got into the story as a drawing But he did make the copy the editor in writing the lead -in said it began as the hope of a small group of men Others called it an act of contrition by pre -war statesmen So you see the interview with Henshingbrook did pay off it became a useful part of the story.
I Think you understand what it is I've been trying to say that the artist should do what he can to get out of the studio Not every artist will want to go to Hong Kong or Thailand Not all artists are interested in such things as the common market and land reform But there are things in need of interpretation right here at our doorstep Look at the people you see on the way to work or to school Draw them Go down to the bus depot to the airline terminal Into the hotel lobby draw them.
Look at the people right here in this room Are these the people you see in the magazines? Are these the people you see on TV? Look at them closely draw them Oh And I'd really like to know Yes watercolor Well, I don't mean that I don't Oh, you're not You