Question:
Could you tell me how it was that you began going to the Hofmann School?

Myrna Harrison:
I was up in Provincetown studying with Morris Davidson, who was one of the painters there and then I studied with Jack Tworkov and I had a lot of friends who were studying with Hofmann, and I knew about Hofmann and I liked the work and I was interested in what was happening. So I moved over to the Hofmann school. I was there for about 3 and a half to 4 years.

Question:
What in particular was more meaningful about the Hofmann school?

MH:
Well, the students were very interesting. And the best students were there, so that’s already a clue, when you’re interested, that this is where you want to be. You really want to be around the best young painters around. Where is it exciting to be? And the school was exciting; he had young painters, and I think, characteristically of an awful lot of painting schools, at least when I was young, you would look around and you’d think, these people are horribly old at, say, fifty! [Laughs] So, if you’re very young, you think, I’d like to be where the young people are, where something exciting is going on. The school had that kind of intellectual ferment, and intellectual intensity, aesthetic intensity and lots of young people, my age, talking about things and working. It just seemed to me like it was a much more exciting place to be than most schools are.

Question:
Was it because of what he taught or because of what he was?

MH:
I’d say both. I think one of the things that interested me the most about Hofmann was, it really was being in touch with someone who for whom painting was his life. He led a rich life, but obviously the core of that life was painting. That was also true of Jack Tworkov, but with Hofmann it was so intense, and that was something you learned there about painting and about the life of a painter: The kind of intensity that was required in order to be a really good painter. But then, of course, you learned a lot too. He brought the whole Cubist tradition, he brought modern art in- I think an awful lot of it had to do with sensing that you were part of a whole art tradition. He always made that very clear in class. When he taught, he would refer to earlier painters: he’d refer to Cezanne, he’d refer to Picasso, he’d refer to Matisse. He’d refer to Giotto, he’d refer to the whole history of art, and I think there you had this sense of being in this whole tradition of art that came through Europe and came to the United States.

Question:
This in spite of the fact that he taught for forty years- as far as you know, he was painting all the time?

MH:
Yes. I know that at the time that I was studying with him he was painting all the time, because he had a studio separate from the studio he taught his classes in, he had a studio that he did his painting in, and his writing, I gather. But I know he did his painting in it because it was over in the lumberyard. Several years later I lived over in the lumberyard- my husband and I both had studios there- at that point you knew that Hofmann went and he painted every morning from something like 5 or 6 in the morning until 9 or 10 when he would show up at the school. Then when he was finished with the critique, he would go back to the studio. We all knew was painting, and I was there in the 50s, and he was showing at that point. I think students who were there in the 30s and 40s, he was not showing that much, but by the 50s he was showing regularly at the Kootz Gallery, and he showed at the HCE Gallery in Provincetown. So we went and saw all of the paintings that he was doing, and it was very rich.

Question:
You were not there at the time when people were saying he was a great teacher but not much of a painter.

MH:
No, I was not there at that point. That would have been earlier. I began studying with Hofmann in 1953. At that point, he was already pretty well established as an artist. Now, I can remember that some of the critics at that point- I think it was Emily Genaur- who explained that she liked tasteful paintings tastefully painted and she didn’t like Hofmann. Well, anyone who liked “tasteful paintings tastefully painted” was clearly not going to like Hofmann, and she was the reviewer, I think, for the Herald Tribune at that point. So he was not accepted by a lot of the critics and reviewers of the newspapers. Someone referred to it as the “Drip and Drool School of painting,” but as students, we all looked at that and said, well they didn’t know what they were talking about anyway. WE understood, because we were Hofmann students.

Question:
You went on to both paint and teach. Did you teach art?

MH:
I taught art occasionally. I had been in college, I had dropped out. I had made up my mind that I would be a painter, and I studied with Hofmann, and I started to show, and when I decided that I was tired of working nightshifts at Western Union and waiting tables and doing all those things, I thought maybe getting a college degree would make it a little easier. I thought about going back in art, so I went back and when I talked to the various art faculties at Columbia and NYU and the various universities around New York, I was already showing with some of the people I would have been taking courses with, and I thought: this is not going do well for my academic career. So I did not go back in art. When I went to college, I went back for English; because I didn’t know anything, so I didn’t think I would get in trouble.

So when I taught, I primarily taught English. Occasionally I would teach a painting class. But I was not really teaching painting that much.

Question:
You became the president of three colleges. At these colleges, was Hofmann’s style of teaching done in the art departments?

MH:
No, not really. Arizona, by and large, skipped the modern art movement. It’s almost as though Cezanne through Hofmann just didn’t exist! They were doing Romantic paintings of the 1850s, and they’re still doing them, and it’s 2001! Much of the art that has been the basis in Arizona, like the Cowboy Artists of America, are a group of old illustrators. Then the illustration went out and they moved into doing this Western Scene, and it’s a terribly romanticized vision of the West, a terribly romanticized vision of cowboys. That life existed in the West for only about 20 years- you’d never know it from Hollywood movies. But it really was only a very short timespan in which there was that kind of a West. It’s deeply embedded in the American mythology. In art, it overwhelms almost all of the art in Arizona.

I know some young students from when I took a class in Chinese painting a year ago; they were painting abstractly, and everyone thought they were crazy. [Laughs] So there are some people doing that but it’s not the substance of what is happening in Arizona.

Question:
Hans Hofmann told some of his male students that if they wanted to be artists, they should marry a rich woman.

MH:
[Laughs}

Question:
Did he ever tell you the equivalent?

MH:
[Laughing] No, certainly not! That’s interesting, because he didn’t marry a rich woman. Maybe that was the joke – he might have wished he’d married a rich woman, and then he wouldn’t have had to teach, but he himself did not marry a rich woman.

No, he never said that to the women. I did marry one of the students from the Hofmann School, and he liked my work a lot when I came in.

He was very interested in my work, and I felt there was a change in his attitude toward me when I had married. I was no longer treated quite as seriously as I thought I had been treated prior to that. I think that was just the older tradition of the way men responded. He had a lot of young women students- I never felt that he discriminated against them in some active way, but I felt, personally, that once I was married there was a change in his attitude toward me; that he didn’t take me as seriously anymore.

When he did his mosaic mural, I think there were 4 or 5 people on that crew, but no woman was on the crew, and I don’t know of any women who was even asked. And I will add as a statement on myself: I don’t think it occurred to me at the time that perhaps I should have been. So I think that has to do also with how times have changed. It would be unfair to look back now and say, “Well, he should have done it,” but I think at the time, we all accepted the role as well. I certainly accepted roles in my 20s that I would not accept today.

Question:
Lee Krasner said that he never took the women as seriously as the men. On the other hand, he told Wolf Kahn that he thought the women who studied with him were far superior to the men. So I don’t know which is true.

MH:
Well, it may have been both. I think all of our attitudes, even today, are so conflicted- all of the attitudes we were raised with as women, and men bring with them all of their attitudes. I would agree in some ways with Lee Krasner that he didn’t take the women as seriously, although I always felt that he took my work pretty seriously. But then, when certain options came up, women weren’t considered for them.

I think in general, women tend to be the better students. It’s true in high school, it’s true in public school, it’s true in college. We have been raised to do things right. If someone tells us to do certain things, we do them. I think men are raised to be more obstreperous, and to be more assertive, and some of the male students fought him in ways that the women students never did, so I could imagine Hofmann saying something like the women were better students in the class- they were probably a lot easier to deal with in the class than the men were [Laughs}! They didn’t raise the issues, and I’m thinking of Jan Muller, for example, who left Hofmann, and Hofmann was very upset. He thought that Jan should not have left, and Jan thought we all should go back to figurative painting. It was a big issue during my time in Provincetown in the school.

Question:
Hofmann insisted that you had to paint from nature. You have some pretty spectacular nature here- is that why you came to Arizona?

MH:
I moved to Arizona for a job, but I chose this site. I was living in Phoenix and I was desperately looking for a place where I could paint on the weekends where I wouldn’t have to drive a long distance to get out to nature. I chose this house in part because of the scenery here. It is spectacular- I agree with you. I have my own canyon, and I look down and an awful lot of my work comes from that. I’m deeply moved by nature and by the desert. The desert particularly moves me, the ocean moves me. I do occasionally draw from the nude, if there’s a nude model, I’ll go and spend a day drawing from the nude. But I don’t do paintings of figures, and I realize that there are never any people in my paintings. Occasionally I have a little house in the painting, and I say, I wonder whether I dislike people that much [Laughs]? It’s not what moves me. When I go to paint something, I will always paint from nature. For myself, I would very much agree with Hofmann- if you don’t keep going back to nature, I think you eat up your own insides. It’s like a spider; you can only spin so much web out of your inside. It comes out of the inside, but there’s a limit to how much of that web is there, and you can run out of it. Even working abstractly, I’m much more comfortable if where I start from is a still life or a plant or a scene from nature. The drawings are usually fairly realistic, or at least they are to me; to people looking at them, they think they’re very abstract, but to me they’re very realistic. I work very clearly with the image in front of me, but sometimes, in the paintings, the work will become very abstract because I want to achieve certain kinds of spatial relationships. But I love working from nature. I just love the desert, and I love the ocean; I think of the desert as having been the ocean a couple of million years ago [Laughs]. It’s got that same kind of space- an infinite space.

Question:
When you paint, do you think about the viewer?

MH:
I do believe that you must get your work out there and have viewers. I think that otherwise, it’s an incomplete act. When I hear a painter say, ‘I only paint for myself and I only paint what makes me feel good,’ I think: No, painting is a communication. The process is unfinished if the work isn’t seen by other people. I want people, when they see my work, to understand what I feel about the desert. And to have that sense of it. I don’t paint to please someone, and I don’t paint to sell paintings, but I do paint because I would like to say something to someone about the desert. It is not nature, the mother of us all; it’s nature, red in tooth and claw.

You cannot live here without enormously adapting to it. The desert will not adapt to you. I want people to see that- the intensity of it and the dynamic quality of it, and the fierceness of it. It’s a very fierce landscape. It doesn’t even meet you halfway- just like the ocean. You can put your toes in, and splash around a little- but you can’t go any further.