I Only Want to Paint [2:46:41], a lengthy cache of documentary footage, was filmed for the documentary of the same title, and captures life in Tom Wesselmann’s studio in 1998. It straddles a fine line between documentary, oral history, and diary. In it, a skeleton filmmaking crew spends days in Wesselmann’s studio, watching attentively as Wesselmann and his studio staff make decisions over color, collage materials, and scale. Large pieces of art loom over the proceedings — a corner of a Great American Nude or a Smoker, perhaps — but Wesselmann himself is undoubtedly the star of the show.

After an artist passes, we can find various ways to reconstruct the ways they thought about their own work: oral histories are one tool, while archival records are another. But rarely are we afforded such an in-depth look into how an artist thought about their own work and legacy. In I Only Want to Paint, Wesselmann is as aware of the camera’s watchful eye as he is of his own answers. He tweaks his phrasing; he returns to questions on his artistic influences and reconsiders them hours later. He sometimes repeats entire segments, workshopping words, gestures, and interpretations of his works. The picture that emerges is of an intensely thoughtful, intentional artist, working within a finely honed studio ecosystem that allowed him to produce large- and small-scale works alike that often defied neat genre categorization. We will never be able to produce a new oral history with Tom Wesselmann, but to have access to this newly transcribed footage is a rare gift for artists, researchers, and scholars.

This is Part 2 of "I Only Want to Paint".

I Only Want to Paint [2:46:41], a lengthy cache of documentary footage, was filmed for the documentary of the same title, and captures life in Tom Wesselmann’s studio in 1998. It straddles a fine line between documentary, oral history, and diary. In it, a skeleton filmmaking crew spends days in Wesselmann’s studio, watching attentively as Wesselmann and his studio staff make decisions over color, collage materials, and scale. Large pieces of art loom over the proceedings — a corner of a Great American Nude or a Smoker, perhaps — but Wesselmann himself is undoubtedly the star of the show. 

After an artist passes, we can find various ways to reconstruct the ways they thought about their own work: oral histories are one tool, while archival records are another. But rarely are we afforded such an in-depth look into how an artist thought about their own work and legacy. In All I Want To Do, Wesselmann is as aware of the camera’s watchful eye as he is of his own answers. He tweaks his phrasing; he returns to questions on his artistic influences and reconsiders them hours later. He sometimes repeats entire segments, workshopping words, gestures, and interpretations of his works. The picture that emerges is of an intensely thoughtful, intentional artist, working within a finely honed studio ecosystem that allowed him to produce large- and small-scale works alike that often defied neat genre categorization. We will never be able to produce a new oral history with Tom Wesselmann, but to have access to this newly transcribed footage is a rare gift for artists, researchers, and scholars. 

Lippincott, Inc. was founded by Donald Lippincott in 1966 as a fabrication space specifically for artists producing large-scale sculptures, not industrial design projects. Eventually joined by his brother, Alfred, the Lippincott studio quickly gained renown for its collaborative, salon-like atmosphere; its attention to artists’ aesthetic and technical considerations; and its innovative methods for constructing large-scale sculptures. Lippincott, Inc. also offered artists the option of partnership pieces: a collaboration in which the fabricator covered up front costs and materials in exchange for l an ownership stake in the finished work. The Lippincotts worked with many 20th-century artists of note, including Claes Oldenburg, Donald Judd, George Sugarman, Louise Nevelson, and others. But Tom Wesselmann’s 3-D and sculptural works hold a special place in the studio’s history. From 1980 onward, the Lippincotts worked on over 600 individual jobs for Wesselmann, which would ultimately account for almost ⅙ of the studio’s total output. Donald and Alfred developed a fond, creatively fruitful working relationship with Wesselmann that lasted from 1980 until the end of his life. The oral history highlights the arc of their years working with Wesselmann, as well as specific projects, from Wesselmann and others, that represented turning points in their own studio practices. 

Jim Dine is an American artist active from the mid-1950s onward whose work defies neat categorization. An accomplished painter, printmaker, sculptor, and as of recently, poet, Dine is often closely associated with both the Pop Art and Neo-Expressionist movements. Along with Marcus Ratliff and Wesselmann, with assistance from Judson Church minister Bud Scott, he co-founded the Judson Gallery, an experimental art space that hosted exhibitions from all three co-founders as well as fellow artists like Claes Oldenburg and Allan Kaprow. Dine, like Wesselmann, also hails from Cincinnati, Ohio, where he first met Wesselmann as a young man. Highlights from his interview include candid reflection on Wesselmann’s shifting artistic phases and influences, memories of the Happenings, discussion of Wesselmann’s relationship with psychoanalysis, and an examination of Dine’s own artistic process. 

Susan Stedman is a curator, arts administrator and manager for artist’s estates. She has held positions at the Museum of Modern Art and the New York State Council of the Arts. She met Romare Bearden in the 1960s and was a friend—and fierce supporter of his work—until his passing. Highlights of her oral history include descriptions of Bearden and the artistic climate in the 1960s and 1970s, memories of meeting her husband, artist William “Bill” Majors, and recollections of the Spiral collective and the Cinque Gallery. 

Sheila Rohan is the youngest sister of Nanette Rohan Bearden and the sister-in-law of Romare Bearden. She was a principal dancer of the founding company of the Dance Theatre of Harlem. Later, she was a soloist and Ballet Mistress for the Nanette Bearden Contemporary Dance Theatre. Rohan was instrumental in the development of the Romare Bearden Foundation and serves on the board of directors. Highlights of her oral history include memories of her time dancing under Arthur Mitchell at the Dance Theatre of Harlem, recollections of visits to St. Maartens with Romare and Nanette, and a discussion of her and her sisters’ work to preserve Bearden’s artistic legacy.

Myron Schwartzman, Professor Emeritus of English at Baruch College, is the author of the biography Romare Bearden: His Life and Art (1990). Having befriended Bearden in 1977, Schwartzman conducted extensive interviews with the artist over the course of several years, deepening their relationship and informing his narrative. Highlights of the interview include depictions of Schwartzman’s visits to Bearden’s family home on St. Maarten and to Bearden’s birthplace of Charlotte, North Carolina; memories of spending time with Bearden and friends in the Long Island City studio; and discussions of the personal, artistic, and historical roots of Bearden’s oeuvre.

Jerald Melberg has owned and operated the Jerald Melberg Gallery in Charlotte, North Carolina for the past forty years. Prior to opening the gallery, Melberg was a curator at the Mint Museum where he curated the retrospective, Romare Bearden, 1970-1980. Having befriended Bearden while working on the exhibition, Melberg subsequently curated several exhibitions of his work at his gallery. Highlights from Melberg's oral history include anecdotes of his first meetings with Bearden, memories of challenges and triumphs while curating the major retrospective at the Mint, and reflections on Bearden's legacy today. 

KEYWORDS: Romare Bearden, Mint Museum, curation, Arne Ekstrom, retrospectives, gallerists, art dealers, Al Murray, collages, recordkeeping, Milton Bloch, collective memory 

This interview was conducted in French. Visit the Gonzalès Oral History webpage to download a French or English transcript.

Marie-Caroline Sainsaulieu is a French art historian specializing in late 19th-century and early 20th-century French painting. While working on the catalogue raisonné of Henri Manguin, she met Jacques de Mons, with whom she published a catalogue raisonné of Eva Gonzalès’s works in 1990. Sainsaulieu’s interview gives fascinating insight into her personal background with art and architecture that informs her research, as well as detailed historical context for Gonzalès’ life, works, and contemporary significance.

KEYWORDS: Eva Gonzalès, Théodore Géricault, Henri Manguin, Charles Joshua Chaplin, Édouard Manet, Jacques de Mons, Reims Cathedral, Berthe Morisot, French Impressionism, archival research, droit moral, catalogue raisonnés

Johanne Bryant-Reid is the current co-director of the Romare Bearden Foundation, as well as a serious art collector and dedicated philanthropist. While working as a Human Resources Executive at Merrill Lynch in New York, Bryant-Reid became immersed in New York’s art scene, often using art as a tool for philanthropic fundraising. She joined the Board of the RBF in 2002, and became co-director in 2009. Highlights of her oral history include her first meeting with Bearden, memories of the artists’ salons and social circles of the 1980s, and reflections on her own art collection.

KEYWORDS: Romare Bearden Foundation, collage, Russell Goings, Cordier & Ekstrom, Roy Crosse, art collectors, Norman Lewis, Merrill Lynch, artists’ estates, E.T. Williams, Grace Stanislaus, Diedra Harris-Kelley, artists’ archives, From Process to Print, Cinque Gallery

Allan Rubin and Candy Spilner were studio assistants to Tom Wesselmann between the late 1970s and early 2000s. Both accomplished artists in their own careers separate from Wesselmann, the two met at Cooper Union in 1969 and have been a couple ever since. Their interview delves into many different aspects of labor in a studio setting: balancing one’s own creative aspirations with the necessities of financing them, fabricating work for another artist, the place of ego within art, and maintaining boundaries between one’s own artistic practice and their employer’s, among others. Highlights include descriptions of daily studio life in the 1980s, detailed accounts of working in the various mediums Wesselmann experimented with over the course of his career, and memories of traveling to accompany and install international Wesselmann exhibitions.

KEYWORDS: studio assistants, Great American Nudes, Cooper Union, Janis Gallery, Green Gallery, Standing Still Lifes, Monica Serra, Jeffrey Sturges, printmaking, laser cuts, three-dimensional sculpture, recordkeeping practices, ledger books, Ivan Karp, Jacques Kaplan

André Thibault (Teabo) is a North Carolina-based artist who served as Romare Bearden’s studio assistant and collaborator from 1980 until Bearden’s passing in 1988. Highlights of his interview include memories of working hands-on in Bearden’s studio, the development of particular Bearden works, and Thibault’s own journey with his artistic practice.

KEYWORDS: Romare Bearden, artists’ studios, experimental art, collage, African-American art movements, Québec, Arne Ekstrom, Barrie Stavis, Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery, ACA Gallery, Canal Street, Myron Schwartzman

Sophie Renoir is the great-granddaughter of painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir and a contemporary scholar and advocate for his work. Following in the footsteps of her family’s cinematic traditions—her father, cinematographer Claude Renoir, and uncle, director Jean Renoir—she is an acclaimed French film and television actress. Highlights from her oral history include discussions of childhood memories from the Renoir family home in Essoyes, responsibilities of maintaining a family’s artistic legacy, and ways she connects personally with Renoir’s paintings today.

KEYWORDS: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Impressionism, Impressionist art, Claude Renoir, Jean Renoir, Pierre Renoir, Essoyes, art museums, droit moral, Renoir Committee, La vague, La loge, Eric Rohmer, digital art history, catalogue raisonnés, classic cinema

Paul Louis Durand-Ruel is the great-grandson of Paul Durand-Ruel, the art dealer of Pierre-Auguste Renoir and many other Impressionist legends. He has written and lectured on Paul Durand-Ruel’s important influence on the Impressionist movement, and co-edited the memoirs of Paul Durand-Ruel with his niece, Flavie. His oral history sheds light on the creative relationship between Renoir and Durand-Ruel and how an artist—and their dealer—might find ways to actively shape their future legacy during their living years.

KEYWORDS: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Durand-Ruel, art dealers, artistic legacies, Impressionist art, Impressionism, archives, art restoration, provenance, catalogue raisonnés, art galleries, forgeries, portraits

Evgenia Kuzmina is a researcher on the team compiling the forthcoming volume of the Paul Gauguin catalogue raisonné. She began working for the Wildenstein Plattner Institute’s Paris office in 2018. Originally from Russia, Kuzmina’s first encounters with the work of Paul Gauguin came in the galleries and archives of Moscow and St. Petersburg, lending her a unique perspective on the artist’s work. Highlights of the interview include discussions of various European art institutions and archives, the benefits and difficulties of conducting research with digital archival collections, and establishing a comprehensive chronology of Gauguin’s works.

KEYWORDS: Paul Gauguin, Tahitian period, provenance research, correspondence, archival collections, dossiers, catalogue raisonnés, digital archives, ZADIK, Thannhauser Archives, Gaston Lévy, Georges Chaudet, Pushkin Museum, Russian art movements

Sylvie Crussard is a Gauguin scholar and leading researcher for the forthcoming volume of the Paul Gauguin catalogue raisonné focused on the artist’s Breton years (1889-1891). Working on the Wildenstein Institute’s Claude Monet catalogue raisonné in the early 1970s was her first job in art history, and she has remained integral to the Institute’s research endeavors ever since. Highlights from her interview with WPI’s Executive Director Elizabeth Gorayeb include her memories of working on the Monet catalogue with researcher Rodolphe Walter, collaborating with Daniel Wildenstein and Douglas Cooper on the early volumes of the Gauguin catalogue, shifts in public perception of Gauguin’s work, and descriptions of her preferred research methods.

KEYWORDS: Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin, Wildenstein Institute, Daniel Wildenstein, Richard Brettell, Douglas Cooper, Rodolphe Walter, Victor Merlhes, Tahitian period, Breton period, Pont-Aven, experimental art, sketchbooks, catalogue raisonnés, provenance research

Françoise Marnoni is a researcher and Managing Editor for the forthcoming volume of the Paul Gauguin catalogue raisonné. She began working for the Wildenstein Institute’s Paris office in 2000 while researching the Pierre-Auguste Renoir catalogue raisonné, and later on, the catalogue raisonnés of Maurice de Vlaminck and Kees Van Dongen. Highlights of the interview include discussions of her research methods, the use of correspondence and digital archival collections as research tools, provenance in Gauguin’s Tahitian period, and the particular advantages of a digital catalogue raisonné.

KEYWORDS: Paul Gauguin, Tahitian period, provenance research, correspondence, Ambroise Vollard, Raymond Cogniat, Georges Chaudet, Georges-Daniel de Monfreid, Gaston Lévy, archival collections, dossiers, catalogue raisonnés

Roberta Bernstein is the author and project director of Jasper Johns: Catalogue Raisonné of Painting and Sculpture, including the catalogue’s comprehensive monograph, Jasper Johns’s Painting and Sculpture, 1954–2014: Redo an Eye. Bernstein has written and lectured extensively on Johns and other contemporary artists, including Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and Marisol Escobar. Bernstein is professor emeritus of art history at the University at Albany, State University of New York, and received her Ph.D. from Columbia University.  Highlights of the interview include discussions of Bernstein’s dissertation—the first art history dissertation on a living artist at Columbia University—on Johns, memories of early years working in Warhol and Johns’ studios, and reflections on the process of cataloguing and classifying a living artist’s works.

KEYWORDS: Jasper Johns, catalogue raisonné, John Cage, Theodore Reff, Columbia University, dissertations, art history, David Whitney, Merce Cunningham, Wildenstein Institute, Heidi Colsman-Freyberger, archives, Museum of Modern Art, Leo Castelli, art mediums, Fool’s House, Flag

Carroll Janis is the son of acclaimed gallerist Sidney Janis. He helped organize many of the Janis Gallery’s most significant shows of the twentieth century, and took over management of the gallery after his father’s passing in 1989. He maintained close connections with many Pop artists, including Tom Wesselmann, Claes Oldenburg, and James Rosenquist. Highlights of the interview include discussions of the gallery’s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop, detailed descriptions of the Janis Gallery’s operations, and thoughts on the art historical legacy of Wesselmann.

KEYWORDS: modernism, Tom Wesselmann, Abstract Expressionism, art market, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock, Hans Hofmann, Arshile Gorky, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Pop Art, Sidney Janis Gallery, Green Gallery, New Realists, erotic art, Great American Nudes

Monica Serra is a painter, multimedia artist, and singer/songwriter. She collaborated with Tom Wesselmann as a model, then joined Wesselmann’s studio as a studio assistant and went on to become the studio manager. Since Wesselmann’s death in 2004, she has been an integral part of the Estate of Tom Wesselmann, continuing to preserve and advocate for the works and legacy of the artist. Monica’s oral history examines her close working relationship with Wesselmann, the experience of viewing herself in his works, and themes of gender and representation.

KEYWORDS: modeling, drawing, gender, studio practice, nude portraiture, Tom Wesselmann, Henri Matisse, metal sculptures, Candy Spilner, Allan Rubin, country music, songwriting, art criticism, Smoker series, Great American Nudes