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MY LIFE BEFORE 1965

1965-1959

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FROM 1965 TO 1929

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ROBIN AND MARNY WHITE

MARNY AND ROBIN

1959- 1955. BUT Why had I come to California in the first place? It was not to study at Stanford. To answer I mention my long-time friend Robin White and a friendship that reaches back to my high school days. In 1957, I flew to San Francisco, California from Hartford. The plan was to meet Robin who lived in Menlo Park with his family. Robin was awarded a creative writing fellowship at Stanford University. He, with his wife Marny and their three children were about to embark on the return trip to Connecticut and I was invited to come along. The journey took several weeks, first going south along the California coast where I saw the Big Sur landscape after which we made a U turn that took us north in a route that paralleled the Sierra Nevada and Cascade ranges with stops at key national parks including Yosemite, Crater Lake Park in Oregon and Mt. Ranier in Washington. Robin referred to the itinerary as the big S in the west.

I took similar journeys in 1958 and 1959, except that on this last journey I did not return to Connecticut, but stayed in California. My plan was to find a position in the Bay area as an art teache. The teaching position I found was in the Millbrae School District, which was near the SF Airport. I gave notice to the West Hartford School District at the end of July, and started teaching in Millbrae in the fall.

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1959-1962

ART TEACHING:

MILBRAE, CALIFORNIA

The Milbrae School District never had an art teacher in the 28 years of its existence. The neighboring school districts of San Mateo and Burlingame had established art programs. I think that I was recruited by the school district since I had taught in a well established school district in Connecticut. But it was a challenge in many ways. First there were several elementary teachers who were able teachers of the arts in their own right. I had to win them over by showing them that I could offer something new. Winning the support of the school principals was also a challenge, but I happened to win the support of two or three influential principals, and the school superintendent. I made a practice of cleaning up the messes that one can get into in teaching art, and after the first six months I knew that I met with acceptance.

I lived in Menlo Park and commuted to Milbrae, but then I moved to San Francisco and commuted south to Milbrae. I painted quite steadily and began to search out graduate programs when I found Stanford’s program in art education.

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ONE MAN SHOW: ARTISTS COOP GALLERY SAN FRANCISCO

1962

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JUNE MCFEE

Though going to Stanford was not initially in my plans when I left Connecticut, I began to take courses at Stanford in the following year on a part-time basis.

My graduate advisor was June McFee and I want to describe what she taught me. In 1957 June graduated from Stanford University and served as assistant professor in the School of Education for a number of years. Her dissertation and subsequent text described a new theory of art education called perception–delineation or PD theory. I won't try to describe it here since it can be found in her book Preparation for Art which was first published in 1961 with a second edition in 1970. I wanted to find out about the availability of advanced degrees in the Bay area. As it turned out Stanford had a graduate program in art education, and so I talked to a lady sitting in a green chair in a small dark office on the third floor of Cubberly Hall. I had met June McFee for the first time.

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WHAT I LEARNED FROM MCFEE

By 1960 and 1961 everyone was reading Bruner, but June was reading Bruner in 1956 when he and others were developing what was then called the “new look” in psychology, later to be regarded as the opening stage in the “cognitive revolution”. In a series of studies of perceptual behavior Bruner and others began realizing that the ways we see and understand the world is affected by our readiness to perceive, by our prior knowledge and by our values and needs. These set our attention mechanisms to respond to stimuli in ways that can in large part be predicted and measured. Cognitive factors in our psychological organization affect what we notice or overlook. Heretofore visual perception was thought to be an ocular matter involving sensory acuity, but now it was seen as central to the way we understand the world.

Such insights wereto have two effects on art education. First, McFee was describing a theoretical approach that challenged the leading paradigm of the field namely Lowenfeld's visual–haptic dichotomy. Individual differences in student's responses to stimuli in their environment could now be explained by their prior knowledge and by their readiness to perceive new phenomena. Lowenfeld regarded these differences as innate dispositions acquired at birth, influences that could be nurtured by teaching but which is already determined at birth.

Thus, my years at Stanford had educated me to experience paradigm shifts. Only now can I realize how I was prepared for what wouldetranspire in Columbus.

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BACKPACK TRIPS WITH ROBIN & MARNY

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SUMMERS 1963- 1968

SUMMERS 1963-1968

As I think about it now I really had no life of my own. I lived vicariously through others, through Robin and Marny, and others. My role was that of a dutiful son who took care of his mother, and what I lacked was a life of my own and a life partner to share it with. Around the fall of 1968, I had a conversation with Mrs. Toby Barkan, Manny’s wife, about the problem of caring for my mother, and the sense of guilt I experienced when I thought of living apart from her. This would have necessitated nursing home care but somehow that prospect would trigger guilt and I refused to act. Toby was a psychiatric social worker and her words changed my life. She said, “Well, Arthur, there are some guilts you have to live with, but you need to fulfill your own life.” When my mother was diagnosed with secondary onset diabetes, her doctor made it clear that nursing home care was an unavoidable necessity. That happened several months before Jenny and I married.

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1954-1959�ART TEACHING: CONNECTICUT

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U.CONN�CYNTHIA R. SNOW

I finished my studies at New Haven State Teachers College in 1951, though I did not graduate until the following year. The Korean War was raging and with the military draft pending, it was not possible to obtain a teaching position. I took an exam that entitled me to defer military service if I were in graduate study, though I was granted a series of deferments by the local draft board since I had to support my mother. She was no longer able to work owing to a series of mental breakdowns. For income I worked summers in a wire factory, and decided to go for a masters degree at U Conn. With no money to speak of, I took the plunge, but was able to make ends meet by working part-time on campus.

I studied painting with Cynthia Snow during my second semester at Storrs. She was from North Carolina and had a strident southern accent. She rarely lectured on art but would introduce a problem or describe the work of a painter, or a style of painting. Sometimes she would object to something I was doing, but then on the following day, she would often rescind her previous reservations. Sometimes she would pin a reproduction of an art work to my easel in the painting studio with a note saying that I should study this person’s work. But, mostly she inspired confidence by telling me what I was doing and whose paintings I should look at, and what could I learn

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TEACHING/ ESSEX CONN.1954

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EXISTENTIAL CRISIS

In the mid 1950s I began reading Arnheim’s Art and Visual Perception I was the art teacher for three towns, including Essex, Deep River, and Chester, Connecticut. One October afternoon I was in the middle of a lesson in a second grade classroom making Halloween masks. Outside, the sugar maples were ablaze in splendor and the sky was a brilliant blue. For an October day it was quite warm and I yearned to be out enjoying the autumnal glory. I asked myself “what the hell am I doing in this situation? Why would a grown man spend his time with this foolishness? It was an existential crisis. I was a quarter of a century old and experienced the sense that death was , if not immanent, was nevertheless, an inevitability. There had to be more to life than this. In 1954 it was fashionable to have such crises. When I lived in Essex, I was only five miles from Robin and Marny’s house in Old Saybrook. It was in those years that my connection with the Whites took hold, and they helped me pry loose from life as an art teacher in Connecticut which happened later.

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WEST HARTFORD

1955-1959

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PAINTINGS�1955-1961

In 1955, I left Essex to move to West Hartford where I taught for the next four years.. While my livelihood was made by teaching art, the years in West Hartford were ones where I became heavily involved in my own art making. I showed work throughout New England, including the Boston Arts Festival, and won occasional awards and honorable mentions. Some of the angst was abated by these efforts.

On a number of Sunday afternoons I drove up to Storrs Connecticut with my paintings and would show them to Cynthia Reeves Snow who was my painting professor when I worked on my masters degree. We would drink tea and worry about each other’s paintings. On other occasions I drove to Old Saybrook to see Robin and Marny, while at other times, I would return to New Haven to see family and friends.

These were the years when abstract expressionism was the dominant style, and in New York I found such artists as Franz Kline and DeKooning to my liking.

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PAINTINGS Cont’d

At that time it was my aspiration to enter the New York art scene by having a show. I recall driving to Manhattan to enter paintings in the Pennsylvania Academy Annual, and on another occasion, I talked to gallery directors and showed them my work. I also thought about graduate work at NYU. But, New York seemed to be a world that I was not ready to enter, and in 1959, I made the move to California.

The late1950s were the waning years of the beat generation. Kerouac’s On the Road was the leading novel of the day, and the scene in San Francisco was about to shift from the North Beach district with its City Lights Bookstore to Haight-Ashbury and the flower children. Tim Leary was teaching people about LSD across the bay in Berkeley, and in general, the revolution in lifestyles that we now refer to as the Sixties was beginning to flower. There were student neighborhoods near Stanford in Menlo Park and Palo Alto where ingenious individuals had figured out how to grow marijuana in remote corners of the Stanford Golf Course where the automatic sprinklers provided irrigation on a regular basis.

Robin had preceded me in the move to California. He was awarded a Creative Writing Fellowship at Stanford and with the success of his first two novels, had moved to Portola Valley, an affluent sub-division near the Stanford Campus. The Whites offered me a place of refuge. It was not uncommon for me to drive into the foothills behind the Stanford campus to spend evenings on their deck, drinking bourbon and water and where we worried about the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis , the Berlin blockade and later the Kennedy assassination.

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1947 1955

1947-1955

. I graduated high school in 1947. The war had just ended and the GIs were returning. In fact my college classmates were mainly returning GI’s who received well deserved stipends to pay for their education. I went to New Haven State Teachers College with the idea of transferrin to the University of Conn. I was jealous of these returning service men and women, but in another sense I was very grateful to them, because they were a serious lot, who had lost years of their lives to the war, and who now were making up for lost time. College in the late 1940s was a far more serious place than it was in the decade that followed.

One of my classmates was Diana Mars , who later married Richard Lukosius. She was in the service during the war years. She was about ten years older and was an accomplished artist and designer in her own right. Her husband Richard was a student of Josef Albers at the Yale Art School. She looked at my art work and told me that I was a better painter than many who were art majors. Another classmate was Kiki Rabinowitz. Her husband Harold was also a student at Yale and they lived in an apartment on Howe Street near the college. The GI stipend helped support them in their studies and they supplemented their income by starting a window display business. Kiki had a diploma from Cooper Union and was also a superb designer.

On several occasions I went to visit Harold at the Yale art school and sat in on the famous color course given by Josef Albers. Yale also held studio critiques in which visiting artists from New York offered advice and opinions. One evening I dropped in to see Harold and Kiki who had a visitor named Willem DeKooning. He was then in his late 40s or early 50s and had penetrating blue eyes.

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THE WAR YEARS�1942-1946

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CHILDHOOD

1942- 1929 . My father died at the age of 33 when I was ten months old and so I have no recollection of him. He was in the furniture upholstery business with my grandfather. The depression was in its first stages when my father died and my mother was lucky enough to find a job, though it paid very little. For this reason she moved into the house of my maternal grandparents, and this was where that I spent my childhood years. My grandmother and grandfather took care of me while my mother worked. As Orthodox Jews they were loving grandparents from the old country.

In preparation for this talk I looked at old photos of family members and friends. I found pictures of my mother that predated my birth and the first pictures of me as an infant. I found pictures of a birthday party taken when I was about nine or ten years old. There were pictures of me with my dog named Tiny, and pictures of cousins and aunts. I found one picture of my mother and father which predated my arrival.

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INFANCY

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MATERNAL GRANDPARENTS

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RETIREMENT, 1996