Dr. Nathaniel Halper Provincetown Arts Leader
Joyce Scholar and Gallerist
By: Charles Giuliano - Aug 29, 2024
Ellen O’Donnell, then director of the Provincetown Art Association, was in high season when I arrived for interviews. She was too busy to talk at that time, but introduced me to Nat Halper who proved to be my first contact. We met at PAAM in the main gallery and sat on a bench. For its day he ran Provincetown's most renowned gallery HCE named for a line "Here Comes Everybody" in Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce.
He died at 75 in 1983. What follows is an excerpt from the New York Times obituary.
”Dr. Nathan Halper, a writer and authority on James Joyce, died June 26… He was 75 years old and lived in Provincetown, Mass., and Manhattan.
“Dr. Halper wrote for many publications that specialized in Joyce and was a contributor and advisory editor of The James Joyce Quarterly, published by the University of Oklahoma. He also contributed to such magazines as Partisan Review, Commentary and the Nation. His most recent work, ‘Studies in Joyce,’ is scheduled to be published this fall by University Microfilms International of Ann Arbor, Mich.
“Dr. Halper was co-chairman of the Second Provincetown James Joyce Symposium, held last month under the sponsorship of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum and several Joyce organizations.
“He was born in Manhattan and graduated from Columbia University, where he also received his doctoral degree.”
Nathan Halper I’m one of the trustees here. I’m the one who has known the affairs of PAAM and this town longer than anyone. I’m the antiquarian and have had my finger in the pie. I still do to some degree. I used to have a gallery here (HCE) for 15 years.
Charles Giuliano What can you tell me about Karl Knaths (1891-1971)?
NH There is an artist, Ross Moffett, who painted a portrait of Knaths when he first came here somewhere between 1915-1919. Ross Moffett was more or less his age. The picture depicted him as an apple cheeked boy from Wisconsin. The painting may be owned by Moffett’s daughter who lives on The Cape. We’ve been trying to get her to give it to us.
There was a small Knaths show of mostly drawings and monotypes at Barbara Fiedler Gallery which is opposite the Phillips Museum. I sent a small self portrait that I own and asked her to loan her portrait. So both were shown.
CG What do you own of Knaths.
NH I have a late, 1967 self portrait. It’s much wilder than his usual work. Although you can see the grid the color is much more Fauvist and the drawing is Expressionist. It’s wild.
CG What do you know about the grid. Usually there is a center point then radiating lines.
NH I’m not an artist so what I have heard is second hand. I’ve seen paintings he’s done in different forms. At some point he got a theory of design and color based on the Golden Section. He mixed color in clam shells. You can see the clam shells in the self portrait I have. He mixed small quantities of paint and put one at each intersection, just a little drop. He then determined the color scheme. There would be some form of progression or design. They didn’t usually go far from each other which is why the paintings often look soft and pastel like.
CG The late paintings are different. There’s less detail and they’re flatter. When did you meet him?
NH When I first came there were the Weinrich sisters. The older one, Agnes, was a very good painter. As an artist, at the time, she was more advanced than Knaths. They had been to Europe and of the artists here at the time they knew more about the outside world. Karl was learning things from her. Everyone speculated that he would marry her but he ended up with Helen a pianist.
Agnes was strong minded where Helen was a bit of an invalid. She lived to be more than a hundred and was at the time Provincetown’s oldest citizen.
In those early years Knaths was a rebel. He teamed with Ross Moffett (1888-1971) and Edwin Dickenson (1898-1978). In the 1920s they were the town’s leading rebels. Earlier the town was full of academicians. Charles Hawthorne (1872-1830) was considered to be a rebel within the academicians. The National Arts Club (Gramercy Park, New York, of which I am a long standing member) considered him to be as wild as you can get. He had the concept of painting in color. When Hans Hofmann (1880-1976) arrived he very much admired Hawthorne’s paintings. There are writings that document that. So when new artists painted in a manner inspired by the Armory Show (Knaths) locally they were considered to be terrible. There were enough of them that there were big fights in the Art Association and it evolved into having two juries for exhibitions. Sometimes that resulted in having two different shows. That meant a modern show and traditional one. The modern show would have artists like Knaths and Dickenson.
CG Weren’t some of the early modern shows organized by Knaths and Weinrich?
NH If you look through the early catalogues you will seem one or the other of them on the jury.
CG So they were part of the new art scene.
NH That makes it sound more earth shattering than it was. It was just a tempest in a tea pot. They were chosen as jurors so often that they became the old guard. That changed in the 1940s when, as a group, the abstract expressionists came here. Some came during the war.
CG When did Hans Hofmann come?
NH He was here in the 1930s. He had a studio in Day’s Lumber Yard (now the Fine Arts Work Center). His school was where Hawthorne’s originally was. He and his students were regarded as lunatics by the locals. An artist told me that when he first came he didn’t have the courage to say that he studied with Hofmann because people would think that he was nuts. Hofmann didn’t come into his own until after the war. The GI Bill sent students to him from all over the country. His winter school was on 8th Street. He bought the large house of Frederick Waugh. He lived there and used the studio for teaching. He himself painted where the Fine Arts Work Center now is. I don’t know if Knaths approved of him. The colors were so violent.
CG In the Knaths files of Archives of American Art there are transcripts of several Hofmann lectures.
NH There are lots of things floating about. Reggie Cabral bought things from the Knaths estate. That included a trunk full of things. I saw a couple of notebooks where he listed what he considered to be the good painters.
Reggie Cabral owns the A House. He became interested in art when he married a painter. Of native Portuguese heritage he became interested in the history of this art and acquired whatever documentation he could. You never know what kind of a mood he’s in. He may show you the Knaths material.
(Cabral played cat and mouse then blew off an appointment to see his collection. Arguing that he knew more about art than I did he said “Jackson Pollock drank at my bar.”)
CG Does he still have the Knaths material?
NH I know he does but probably hasn’t looked at all of it. Much of the material included unframed drawings (Torn from notebooks by bank executor Ken Demaris.) He showed me a notebook of great artists with Knaths’ name attached. It may have been an afterthought by Knaths who considered himself in their tradition. John Marin was one but none of the abstract expressionists were included.
CG What did the abstract expressionists think of him?
NH Take someone like Adolph Gottlieb. He started as a traditional painter and respected technique. He knew his business like you might say about a carpenter. They considered Knaths to be old fashioned. More recently I heard Motherwell sniff about “those grids.” They felt that they had freedom that guys like Knaths did not. That he was too confined by theory. One of the older artists who they all respected was Milton Avery. They felt that he was the best of two worlds. He worked their way although there were scenes with one mass of color against another mass of color. The abstract expressionists didn’t want anyone else in their galleries. But they would tell the gallerists to “Get Milton Avery, we’ll show with him.”
One night Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler, David Smith and Kenneth Noland came into my gallery and said “We want to see the Avery pictures.” Frankenthaler said “Tell Mrs. Avery that she can have any picture of mine for this painting.” She was full of arrogance but Sally Avery responded “nothing doing.” The wives are generally more arrogant than the artists, particularly the widows.
CG What do you know about the Knaths estate?
NH When he died Helen was still alive and I don’t know if he had organized his estate. Several years before he died he was asking me what had been done with the Milton Avery estate. There had been all kinds of problems with the Avery estate. Helen was not an active person and he couldn’t leave it in her charge. I got the impression that he anticipated being deceased fairly soon. So he made an arrangement with the bank that they would take the estate when he died. The First National Bank, later Shawmut, became the trustees under the vice president Ken Demaris. They wanted to get rid of the paintings which they regarded as a damn nuisance and something they knew nothing about.
CG How many works were there?
NH They had some works from the studio and more things came back from the Rosenberg Gallery. Bob Brown from the Boston branch of Archives of American Art came to me to make tapes. At one point he was late and apologized saying “I was in Orleans looking into the Karl Knaths estate.” I asked if they had anything left. He said “Yes, some monotypes.” Mervin Jules, the retired head of the art department of City College, and I went to see what they had. We bought one painting, the “Self Portrait” as well as all the monotypes, one water color and 13 or 14 drawings. We became partners though I hadn’t been in the art business for years.
CG Do you still have that material?
NH A lot although we sold a couple of monotypes. There were other paintings and a man from Providence (Ed Shein) bought a number. He was a dealer without a gallery. He had clients and knew or advised on what they were looking for. He bought about 45 paintings, sold them, and then went back for more. He bought what was left so perhaps a hundred paintings. Jean Young had come and gotten a bit of everything. I think there were Weinrichs in the estate which they inherited from Agnes.
Right now we’re looking for Weinrichs because the Smithsonian is going to have a show of Provincetown woodblock White Line prints in August, 1983. It will open here then travel with a catalogue. So we’re looking for Weinrichs.(Bror Julius Olsson Nordfeldt (1878 – April 21) developed a technique for creating multi-colored prints entailing a single block. The designs were hand inked leaving a white line. This approach was adapted by a number of Provincetown artists.)
CG Are they hard to find?
NH Yes compared to Blanche Lazzell who was one of many women artists here. I think we can find six to ten prints by Weinrich. Jim Young acquired a wonderful Weinrich painting which hung in Knaths’ home. The Youngs had a show at Everson Museum.
(Karl Knaths 1891-1971: Works on Paper 1919-1930, Forward by Ronald Kuchta, catalogue and text by Jean Young and Jim Young, illustrated, unpaginated, Everson Museum of Art, Woodstock Publishers, 1982.)
That exhibition of some 150 works on paper was offered to Bard College. It was expanded with 22 paintings, 86 works on paper and six of the artist charts. The Bard curator, Linda Weintraub included illustrations of manuscripts and transcribed texts from his theoretical treatise Ornament and Glory.
(Ornament & Glory, Theme and Theory in the work of Karl Knaths curated by Jean Young and Jim Young, Edith C Blum Art Institute, Milton and Sally Avery Center for the Arts, Bard College Center, Allendale on Hudson, New York. October 9 to November 21, 1982, 72 pages, illustrated, published by Bard College, 1982)
Ron Kuchta (1935-2020) had been curator for the Chrysler Museum here so he showed Provinctown artists at Everson.
(He curated a major show and catalogue for Everson. Provincetown Painters: 1890s to 1970s Everson Museum of Art, April 1 to June 26, 1977. He stated in part that “…This exhibition pays tribute to Provincetown on its 250th anniversary as a town (it was incorporated in 1777 before which it was a part of Truro, its immediate neighbor to the south , today a much smaller community). “Provincetown Painters ” consists of the works of many artists; some nationally known; Charles Hawthorne, Milton Avery, Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth, Stuart Davis, Childe Hassam, Ernest Lawson, Ben Shahn, Raphael Soyer, Niles Spencer, William Zorach , Frederick Waugh, Chaim Gross, Karl Knaths, Edwin Dickenson , Hans Hoffman, Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottleib, Franz Kline, Red Grooms, etc.
“Others best known locally, who may deserve to be better known; Ambrose Webster, Mary Cecil Allen , Gerrit Beneker, Oliver Chaffee, Reeves Euler, Henry Hensche, Charles Heinz, Bruce McKain , Phil Malicoat, Blanche Lazzell, Gerrit Hondius, William Freed, Lilian Orlowsky, Nanno De Groot , Arthur Cohen, etc.; and a few anonymous ship painters completely unknown. Some of these artists have spent only a few summers in Provincetown, Childe Hassam, Marsden Hartley, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, etc.
“Others have spent their entire mature lives summer and winter in Provincetown; Henry Hensche, Karl Knaths, Bruce McKain, Phil Malicoat, Reeves Euler, Jim Forsberg , Sal Del Deo, Myron Stout, etc.
“Some spent practically all their summers for many years in the Provincetown area; Charles Hawthorne, Edward Hopper, Frederick Waugh , Hans Hofmann, Robert Motherwell, Jack Tworkov, William Freed , Lila Katzen, Alvin Ross, Fritz Bultman, etc.
“And artists came and settled from all over America, Europe and Japan; Hans Hofmann
from Germany, Reeves Euler from Nevada, Edward Corbett from California, Bruce McKain from Indiana, Fritz Bultman from Louisiana, Nanno De Groot from Holland, Xavier Gonzalez from Spain, Taro Yamamoto from Japan, Peter Hutchinson from England, and Nassos Daphnis from Greece.”
We thought everything was cleaned out except for a few watercolors and seven or eight paintings. There were a couple of trunks filled with stuff. We should have taken a shot at them. Reggie Cabral came and bought three oils as well as the trunks which he hasn’t gone through yet. We had a Dickenson show and Shein bought a painting for the biggest price of anything we have sold.
CG There seems to be a lot of work around. Was Knaths prolific?
NH He painted for 50 years. The works were returned by his gallery.
CG Would they have been better off with Rosenberg?
NH Not really. Knahs was in decline and the gallery was making few if any sales. The estate was selling paintings for a couple thousand dollars. Judging from what they sold to Shein nothing went for more than $5,000. I’m sure that Shein asked for higher prices.
There were periods when he sold well for good prices, in the late 20’s and early 30’s. He won a major prize in a show at the Metropolitan Museum for a painting of “Lilacs.” He had a period of being hot and again in the 1950s. But in those days prices were low. I sold an Avery for $3,500 and today it would sell for $350,000. Any Avery which I had back then would sell today for 20 to 100 times what we had asked. Even the small print in the PAAM show which is $2,000 I originally sold for $25. I remember a small Motherwell for $90 that nobody bought.
CG Do you have any of that work?
NH It was on consignment. I did buy and have a few Averys.
CG How important was Knaths in the overall scene?
NH He was regarded as one of the Old Masters. He read a lot of mystical stuff (Swedenborg) and would write it out in his notebooks. He was interested in James Joyce.
He would see in it the infinite and sublime.
When I first came here in the 1930s I got on the WPA Writer’s Project. Provinctown was probably the only place in the country that had a joint union of artists and writers. Almost out of necessity they got together. I was secretary and Knaths was one of the members so we met that way.
We were on social terms and a couple of times he came to the house with his wife. We wanted to reciprocate and 5 PM seemed like the right time but it was embarrassing as we caught them in the middle of their supper. Apparently, that was the usual thing for them. He got up early and would paint then take a walk. He wore a white sweat shirt and hat. A lot of the drawings and some of the paintings depict a walking figure.
CG Did you have conversations?
NH Yes but I kept away from that as my conversation was realistic with practical concerns. His would always be about some damned principal of other. His talk tended to be theoretical, although like many painters, he had practical skills. He built their house for instance.
CG Did he have students?
NH Near where he lived was an old lady Ferol Warthen now in her 90s. She and her friend Angie Myrer, who is now dead, studied with him. Ferol had some of his water colors. They were with him a lot. There were several young artists but they have drifted off. Jim Fosberg, who ran the art store, spent a lot of time with him.
In any artists organization you have discussions about quantity vs. quality. They are all in the same boat but somebody is bound to say “I’m only interested in good painting.” The question always is who is going to decide that? So there are always going to be fights and arguments and that hasn’t changed. Knaths resigned from PAAM at least a half dozen times. A couple of years later he would say “we’re all painters” and come back. It went back and forth all the time.
CG Did you hear him lecture?
NH In 1949 there was Weldon Kees, a poet and jack of all trades. He was a painter, poet, musician who was into everything. He was an advisor to New Directions the publishing house. He wrote for the Partisan Review. He was associated with the abstract expressionists. He, Adolph Gottlieb and Gottlieb’s cousin, the poet Cecil Hemley organized something called Forum ’49. Hemley’s father-in law, an art dealer, bought a garage (that became Gallery 200). They organized panels and lectures every Thursday evening and a number of important people participated. Francis Biddle, the Solicitor General, spoke. Gottlieb and Motherwell spoke as did Knaths. There are no transcripts of the talks but posters exist that list the events and participants.
CG Do you recall what he said?
NH In my terms I have always found Knaths to be vague. His paintings had grids but if you asked him about them he would give you a lot of vague stuff about the Golden Section.
(Knaths used geometry to compose his paintings. They were derived from diagrams in The Elements of Dynamic Symmetry, by Jay Hambridge. His The Diagonal was copyright 1919 and published by Yale University Press in 1920. The system was widely influential. The artist and Harvard Professor Denman Ross taught it to his protégées, Hyman Bloom and Jack Levine. It had no lasting influence on Levine who told me that “It was just something he taught us.” There are examples of those exercises in the collection of the Fogg Art Museum.)
CG His responses then were poetic?
NH Yes, but with what I would call “pseudo precision” like a lot of mystics will give you.
CG It was well worked out in this mind.
Karl Knaths circa 1919 by Ross Moffett
CG It was well worked out in this mind.
NH Or stuff like the Pyramids of Egypt. How they could tell you all kinds of things about the world. They have it all worked out mathematically, If you don’t see it that way it seems like a dream world.
(No doubt Halper is referring to the 19th century work of Charles Piazzi Smyth who with John Taylor theorized in 1859 that the Great Pyramid was built by the biblical Noah. Smyth went on an expedition to Egypt in order accurately to measure every surface, dimension, and aspect of the Great Pyramid. He measured the dimensions of the stones, the precise angle of sections such as the descending passage, and photographed both the interior and exterior of the pyramid. He made astronomical calculations and determined the pyramid’s accurate latitude and longitude.
Smyth claimed that the measurements from the Great Pyramid indicated a unit of length, the pyramid inch, equivalent to 1.001 British inches that could have been the standard of measurement by the pyramid’s architects.
He found the number of inches in the perimeter of the base equaled one hundred times the number of days in a year, and found a numeric relationship between the height of the pyramid in inches to the distance from Earth to the Sun, measured in statute miles. He also advanced the theory that the Great Pyramid was a repository of prophecies which could be revealed by detailed measurements of the structure. He conjectured that the Hyksos were the Hebrew people, and that they built the Great Pyramid under the leadership of Melchizedek. While his theories were debunked Egyptologists do not dispute the accuracy of his measurements.)
CG In his manuscripts and writings there are a number of signs, figures and symbols. Is there someone who might explain them to me?
NH You will find people but not doubt they will be talking in the same way that he did. If Reggie Cabral lets you look at the notebooks you will find things. In his notebooks, for instance, he listed the great paintings, five from antiquity and five from the contemporary scene. That would give you a sense of what he valued in a painting and work from there.
CG He led a simple life. Did he have money and was it a factor?
NH Back then you didn’t need to have a lot of money. He built his own home. Back then you could live quite well on $2,000 a year. You could dig for clams and the fishermen often gave artists fresh fish. In the summer he had a vegetable garden. I don’t know about his medical expenses or what he spent for paint. I don’t know how successful he was in selling work but prices were low. If he got $1,500 or $600 that was pretty good.
CG Which he had to split with Rosenberg.
NH In those days galleries just took a third. Not like 50% and up that’s common today. He was in the WPA in the 1930s.
(In her dissertation for Boston University Edith Tonelli, on the WPA in Massachusetts, discussed murals by Knaths on Cape Cod.)
CG He painted murals for the WPA.
NH I didn’t know that as I was involved with the writers and not the artists. You might talk about artists and the WPA with Bruce McCain who is still around from those days.
CG Do you live here year round?
NH Six months here and six in New York. From 1936-1940 I lived here year round. Since then I’ve spent two more years here year round.
CG Did you have a gallery in New York?
NH Not after the one I had here (HCE) for two reasons. The kind of space I had here, in New York even in those days, would cost six figures a year. The access to people I had who came here I wouldn’t have had in the city. Look at the people I represented here; Milton Avery, Robert Motherwell. One year I had David Smith, and another year Franz Kline, Louise Nevelson. I even had connections to the Marsden Hartley estate.
Let’s walk through this show (PAAM) and I’ll show you some of the people I represented. (We strolled as he pointed to prints and drawings on display.) Budd Hopkins, George McNeil, Avery, Motherwell, Varujan Boghosian, Nanno de Groot, Wolf Kahn, Jack Tworkov for three years, Hans Hofmann, Nassos Daphnis. I had Adolph Gottlieb for three or four years, Myron Stout, Jim Fosberg, Seong Moy, Lester Johnson, and Leo Maso. Those are some of the people I had.
CG Did you sell work?
NH When I started the older dealers told me it would take five years to become established. In my fifth year I finally made about $100. For the next five years I made pretty good money considering that I was only open for ten weeks.
CG Did you make a living from the gallery?
NH Not really but I had other sources of income. For those five good years I made enough money to go to Europe and buy pictures for the gallery as well as put together a fine collection for myself. I have Knaths, a few Averys, a Frankenthaler, a David Smith drawing. A couple of Dickinson drawings are worth a lot more than I paid for them. In fact, out of the gallery I could make a lot more than I ever did then. I could sell my Avery and do quite well.
CG Are you lending Avery to the upcoming Whitney show?
NH No, but they did a long interview with me. I bought a charcoal by Myron Stout. The Whitney borrowed it for their show. They insured it for $8,000 but I actually paid $66.
CG Things have gone up.
NH Haven’t they. If I had spent $25,000 or $2,500 a year over ten years the value of that collection would be more than $1 million. If you chose well it was the best investment in the world. I bought a Jan Muller, everyone said he was a good painter. You could get a Muller for $50. I bought one painted on a shingle for $25. I also bought a cheap Lester Johnson.
CG Did you know Bob Thompson?
NH He was around every now and then. I have a few Thompsons. There were all kinds of artists floating around and you could get their work for next to nothing.
CG What did you pay for the Knaths self portrait?
NH I know but better not tell you because we have it up for sale at $6000. So it couldn’t have been for much.
CG What’s his price range today?
NH That’s up in the air because no gallery represents the work. Knaths sells for what traffic will bear. It’s scattered around and I don’t know what (Ed) Shein gets for a painting. Mervin Jules and I bought the Knaths self portraits together. We’re ready to keep it indefinitely. Mervin offered to buy my share. It’s just a good piece and I have it hanging in my house.
CG Can I take a look at it?
NH Sure. (Walking on Commercial Street toward his house.) It’s a period of decline for Knaths because there are cycles. With time people are in complete decline then they can be hot again and vice versa. I can remember when nobody gave a damn about the Ashcan School. Next year there will be a show of Provinctown’s colored woodblock prints. (Multi colored prints from a single block called White Line Prints.) One of the artists, Blanche Lazzell, a damned good artist, needed money and I couldn’t sell a single print for $100. I had to organize a raffle with people putting in $10 each. Now that same print I can sell to a dealer, a dealer mind you, for $1,200.
That interest has risen in the past few years, not just for her but the whole woodblock school who were considered to be nothing. It takes a change in fashion over 25 to 50 years and that hasn’t happened for Knaths yet. Or for artists like him who adapted aspects of cubism.
CG Would you agree that the earlier works of Knaths are stronger than the late ones?
NH I agree. The monotypes from 1919-1920 when he first arrived here are as a group stronger than his later paintings.
(I saw a number of these works in the collection of Jim and Jean Young with some signed Otto Knaths. With fresh originality they were on a par with the best of American modernists.)
At the time, he, Edwin Dickinson and Ross Moffett were the rebels. What they were doing was unique. That’s why Mervin and I are so interested in the late Knaths self portrait because it seems like a creative burst. Whether it is good art or not there is a burst of vigor. There is a bit of savagery which had been missing.
It was painted around 1967 which is when he was thinking about what to do with his estate. That he was a very sick man did things to him.
CG The manner in which he planned for the estate was problematic. Why didn’t he use Rosenberg Gallery for estate planning?
NH The gallery had other fish to fry. Dealers were not making money on artists of his generation. They were selling Eakins and the Hudson River School but making nothing on contemporary art.
CG What did the monotypes sell for?
NH The AAA Gallery, Jules is a friend of them, and the Metropolitan Museum were organizing a show of monotypes. They were interested so we matted and framed some and sent them to the gallery. We put prices on them but they didn’t sell any. They were sent back with a note that our prices were too high. For that little (Young curated) show in Washington, D.C. at Fiedler gallery we sold just one. It was consigned for $980 but I have no idea what they got for it. Then I sold one to a New York dealer and art historian. He told me it was for his collection and not for resale. I think he paid $1,200. In each case we looked at the AAA consignment value then adjusted accordingly. We got anything from $800 to $2000. Shein would know because he had a lot of Knaths that he bought from the bank that wanted to get rid of them.
CG Did Duncan Phillips come to Provincetown?
NH Not to my knowledge but Knaths would see him when he taught each year at the Phillips. He would buy paintings from Rosenberg who represented Karl and a couple of other Americans. They represented them but didn’t make money from them. Avery was with Rosenberg for a time and told me this story. Rosenberg had just sold a Renoir at a huge profit as he bought it for next to nothing in Paris. A few days later Avery was in the gallery. Rosenberg was tearing his hair out as nothing had sold for three days. He heard him call a guy and say “Joe you remember that print you wanted that I was asking $150 for? I can let you have it for $150.” They had to have action.
An older dealer told me that they went crazy on rainy days. They had the Americans because they would come in and talk to them. In the 1950s Babcock told me that “This is the first year that I have broken even on my contemporaries.” Rosenberg never made anything on Knaths.
CG Did Avery make money?
NH He finally did in the 1950s around 1958.
(Enter Halper’s house and view the Knaths self portrait.)
CG Wow.
NH Have you ever seen anything like that before? Now you see why we bought it over several other painting that were offered to us. You can see why we are not anxious to sell it and if we do for a good price. It has everything you want in a Knaths. It has the grid and he’s mixing paint in clam shells.
CG Do you ever see a Knaths without the grid?
NH Here’s a monotype but I have a better one upstairs. It’s like his paintings but because of the medium the colors are stronger. We have work by a lot of the artists we represented some of whom gave us things.
CG Did Knaths know Avery?
NH They knew each other and had similarities but weren’t together much. Who was together with Avery and visa versa was (Marsden) Hartley. They knew each other and some of their sea things were similar. When Knaths came to the gallery to see Avery he wasn’t impressed as Hans Hofmann was. I saw Hofmann stare at an Avery for 15 minutes then say “Dat is uh masterpiece.” Knaths was snooty because Avery didn’t have grids. Avery was the least grid like man you would see. He probably had his theories but not like Knaths.
CG You were fortunate to find so many monotypes.
NH A guy said to me that he had just been to see what’s left of the Knaths estate. We also have some unframed ones which are in D.C. but this is the peak.
CG I agree with you that the monotypes are excellent.
NH I haven’t seen it but I’ve been told that someone in Woodstock (Jim and Jean Young) have one that’s just as good.
CG Do they have titles?
NH Some do but there is no way of knowing if they are his titles or ones given by the estate. All of the monotypes were done in 1919-1920.
CG Why did he stop?
NH He was doing other things. When we sent them to Washington (Fiedler Gallery) they called us in a tizzy, “Who the hell is Otto Knaths?” At that point he wasn’t sure and was vacillating between Karl and Otto. Often he would create something then do it again in another medium.
In New York I have a drawing of a rooster. Reggie Cabral said that “It’s a print.” No, I insisted it’s a drawing because it has ink spots but he did it after a print. We found a watercolor of the same subject and he may have also done a painting. Avery was also apt to do that. Any one of these (pointing to drawings) he may have done over and over. But after 1919-1920 he quit making monotypes. Overall, I don’t know how many he did and he may have done one later.
CG (Pointing to a monotype) What would you say that is?
NH An abstraction.
CG It’s very advanced for it’s time.
NH It’s very different from his later abstraction as they were less structured. Though you can see a structure and possibly it may even have been abstracted from a figure. It’s hard to say what’s the source and subject. At the same time that he was working this abstractly some of the others are more realistic.
CG How many monotypes did you acquire?
NH All that was available about 13. The fellow in Woodstock (Youngs) got a couple of them.
After Avery had his first heart attack he said “God, I’m not through yet.” His paintings were always high key and even more so after that. Of his absolutely last ones I have a picture of his wife which he actually called “Green Hat.” Except for the composition you would never know that it’s an Avery. The strokes agitated him, and I guess that’s what happened to Knaths as well. There is something savage in the self portrait. I showed it to Motherwell with the comment that it’s the gutsiest painting that Knaths did. Bob replied “It sure is. He was always so damned delicate with his greens.” He got a glimpse of death and it was a kick in the ass.
(Showing me) Here is a monotype called “Horizontal Composition” with a white form in the center.
CG Why did Knaths change his name from Otto to Karl? (This simple explanation that signing work OK was too close to Oskar Kokoschka.)
NH It might have been the war. (Karl was less Germanic that Otto.) He was the kind of guy who might have gotten involved with numerology. There was a painter here, Edwin Euler, who changed his name to Reeves Euler. He told me it was better for his pr or it might have been the better vibrations of numbers. I wouldn’t be surprised as Knaths got involved in all kinds of things; numerology, astrology, alchemy. I think he was Jungian rather than Freudian.
CG Didn’t Knaths know Euler? I tried to reach him but he had passed away.
NH He passed away in March. I don’t know how they got along because they were quite different. Euler was very conservative. He was from Idaho (1896-1982).
CG Who were Knaths’s allies?
NH Jim Fosberg and maybe Myron Stout. There were people who chatted with him, the women (Ferol Sibley Warthen) but he was a loner. Not that he wasn’t friendly which he was. The fact that he was mystical, and its precision, there were very few people he could talk to about his theories and beliefs.
There’s a professor emeritus from Columbia, Otto Luning. Another Otto who was also from Wisconsin. I was at his house when I said “I know another Otto from Wisconsin, Otto Knaths.” He said “Oh, I know him quite well.” They had rapport as two men of German heritage from Wisconsin.”
CG How did Knaths get along with townspeople?
NH Very well because he was well behaved and good with his hands which was always admired. He built his house and may also have done the cottages on the property. He minded his own business and didn’t cause a rumpus.
He was interested in very vague things on a very precise level or very precise things on a vague level. But he was never precise about precise things or vague about vague things. In the early days of WGBH FM and educational television he would listen in his spare time to “content that was very instructional.” He was like a lot of guys with a scholarly bent who had never been to college. They just like to have information.
We have the drawing for the “Ahab” painting. Demaris can tell you who has the painting. It’s got this dramatic stuff of a guy throwing his hands all over.
He could tell you if he wants to. You never know with guys on Cape Cod. Sometimes they’ll tell you everything and other times just dry up.
(Looking through his address book) David Tunic, 21 East 81st Street has some monotypes on consignment. There were three works lost at a framer’s where there was a robbery.
CG What do drawings sell for?
NH There is no regular market. There was a show at a gallery near the Phillips and they sold for $200 to $600. People bought from the estate and there were drawings here and there going for $400 to $500. The market was flooded a couple of years ago perhaps people thought it was an opportune time to pick up a Knaths. We didn’t try to sell our Knaths because everyone else was, so the hell with it. Just wasn’t worth the hassle though I didn’t see much out there this year. You see them in small galleries or auctions.
Reggie Cabral has a trunk load of them. He could flood the market but doesn’t need the money. He’s more apt to give them to a museum. He doesn’t want the IRS to get an idea of how much he has. I think he paid $200 for the contents of a trunk because it was just rubbish to the bank. They were the last things left and unframed. The IRS doesn’t believe you when you say I just paid $200. They say stop giving us that shit.
There was a guy from Canada who came and bought Avery and Hofmann for under $5000. Later he had a show and the papers reported the worth of the collection as over $2 million. The Canadian IRS looked into it and said “We’ve looked at your taxes and where the heck did you get $2 million to buy the collection?” He probably invested $25,000 at $2,500 annually over ten years but he had to settle with them. Guys like him want to keep a low profile when they’re honest and they’re not always honest. The IRS doesn’t know a good goddam about art evaluations. They investigated me several times but I never paid them a penny because I kept accurate records.
After 15 minutes the IRS guy said “Ok, you’re all clear but can we have a cup of coffee while you tell me what the hell the art business is all about?” Two or three times I had to deliver impromptu lectures on the art business.