I was drafted in '45 and I was a sailor for a year. They didn't know what to do with me so they made a sort of photographer out of me.

Now almost every artist outside of New York is connected with some school or some museum school, and even in New York the majority are. That's an interesting fact when you take the idea of making money, making a living selling paintings. Only a dozen or two painters do that.

If some student came up and wanted to know where to study painting, you'd want to suggest someplace, but there's no place. I wouldn't know where to send a student to study.

I got out of Columbia and then into the American Abstract Artist group, which had almost all the abstract artists in the coutry in it, about 40 or 50.

I taught a lot of art history, especially Chinese, Japanese, and Indian. But the painting classes came back. The nudes came back. Not so much the still lifes. So now our department is the worst department, partly because it has the worst facilities.

I tried to oppose the academic to the marketplace.