Romance, Gangsters, and Cowboys
Interview with Rudy Burckhardt
Conducted by Paul Mattick (1991)
October 2004

When you came to New York in 1935, what originally brought you here?  Why did you come?

I wanted to leave Switzerland.  Or gradually it became clear to me that I wanted to leave; I was very slow, I was not a troublemaker of any kind.  I didn’t think of America until I met Edwin Derby.  I remember I was very depressed, and I was dropping out of medical school.  I was moping around in Switzerland and then I met Edwin and that gave me the idea to come to America.  I know I thought usually when someone wants to be an artist in Switzerland they go to Paris, but then America seemed far enough away from my family and everybody and out of Switzerland. 

I was really lucky – what used to be called, born with a silver spoon in my mouth.  My father died, and when I was twenty-one suddenly I had $20,000 or so.  At that time that was a lot of money, so I came over here with enough to live on for a number of years.  I didn’t have to get a job even, so I was playing around doing photographs…

So you immediately began with photography, or were you painting too then?

No, painting I started later, mostly after the war when I got out of the army.  You could go to school then on the G.I. Bill, and it was very good – plenty of money to pay tuition and some to live on besides.  I was painting a little before then, so I went to a French painter called Ozenfant, who had a school here.  Then I started to do photography more professionally – by that time my money was used up – by photographing paintings for art books, in galleries and museums.

I took photographs for Art News.  I did many stories about so-and-so paints a picture.  Tom Hess was the editor, Thomas B. Hess.  He was a very, very nice man, a very kind man, and intelligent, and he loved de Kooning’s art.  He never changed; you know, other people changed later on.  He never changed his mind about it.  Most critics give somebody a great review, and then two years later you have another show and they say, “Well, it’s not as good as before.”  Mainly because, you know, they have to write something new.

What was it like in 1935 to arrive here from Basel, to be in New York?  What was New York like?

Well, it was like a fairyland for me; it was luxurious.  I remember arriving in the boat.  Of course, at that time, you anchor in the harbor, and then early in the morning – six or seven in the morning – you slowly go in.  You see the skyline and you dock and it’s beautiful, like a fairytale, the skyline downtown.  Somehow, right away I realized then that I wanted to stay here.  I felt bad about leaving my mother.  Fortunately I had four sisters and brothers so they could take care of her.

I want to ask you about the years before the war:  what kind of people were you associating with?

Edwin Denby and his friends.  He knew Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson and the Group Theatre people, Harold Clurman – they were quite left too.  I was a member of the Photo League, right after the war; they were quite left too.  They thought my photographs were OK but very unimportant, because they thought you should really show poor people, how they lived in the Lower East Side, you shouldn’t just go out on the street and take snapshots of whatever you see, you should almost live with the people until you can understand them and then take their picture.  And then, when McCarthy came around the Photo League was labeled as a Communist front organization.  Some of them were Communist party members.  I went there just to be with some other people to talk about photography, show your work.  Otherwise, I was never political, and neither was Edwin Denby.

Paul Strand always projects his own gloom on things, he was a very gloomy guy.  I remember once I saw a photograph of his of an Italian family in front of their house, a sort of farm house.  Now, I know Italians – they like to have their pictures taken.  But he managed to make them all tragic looking.

I knew Walker Evans, before the war.  He was a very interesting guy.  I remember showing him some of my photographs.  He said, “Aren’t they precious?” This was a bad word, meaning very light weight – Actually, Edwin figured it out: he himself was accused of not being really socially conscious, of being really a very aesthetic guy, which he was.  So it was on his mind,

He was glad to find you, somebody who was less socially conscious than he.

Yes.  He went and took these wonderful photographs in the South, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.  He thought he had to be very socially conscious.  He takes a picture of an interior, sometimes a wonderful interior, with a broom standing in the corner, a picture of Santa Claus on the wall – something like that.  They’re just very great pictures of nice interiors.  It doesn’t mean he feels a lot for the people who live there.

I met Edith, my first wife, after the war, in 1945.  Through her I met Heinz Langerhans, her boyfriend before me, and Fairfield Porter too.  Porter was a very intense guy, very awkward, very abrupt.  If he had an idea, he would come and talk to you about it, very brilliantly, and then when he was finished he would just get up and go home, barely saying goodbye.

Then I also met Fritz Henssler, Hans Sharper, and Paul Mattick, your father.  I was just listening, actually.  I was young and very curious about all those things.  I wasn’t much of a talker myself.  I was always fascinated by people who could just talk and it comes out.  These were the first people against Stalin, they started right away.  They hated Stalin more than anybody, though not more than Hitler.  They were very passionate about it, they were called council communists.

When Germany lost the war, I remember suddenly some of the Germans I knew here became very upset.  Suddenly they felt like German who had lost the war.  I remember one who called the people in Germany who cooperated with Allies, Anglo-American quislings!  I don’t know what he expected Germany to do.  It was something very deep, something basic which had nothing to do with the mind.  I remember even Kangerhans said that Roosevelt was the biggest villain because he coldbloodedly developed the atom bomb.  Hitler could have done it but he didn’t.  A lot of the German scientists came over here.  He had a theory Hitler wanted to lose, which may be true, who knows.  He certainly couldn’t win; there’s no way of imagining Hitler to win.  Wherever he took over countries they hated him.  He didn’t have any idea how to rule a country.  Like the Americans, who became best friends with the people who lost the war, with Japan and Germany.

The political people whom you knew seem to have been mostly Germans.

Well, they seemed to be the liveliest.  The American communists were kind of grim, compared with the Germans.  I remember de Kooning once saying something funny, before the war – a lot of his friends were leftists or communists, but he was never interested in it – he said, “These communists, they like to drink coffee in the morning, so they say, the People want coffee in the morning!”

Do you think you’ve become more conservative with time?

Well, you become more careful.  I wouldn’t want to watch a revolution anymore, no.  I probably never would have liked it, but now I wouldn’t want to survive one.  It would be too awful, too brutal.  I was always kind of a coward.  I never took photographs of any violent happenings.

After the war you began to be more involved with painters in New York?

Yes, with Bill de Kooning, he was a great friend of Edwin and me.  We were next-door neighbors in 1935 and later he was one block away, and we saw a lot of each other.  I didn’t quite understand what he was doing.  I could tell he was an extraordinary man, and artist.  But he didn’t really know either, he was never finishing paintings.  He was a very intense guy, he used to walk around all night.  I told him once, have a drink, it’ll relax you.  – No, no, it doesn’t do anything for me.  And then ten years later when he became successful finally, then he started drinking.  I remember he once explained it.  He said, “suddenly I was invited to all these parties uptown.  I didn’t know how to talk to these people, so I’d have a drink, and as soon as I finished my drink a waiter came and gave me another.”  He was very good.  He was interested in my photographs, too.  He especially like to talk with Edwin; they had long talks.

To what extent did you at the time think of there being what we now think of as the group of American artists?

I never thought of it, No.  There was the Club, when that started that was kind of fun, I used to go there and I became a member.  They had great New Year’s Eve parties and they had other parties.  Some artists talked.  But then twenty years later people say, Oh there was the Club, camaraderie with the artists – it was nothing like that.  We just got together, some were heavy drinkers.  And then there was the Cedar Bar, I used to go there.

De Kooning and Kline were really great friends.  They went out drinking together sometimes for several days and nights.  But Kline never wanted to talk about art.  He was a wonderful storyteller, full of jokes, a very, very nice guy.  And then of course Pollock, he came to the Cedar Bar every Monday when he came in from East Hampton to see his psychiatrist.  After the psychiatrist he went to the bar, and he would sit by himself.  He could be quite nasty.  He and Bill de Kooning were always rivals.  They both appreciated each other’s work, and they were friends.  Rothko didn’t come down to the bar.  Then there was a young woman, Grace Hartigan, a painter.  But all that historic thing was made up later.

Fifty years later people try to put that into words and phrases, but I wasn’t aware of that.  There was the socalled AAA, the American Abstract Artists, but Bill had nothing to do with them.  There were a lot of good painters who are forgotten now.  I have about 20,000 negatives, most of them are of artists who are unknown now.

And museums are supposed to be for old paintings, for old art.  I remember how amazed I was when the Metropolitan would show the latest paintings, like Stella or something.  It seemed crazy to me.  Even the Modern museum didn’t use to show young artists.  Later, in the sixties, they started.

So with hindsight, you can always make sense out of it.  But you have to wait.  People who try to write about the present moment from a historical point of view, I think that’s terrible.  Especially when they make predictions, they’re always wrong.  I remember predictions like: In three years there’s going to be war between Russia and the United States.  Capitalism is going to disintegrate in America, it doesn’t need a revolution, the way it’s going now, it’s going to fall apart.  They used U.S. Steel, mostly, as an example.  You’ve heard of the Technocrats?  They were very small.  I used to know one who talked like crazy, he was full of animation.  You couldn’t really contradict him because he had all the information.  He was a very little guy.  Once when he made some wild prediction I said, “You think so?” and he said, “I know so.”  But it turned out that capitalism has been very flexible. It changes, and it’s still going on.

Did you have any contact with the now so famous Clement Greenberg at that time?

I remember he once punched John Meyers.  Helen Frankenthaler was Clem Greenberg’s girlfriend, and then she got another boyfriend, and one time Johnny Meyers was teasing Greenberg, “See that handsome young man.”  So he punched him.

He wrote pretty well, he was very readable.  De Kooning didn’t like him; he said, “He tells me what to paint, what I can’t paint.”  When de Kooning began painting women again, in the 1950s, he said, “But Bill, how can you?  Don’t you know you can’t paint figures anymore now?” Bill said, “The hell I can’t, I’ll paint them if I want.”  There’s another story, about Woman I.  You know he worked on it for a year or so, but Shapiro came to the studio and said, “That’s a fantastic picture in the hall.”  Bill said he was going to throw it away.  “You can’t throw that away!”

Did you have any contact with Hans Hoffmann at this time?

Oh yeah.  Most of my friends went to Hans Hoffmann, like Nell Blaine and Jane Freilicher, Larry Rivers.  Somehow, I wanted to be different.  So I went to Ozenfant.  I think it was a big mistake, because Ozenfant was very tight and I was kind of tight, a primitive painter, and Ozenfant like that, actually.  He never encouraged me to be loose.  The opposite of Hoffmann.  I’m still kind of tight.  When I try to be loose, it loses the quality.

I’m interested in how you’ve thought about the relation between photography and painting.

I always enjoyed painters more than photographers.  Most photographers are kind of illiterate and even now most writing about photography is kind of unreadable.  Although they know now that it’s an art, and give you five thousand dollars for a print.  So that’s better now.  It’s still a lower level somehow.  The poor guy who writes for the New York Times, Andy Grundberg, can write about photographs but then he has to write about cameras for amateurs.  That’s ridiculous.  A painting critic doesn’t have to write about art materials.

How did you start making movies?

Well, still photographs are a little bit limited.  Also, it took me a long time to realize it, it’s actually harder to get a still photograph that really stands up, because when it gets printed and comes out it becomes like a fact, you know, and it’s very hard to stay interested in a photograph very long.  So I think they’re best in a book, really, where you can look through them.  While in a film things come and go.  For example, I often have still pictures in my films, you can show then for a second, two seconds, five seconds, whatever you want, and then they go.  So it’s not so demanding to have it interesting all over.  A photograph has to be interesting all over, not just a picture of somebody and then a background.  So in a film it’s fleeting, it comes and goes.  Also, most of my films are not directed.  I like the feeling that, suppose I do a scene in the street, I don’t now what they’re going to do either.  Sometimes something happens that is better than I would have imagined it, if I had thought it through, so I go ahead and do it.  Lately I’ve been working with performance too, dance.  I have some films where I mix up the dance with other things.

How would you compare the world of artists of the period around the war and what it has become today, since you are also part of it today?

It’s too big, I don’t think you can have an overview anymore.  You know, American painters were hardly showing in galleries then.  I remember they used to say, a gallery can only make a go of it if it shows European painters, and then you can show a few American painters.  So it was much quieter.  And you know there weren’t art courses at the colleges.  There were a few art schools in New York.  That only started in the 1960s in the colleges, and they produced lots of painters.  I don’t even go to see much; I’m not trying to keep up.

I think a lot of things have gotten better, actually.  There used to be only Broadway theatre, there was no off-Broadway theatre and there was no dance downtown or poetry, except for the official poets.  So I don’t agree when people talk about the good old days.  Some things were better.  But you couldn’t go around with a Negro girlfriend downtown.  You could go to Harlem and do anything you wanted there, but not downtown.  I remember I had a Negro girlfriend for a while; I was in Chelsea with her and I wanted to go to a restaurant or a bar and they wouldn’t serve us.  We finally ended up in a Chinese chop suey restaurant on the second floor.  It was terrible.  So it’s better.  On the other hand there’s more racial anger again now.  You could go to Harlem and stay all night; I don’t know anyone who has the nerve to do that now.  The Apollo Theatre was wonderful; I used to go there to see all the great bands: Duke Ellington, Count Basie.  But if New York stopped changing it would be something else, it wouldn’t be New York anymore.  Basel never changes.

When did you go back to Europe?

The first visit I made after three years.  I went back in 1938.  And then the war came and I didn’t go back till ’47, to visit my mother.  In ’50 I went for two years, mostly to Italy, with Edith.  I still had the G.I. Bill and got some money from them.  And then in ’55.  But I never stayed in Switzerland for more than two or three days.  I used to hate Switzerland and really wanted to be American in all ways, tried not to have an accent; now I don’t mind anymore.

But what did “American” mean?

Well, it meant a kind of language: romance, gangsters, and cowboys.  That’s what we saw in the movies.  And everything was so much bigger.  In Switzerland everything is small.  And crazy: I was interested in crazy things like marathon dancing, people dancing for four or five days.  We used to read about it in our newspaper in Switzerland, the Basler Nachrichten, they had a column with crazy things about America like frog racing.

As you know, New York is really different from the rest of America.  I really became a New Yorker rather than an American.  America still is the only place where there are so many mixtures of people.  There’s no other place like this.  Anybody can become a New Yorker, really.  But you can’t say the same of Paris or Rome; you never become a Frenchman or an Italian.

I’m interested in something you’ve said about taking photographs of people and buildings: the problem of the height of the buildings and the smallness of people.

It seems impossible.  It took me a long time, actually.  I was about two years in New York before I did any photographs, I was so overwhelmed by it, and was really just looking around.  And then I started with details, before I could do the whole building.

Now it’s not interesting anymore, because these high-rise buildings are all over the world now.  Then they were only here, and in Chicago.  So it was totally exciting and strange.  In Europe the biggest building was a church, a cathedral – that would be out of proportion, as the house of God – and the rest of the buildings had some relation to the people around them.  Now in Hong Kong thee are more skyscrapers than in New York.

The interview was conducted on November 26, 1990 in New York.