Most
prominent in the studio are about a dozen of his own paintings, aquatints,
drawings, and etchings. Otherwise the
three-room space is dominated by a sizable, cross-handled press, and
notifications of various awards and honorary memberships in professional
organizations. Just inside the door is a
plaque from the National Society of Literature and the Arts. “This is to certify that Doel Reed is a
member of the society whose purposes are to recognize achievements in
literature, music, and the fine arts, and to improve the condition of the
creative arts in America.” On one table
is a stack of catalogs, the top one being the 59th National Print
Exhibition of the Society of American Graphic Artists, at Cooper Union in New
York late last year. One of his works
was prominently featured.
We
started our conversation pretty close to the beginning.
You were raised in Indiana, and I
read somewhere that your first exposure to art was at the Indianapolis
Museum. What is it that you saw there?
The
school used to take all the kids to the museum every so often. We went there, and went all around, and the
teacher would ask us to pick out one we liked best. I said I liked the one up there. Well, they had a great big painting up there
of some shipwrecked sailors and the mermaids in the water, and they’re reaching
out to get ahold of the mermaids, and they’re big, juicy German girls, nudes,
water running off their breasts (laughter). . . Hell, I thought it was a great
picture. I still think it was a good
picture! I was kind of ostracized after
that, I guess. It’s funny how people get
such strange ideas about nudes. I
thought, after all, women go and pay a lot of money to get their portrait
painted, and they go and buy a new dress, and then somebody comes and looks at
it the next year and says, “My goodness, she’s got on last year’s dress.” If she was painted in the nude, they wouldn’t
say that. She’d be in style forever.
You went to the Cincinnati Art
Academy. . .
That’s
where I really got interested in figure drawing, because it was a figure
school. That’s an old idea, from the
Munich School and clear on back to the Renaissance, that you learned to draw
the human figure. And by that you got a
great deal of knowledge. It’s one of the
most difficult things to do. I’ve got a
lot of respect for the figure – not as a pinup girl or something of that sort,
but great respect for beauty and form, line, all that sort of thing. Oh, we even had to do some anatomical things
of muscles, the sort of thing that artists have done from the very beginning.
I saw a program recently with Henry
Moore, and we tend to think of his abstract forms, but he said that his primary
interest has always been the human form, and he showed all these sketches he
had done of people in the tubes in England during the “blitz.”
I
think that so many of the younger artists don’t think that drawing is such an
important thing. Well, I don’t think their
things will be looked at 400 years from now.
We look at the old masters because they were great in terms of the
subject. Just like great music and great
books. Many of the young ones don’t
think that’s necessary any more. Well, I
suppose if you’re just going to pour some paint over the canvas and add a few
lines, it’s not necessary.
Did you start to see this kind of
disinterest in drawing when you were teaching at Oklahoma State
University? (He taught at the Oklahoma A
& M University, now Oklahoma State, for 35 years, retiring as Professor
Emeritus in 1959 when he moved to Taos.)
No. When I first went there, in ’24, I was the
first artist on the campus. I think I
must have been a curiosity. I’m sure I
was. But I’ll always be thankful to the
state of Oklahoma. No one ever told me
how to teach. They left the whole thing
up to me, and in all the time I was there I was never questioned. I turned out some darn good students, and I
developed myself. But there wasn’t any
art around there to be affected by. Nan
Sheets in Oklahoma City was a professional artist. She later became the director of the Oklahoma
Art Center. And Oscar Jacobson, who was
director of the art department at the University. We were about the only professional
artists. Boy, we had a bunch of amateurs! But we got together and formed an
association, kind of got things together, and now, by God, the place is full of
all kinds of artists and it’s quite vigorous.
But it was a long, hard row, I’ll tell you.
Let’s go back a little bit. From the Cincinnati Art Academy, you went
into the army and the First World War?
Yes,
I thought about going into the National Guard Engineers, but something told me
not to do that, even though I’d had a little experience in architecture. So I waited until my number came up and off I
went to war. The engineers went down to
an old turpentine camp in Mississippi and stayed there for the whole course of
the war. Boy, I was glad that I wasn’t
them. I was in Camp Taylor in Louisville
for one month before I was on the high seas on my way to France. Can you beat that? They were going to put me in the camouflage
department, and I didn’t know anything about that, and one day they called off
a list of names of men to go as replacements to the Fourth Division, and I
wasn’t on that list. Like damned fools,
this friend and I went over and said, “How’s come we didn’t get called?” The
officer looked at us like he thought we were crazy, and of course we were. He told us to find a couple of fellows that
didn’t want to go, and that wasn’t hard to do.
By George, the first thing you know, I was up in front. I ended up as an observer, sitting in front
of the line in a little hole somewhere.
That wasn’t too safe a place to be.
No,
it wasn’t, I remember that.
It seems that during both World Wars, a lot of
Americans who went to Europe went through something of an artistic awakening by
being exposed to that culture, the museums.
Did something of that nature happen to you?
Oh,
I wouldn’t take anything in the world for that experience. I have no regrets about it, though I was
badly gassed and still have trouble. I’m
down here getting antibiotics every so often for the scar tissue in my
lungs. I was in the hospital in Tours
for a total of about four months, and when I was able to get out I went to the
museum in Tours. They had moved some of
the things from the Louvre down there and I saw them. Tours is a very old city, and it has a very
old cathedral that we loved. We went to
church there, though we weren’t Catholic.
But that didn’t make any difference.
We loved being in that enormous cathedral.
Were you always interested in
architecture?
Oh
yes. When I was in high school I went
down and apprenticed myself to an architect because I thought I wanted to do
that. I did that for a while, and then I
just decided that wasn’t quite it, so I went to off to art school. Drawing and painting were interesting to me,
but the interest in architecture has been very beneficial to me. I used to tell my students, “ I swear I’m
going down to the lumberyard and have them send up a couple of window frames so
you can draw them and know that a window has dimensions other than just up and
down.” You draw better if you know how
something’s constructed. At Cincinnati I
studied with James R. Hopkins who gave me more ideas about the classical parts
of art than anybody else. The main idea
in those days was to discourage anyone they didn’t think had any ability. Get rid of them, there was no need their
wasting the time. One teacher once said
to a guy, “Young man, is there anything else you can do for a living?”
Have we entered a time when there
are too many school-taught artists, too many artists who should have found some
other way to make a living?
I
think people go to exhibitions and see a lot of modernist work and they say, “I
think I can do that too,” and the first thing you know they’re in the business
(laughter)! But if they had to go through the years of learning how to draw and
doing it over and over, composition and color. . . Well, they just wouldn’t do
that. And I think one of the faults has
been the universities. Teachers don’t
want to be classified as old-timers, so they push all the modern things. I knew a teacher who came into class with an
armload of books and he’d say, “Now we’re going to do Matisse or Picasso.” Well, you’re not developing anybody. The funny thing is they were imitating
Picasso, and the next week he was doing something else. If I’d asked one of my students in the early
years who Picasso was, he’d have said he ran a pizza parlor. They didn’t know who he was, and thank
goodness for that.
Were you showing your own work
while teaching in Oklahoma?
I
was showing in exhibitions in New York. (Pause) I think one of the mistakes so
many young people make is that they get so wrapped up in local shows. Local shows won’t get you to first base. I always told my students they could show in
local shows but I don’t think that’s important.
Try a big New York show, and if you get kicked out you can say I’ve been
kicked out of better shows than this.
And do it again and again. The
first thing you know you’re doing something they recognize and you’re in.
When did you begin printmaking?
Oh,
I guess when I was in Cincinnati I did a few things. I was a member of the old Cincinnati Men’s
Art Club and they had a big etching press and I did a little plate to announce
Martha Jane’s (Reed’s daughter) birth. I
did several things there, and then when we went to Oklahoma I got the
department to buy a press, and many of my early things were done on that. Later on, several of the engineering students
built this press (the press in Reed’s studio).
They made the rollers out of a drill stamp for an oil well, they put an
axle through it and welded it in there.
I did a special plate for the Museum of New Mexico for their 50th
anniversary, and I was printing the thing, and I twisted the whole center out
of the dern roller. I was just sick
about it. I heard about this man, Werner
Schultz, and was told I could find him any day after 5 at the Sleeping Boy (a
legendary Taos watering hole). He’d
received his training in Germany where the first problem they give a machinist
is a block and a file, and you make a ball bearing out of it. (Laughs) I thought that was pretty good. He came out and looked at this thing, took it
all apart, and he said “I can make a new roller easier than I can fix this
one.” I said, “Fine, let me know when
you’re finished.” He said, “I don’t have
to do that. You come up to the Sleeping
Boy tomorrow and I’ll have it ready and we’ll put it together.” And he did it, all out of one piece of
steel. It fit together like a glove.
I’ve used that press, I guess, 40 years.
It’s not a big press, but it’s not a mural medium. I don’t know what they want those great big
presses for.
One of the most distinctive things
about your work is the mood. Each one
has its own mood, many of them are black.
I’ll
tell you. Years ago, I used to go
outdoors and paint. I found that not
only are you fighting the wind, the bugs, and the snakes, but you find yourself
matching the blue of the sky, somethin’ over here, somethin’ there. So I quit that, and I go out and make a
drawing, I look around and I finally find something that I think will have
possibilities for a painting or a print, or maybe just as a drawing. Then I organize the thing as I go. And I try to think about the things that
caused this landscape, the upheaval, the volcanoes. The adobe buildings which are really part of
the earth. I try to get that sort of
mood. I like to think about mountains
geologically rather than in terms of vegetation. Many times I’ve been out sketching and seen a
little procession moving through the fields, carrying a little statue of San
Ysidro, blessing the fields and so on, and I think I kinda like that. Those are the people of the earth
themselves. They farm the earth, they
know the earth. If someone doesn’t bless
it, we don’t have rain and sunshine, we’re all lost.
So there’s a sense of history to
your work, too, of how things came about rather than just how they are.
Uh-huh.
But there is that dark mood, the
crosses, the campo santos. . .
Well,
you know, I’ll bet you that the artists back in New York and people who go and
visit the shows must wonder about me.
Maybe they think I’m a Catholic priest or a penitente. But after all,
this is a Catholic country. The cross is
everywhere. It’s part of the country,
and I want to get that feeling. I’m not
morbid about the country, I love it.
It’s part of the design, and the cross makes an interesting design
patter itself. 
But there is the feeling that you
live here and you’re affected by it as well.
Yes,
I want to feel a part of it. I did a
special plate for the Society of American Graphic Artists in New York, and I
got the nicest letter from a man who had seen it and he said, “You know, in
Virginia we have no earthly idea about a landscape like this.” Well, I did the thing down in Pilar along the
river with those big headrocks up there, all that volcanic rock, and that sort
of thing. (Pause) So I’m sure they
wonder whether I make up this landscape or not, but I don’t. It’s here.
As opposed to this feeling of moody
desolation, there is this painting here, An Afternoon in
Summer, which looks almost like “New
Mexico Gauguin”. There is a sense of freshness and sensuality
in it. Do you like that one?
(Smiling) Yes.
It’s one of my favorite paintings.
And Rod Goebel bought it. That’s
pretty good when a fellow artist buys one of your paintings, isn’t it?
Is there a story behind that
painting? Or a story in it?
Well,
no. It’s just one of those idealistic
things that I like to do.
Idealistic?
Well,
I suppose so, after all. . . (Pause) John Stebbins. Did you know John Stebbins? He lived up the canyon here. He used to be a photographer for Time magazine for years. He and his wife and I, we used to meet at La
Dona Luz for lunch, had the greatest time.
And she’d say, “Now, Doel, do you actually see these women around out at
your place?” And I’d say, “Why,
yes. Haven’t you ever seen them? They’re everyplace!” (Much laughter) And she would get so upset. She wouldn’t come to the studio if there was
a nude on the wall. We’d have to turn it
to the wall. (More laughter) We used to
have a lot of fun.
Do you think it’s important to draw
from a model?
Oh
yes! Yeah. I can draw very well without it. . . You need
. . . I think drawing has to be anatomically correct. I don’t object to El Greco making the legs a
little longer or the arms a little longer.
They were still anatomically correct.
The joints were in all the right places.
How much are you working now?
Well,
not too much. I’ve had these two eye
operations, and I’m not doing too much.
I’m doing some caseins. I’m still
doing some printing. I do that all
right, but I just can’t get down to doing a fine line. But those two caseins over there I’ve done
this year.
To change the subject back to your
subject matter, just looking around your studio here it looks like the
predominant subject you’ve worked with has been the female form.
I think so.
It’s an obvious question, but why
do you paint so many nudes?
Oh,
I love to paint nudes. It’s a
challenge. They should always have a
classical look that removes it from being personal. That’s important. And all of those that the great masters did
were certainly not personal at all. The
great Titians, even Reubens. All those
big Flemish girls . . . I don’t know how they’d get along here. They’d probably have to go jogging to get rid
of all that . . . (Laughter) I thought it was one of the funniest things, all
these style ads in the New York papers, and the magazines. They got the skinniest, boniest women, their
cheeks are all fallen in, and the eyes are dull, and they’re built like an
ironing board! Men don’t like women like
that!
It’s funny what you said about the
dress going out of style. In nudes a
certain body type has been going out of style.
It’s
certainly gone out of style in this case all right. But when you look at all the things from the
early Greeks on up through the Renaissance and up through the Flemish painting,
even the 19th century American painting, they were full-blown
women! There is a certain beauty about
them. (Pause) Well, I guess that’s the
way I think about it. I don’t know . . .
I, ah, . . . (Phone rings and Reed answers.
Pause.)
Has your taste changed much over
the years? Do you still like the same
things you used to like?
I
think I like pretty much the same things.
I go to the exhibitions and find things I like. But I don’t want to be influenced by it. I try not to be influenced by anything but my
own thinking. Well, I don’t know,
sometimes I think I ought to sign my name up along with Mozart’s and
Beethoven’s and people like that because I like that too, which I think has the
same sort of thing I’m doing. . .
Real harmony . . .
Yeah.
And that attitude carries over to
your own view of art? That it should be
an expression of joy, of humor, of harmony, rather than . . .
Sure. Yes.
You know I think so many times that these younger painters, who want to
be abstractionists – I have nothing against abstract painting. I’ve been on juries at times and I’ve given
awards to good abstract painting. But if
they want to get good examples of fine abstract composition, they should look
at the old masters, because that’s what they start with. They start with great masses on their canvas,
and then they had a theme which they developed within these masses. But that big pattern is far superior to most
of the abstract painting today.
A change that seems to have
occurred in art, in the last, oh, 20 years, is that the personality of the
artist, in many cases, has become at least as important as the work that he
does. Certainly in terms of sales.
Oh
yes. I know it. I know it is.
(Pause) The year before last I got a letter from the organization up in
Denver that said they were inviting 62 American artists to this particular
show, and I was one of ‘em. Well, I
thought, that’s pretty nice. So I sent
up a few things. (Pause) Well, I guess I
was kinda stupid . . . for one thing. I
didn’t realize it was one of those big moneymaking affairs. It was run by the . . .
Denver Rotary Club. Artists of America show.
Yeah. And I sent up a few things. And I had a moderate price on the
things. That’s where I think I made my
mistake. You can’t sell anything in a
show like that for $4,000. You have to
have $60,000 to $80,000 on it. And the
one thing that sold for $225,000 was a landscape done in a canyon. . . Well,
I’ve been in this business long enough to know when a thing is painted from a
photograph! And this was painted from a
photograph. I know it was because here
in the foreground were some little rocks about the size of a grapefruit, with
some careful shadowing. No artist would
be interested in those little rocks with a shadow cast when you’ve got a great
canyon here and this sort of thing! They
were in the photograph so he put ‘em in there!
(Shaking his head. To himself. .
.) $225,000. . . good grief. . .Now if
I’d known that I coulda tacked on a couple of more zeroes . . . (Laughter) I’m
a little conscientious about things like that, I suppose. (Chuckling) I think that’s highway robbery.
So those paintings were overpriced
rather than yours being underpriced.
I’m
afraid so. (Pause) Well, I’m sure there
were good paintings in there. But the
man who did one for $225,000, I saw one of his paintings down here at the
Gaspard House and, gosh, it wasn’t a painting at all. It was just a little tinted thing on canvas. It didn’t have any painting qualities at
all. I think a painting, and all the
great works I know, had paint on the canvas.
And they were able to manipulate it in the right way. It’s not just a matter of tinting a drawing,
that sort of thing. I’ll bet poor Mr.
Gaspard about turned over in his grave.
(Laughter)
Did you know Gaspard?
Oh
yes, quite well. I loved that ol’
boy. And he used to like for me to come
over and talk, because he wanted to talk about certain American artists. But, you know, he was a little
difficult. He’d go out and bring in a
couple of glasses about the size of a jelly glass and a bottle of vodka, a
bottle of vermouth, and a bottle of red wine.
No ice. He’d pour that glass just
about full with vodka, 4 or 5 drops of red wine to make it pink, ‘cause he
loved pink. (Laughter) And he’d get mad at you if you didn’t drink
two of ‘em. Boy, you’d be practically horizontal. (Laughter)
And he used to invite us out there in the summertime on Sunday for
dinner. And he was a good cook. We went out there one time and Mrs. Fechin
was there. I don’t know if the Fechins
and the Gaspards got along too well or not, but Mrs. Fechin, when Gaspard
brought out the vodka, she said, “Vodka is for peasants.” (Laughter) The Russians didn’t drink vodka,
they drank the best French brandies.
They wouldn’t drink that old stuff. Some friends of ours went to Russia
and said the vodka tasted terrible.
(Laughter)
Who were some of the other early
Taos artists that you were close to?
I
knew Blumenschein. He was a
character. I knew Berninghaus. I thought he was one of the best artists
here. And he was an absolute gentleman
from the word go. A fine man, I liked
him very much. Blumenschein – oh, he was
a funny one. You know, he used to be a
baseball player. He used to go on the
narrow gauge railroad and go over to Tres Piedras to play baseball. And he was a tennis player. I guess he could do most anything. And a bridge player. He was so good they wouldn’t let him play,
they wouldn’t let him stay in the room even.
(We
repair to the adjoining workroom where there is a bucket of ice, bottles of
tonic water, gin, bourbon, sherry, Courvoisier.
He begins by showing us older aquatints and describing the settings and
circumstances of them as we drink.)
This one I call Wedding Preparations because the girl was getting married.
Yeah, she’s cutting her toenails I
see.
Yeah,
she’s getting all ready for him. The
model was from Boston. Her name was
Murphy.
What did your father do, if I may
ask?
My
father was a commercial traveler. He was
a real gentleman, and I think I learned more about how to behave myself from
him, just from watching him. When I got
home from the war he had a lot of extra time and the YMCA was advertising for
secretaries. He’d been a seller all his
life, so he knew he could do that sort of thing. So he went down to Indianapolis and they
said, “Mr. Reed, we think you’ll do just fine.
And by the way, are you a praying man?”
My father said, “Hell no!” (Much laughter) He said, “I thought you
fellows could do that and that I was going to do the work.” (More laughter) So he didn’t get the job.
I spent a little time with Andrew
Dasburg just before he died. He would
drive his car around the house and park along the fence looking out across at
Llano, and sit there in the front seat of his car all afternoon just using a
straight edge and a pencil to define the landscape that is Llano Quemado. It was an inspiration to watch him work. He was then in his 90s, still every day. . .
Did
you ever see him drive his car?
No.
Coming
down here he was turning into his place, so he turned way out on the left hand
side of the road to turn, and he got hit by another car. And he was so mad that the State Patrol
didn’t know that you had to do that.
(Laughing) You had to turn out like that to get in the drive.
Did you visit with Mr. Dasburg
much?
No,
I didn’t. I’d seen him in a gallery
someplace.
I thought maybe living right down
the road, as you do, you might have . . .
I’m
afraid that we were as far apart as the North and South Poles. (He continue rummaging through prints) Ah,
there she is! (Pulls out print of nude)
That was published in a British publication as one of the finest prints of the
year, in 1938. It’s called Fertility. (Pause) She was a beautiful woman with red
hair. I love red hair. Just the kind of woman, as Thomas Hart Benton
said of one of his models, “The kind of woman that causes a man to go around
all day mumbling to himself.” (Laughter)
I met Benton one time. He was quite a
guy. It was at an exhibition and
reception and I didn’t have much of a chance to talk to him. I saw him down the line a little ways and he
yelled at me, “Hey! Are you the guy who
does those swell aquatints?” I thought
that was kinda nice.
Thom
Collins, Stephen Parks, June 1983
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