Invented Symbols
Chapter One: To Manhattan
by Alex Katz

I grew up in St. Albans,  Queens, one of the suburban neighborhoods that started springing up between the wars.  It had people from different backgrounds, and the only thing they seemed to have in common was the price of the house.  It was at the beginning of the Depression, and there were a lot of cops, firemen, and small businessmen who weren't doing real well, maybe some schoolteachers and a doctor.
            My parents, Isaac and Sima, traveled a long way to get there.  My mother was from Bialystok, which was then part of Russia, although now it is in Poland.  She could recite poetry in five languages when she was a child.  When she was 14, she went to Palestine by herself.  At 17, she studied acting in Odessa, then went to study psychology in St. Petersburg.  On the way home, her train stopped in Lida.  That’s where she met my father.
            Lida was one of the four towns in that region that were considered sophisticated, along with Vilna, Krakow, and Lodz.  My father came from a family of scholars, and he jumped from medieval into modern times.  His family owned a stove tile factory, and he was supposed to become a scholar.  He said his blood was too hot for scholarly pursuits.  He spent most of his time playing billiards and chasing women, as far as I could gather, running the tile business from the billiard hall. 
            When Word War I came, he opened a soup kitchen for the needy and started an amateur theater group for entertainment.  My father was cultured but never ostentatiously.  Once I heard him talking about art, and I was surprised.  He dressed well, and I think he was something of a playboy, but in the Russian style.  He liked to ride motorcycles across fields and dive off bridges.             
             My mother was an aspiring actress, whose stage name was Ella Marion, perhaps in homage to the famous Marionella Theater in Moscow.  She had red hair, green eyes, and a sensuous mouth.  She would cause accidents walking down the street.  When they met, it was clear that she would be perfect to star in his theater.  Everything was going well, until he asked her to marry him.  She later told me, “I thought he was an aristocrat, because he changed his clothes three times a day, but when he asked me to marry him, I realized he was nothing but a burgher.”  And she left.  They didn’t meet again until they both came, separately, to New York. 
            My mother came from Russia in 1921 and my father a couple of years later.  He worked in a sweat shop for a while.  Then he worked for my uncle in the wholesale coffee business and went into business for himself in 1929.   My mother had me reciting poetry when I was four.  She was bringing me up to be a precocious kid, and my father decided he didn't like it.  He said, "No more foreign languages," and sent me out on the streets. 
            We were one of the few families who were off-the-boat, first generation.  Most were second generation.  There was one other Jewish family across the street, and they were already second generation.  My mother got an English dictionary and a collection of Poe.  She knew Poe in  Russian, so she learned English from the dictionary.  Later on, she had a speech teacher.  My father picked English up at work.  He spoke a broken English that was similar to that of other Jewish people from the same region.  My mother had a slight Russian accent.  She had a problem pronouncing, because it was all from the dictionary, and some of it was wrong, but her grammar was excellent. 
            Between the two of them, when I went out on the street, everyone laughed at my English.  I got self-conscious, and there started to be gaps between what I was thinking and what I was saying.  All the kids thought I was going to have a terrible time when I got to school; they thought I'd never pass English.  The subject turned out to be easy, but I did have trouble speaking it.  I stuttered for a couple of years — from about the 6th up to the 8th grade — then it stopped.  Until I was around 30, there'd always be one or two words I'd mispronounce.  I couldn't pronounce them, and when I'd get them straightened out, other words would pop up. 
            I think it had to do with growing up in that weird neighborhood.  You accept your parents as normal, and then you find out they're a little different from everybody else.  After a while you say, "They're a lot different from everybody else."  Neither of them looked at things the way other people did, and I didn't look at things the way other people did.  I was brought up to keep things to yourself, and never give anything away.  Whenever I was supposed to react — be happy or sad — most of the time I wouldn't feel anything, so I would do what was expected of me and let it go. 
            I started drawing with my father.  He was artistic, but he wasn't schooled.  His stuff was primitive.  I noticed, when we first drew together, that we both were naive, except his was adult naive and mine was child naive.  His had some kind of an edge, more authority.  I remember that clearly.
             I also remember drawing all over the staircase wall, and my parents never said anything.  The drawings stayed there for years.  Other kids in the neighborhood would have caught hell if they did anything like that.  My parents didn't seem to get mad at anything.  The only thing I couldn't do was hit my kid brother, Bernard.  My father didn't like that.  Outside of that, I could screw up, mess up, anything, and he would just say, "Well, don't do it again." 
             My father put refined colors all over the house.  The living room was a pale yellow, with pale violet on the panels.  There were etchings and expressionist paintings (the painter was a friend of my mother).  This was different from the other houses around there.  No one had these European expressionist paintings — no one had paintings period — and no one had a room that was dusty rose and violet with modernistic furniture.  The sun parlor was the room that really got me.  It had pink walls, and my father painted truncated triangles on them about two inches on edge.  They were painted neatly in dull maroon, and those reds went together really well.  I always thought how nice they looked. 
            We had some wooden flowerpot stands that were expressionistic-looking.  My father cut them casually.  He slapped them together and painted them with orange and green triangles, on which the paint dripped.  I thought they were awful when I was a kid.  Later on, I realized they were pretty good, but it was strange the way he could put them in that room.  Combining them with the neatly painted triangles on the wall didn’t seem to bother him.  My parents kept  repainting the dining room different colors.  I remember it mostly as a dusty rose.  Their bedroom was in yellowish greens, and they had a bright apple-green bed with a golden, crushed-velvet, bedspread, on which he painted small flowers in Florine Stettheimer colors.
            I changed rooms several times.  My grandmother lived with us for a while.  When she left, there was a room upstairs with dark green walls which I had to myself.  There was a bed, a table to work on, and a chair.  When I was about fourteen, I decided I didn’t like the wall color.  It was too depressing .  I changed it to a beige and a darker brown.  My father didn’t like it, but he was polite about it.  I got the feeling he thought it wasn’t tasteful.  After I got into Cooper Union, and learned to mix art school colors, I painted three walls grey and the fourth plum.  I was trying, trying, trying to do something that was ordinary.  Everything in our house was so damn bizarre. 
            The outside of the house had gray clapboard on the second floor, and  blue stucco below.  Then the stucco crumbled a bit.  My father replaced it with white cement and repainted the top gray.  We had a chimney fire and replaced the roof with gray shingles.  Then it became two grays and white, with a big pine tree in front of it. 
            My father believed there was a technique to doing everything.  He used to dive off bridges in Russia, and he would explain how to dive off a bridge.  He had a theory of how to punch a guy out.  He told me once a Polish soldier was bothering him — one punch, and he left him in the snow.  He and his friends would race motorcycles across farms, and there was a technique there, too.  Later, in his coffee business, the workbench had to be a certain height, and in packing the coffee, you were supposed to bounce the package twice, not three times or once.  To cut the lawn, he never retraced his steps; it was cut concentrically.  He used to finish it in 20 minutes, in a ball of sweat. 
            He was 5'9" and weighed about 180 pounds at his best.  He was really built for violence.  He had all the components, a freak body.  He had arms like they came off of Michelangelo's statue of Moses — these big veins crawling all over him with rippling muscles, a thick chest, and a club-like hand.  He had a square frame with nice shoulders and thin legs.  He was very fast. 
            Once, some teenagers were throwing rocks at the house.  He must have been close to 50, but he came out of the house and raced at them.  They broke and started to run.  The guy he caught was a fullback on a high school football team, and he knocked him down, roughed him up.  The next day, they said, "Mr. Katz is very fast."  Most of the time, he was  quiet and contained, but every so often he'd swear.  He wasn't a violent man.  His energy was for violence, though, not for endurance.  It was an explosive  energy. 
            I never heard my mother raise her voice.  She would short circuit sometimes, but she'd never raise her voice.  There was one evening my father threw the kitchen table across the room, near to where she was standing.  That was the most shocking thing I had ever seen.  The most stable thing in life was the kitchen table, where you had your meals.  It had all the dishes on it, and with just a flip of his wrist, it went across the room and ended upside down, right next to where she was standing.  She just looked at him, didn't bat an eye, and he tore out of the house, almost taking the door off its hinges.  My brother and I just sat there, where the table used to be.  It made such a noise, too.  It sounded like a bombing.  I heard a bomb once, when we were in Brown's Hotel in London, and it was just the same kind of noise, like a lot of dishes falling. 
            I always felt inferior to my father, physically.  I knew I'd never have that kind of power or strength.  I also felt I was of a weaker moral nature.  I remember once a petition was passed around not to sell houses to Negroes, and he was the only one on the block that didn't sign it.  All the other alleged liberals crumbled.  It was curious.  There was a guy from Germany on the next block, who had a butcher shop, who wouldn't sign it either.  My father's reasoning was, "If they bring one for Negroes one week, the next week they'll bring one for Jews." 
            There were these people he used to sell coffee to in restaurants, who wouldn't trust their own  brothers, but they would trust him.  When they would open the cash register, they'd give him  the money to give to someone else, while they wouldn't trust each other with the money.  His word was really good. 
            He felt America was a great place.  He never thought of going back, and he never wanted me to go there, either, but his whole way of looking at the world was European.  He never really got America or American sports.  When I ran track, he said he thought track was for horses.  He thought swimming was good, and he liked tennis.  He was suspicious of baseball.  He said, "You can get killed with that ball."
            Aesthetics to me were what you liked and what you didn't like.  It's a process that starts when you're young.  You like things, and you don't like other things.  You form your tastes and your judgments about what art is.  I was lucky as a child to have a mother and father both involved in aesthetics. 
            When I was around 12, I was sitting on the porch with my father, when we saw a bunch of my friends in the street, all dressed up in their Sunday best, some with fedora hats and suits.  My father asked, "Which of the boys is the best dressed?"  I didn't know.  It was a strange question to me.  I remember feeling strange.  I thought, "Well, I guess he means the one who's the most dressed up," and I picked one of the guys with a fedora and a suit.  He said, “No,” he thought it was the boy wearing a sweater.  I looked at the boy in the sweater and realized immediately that he was right.  It was a whole different thing.  It was beige and tan, with a shirt and tie, a haircut and shoes, that all went together.  It was a whole idea of style, right there. 
            Another interesting thing, all the houses on the block were built at slightly different times, by different contractors.  There were six that were the same, and the rest of them were all different.  One day I mentioned that our cellar wasn’t so high. "Wait a minute,"said my father, and he told me the height of all of my friends' cellars, all the cellars I'd been into.  He was right to the inch.  He knew the height of every cellar.  Then he told me which house had the best construction — the one with the largest cellar and the thickest walls.  I still can't figure out how he knew the heights of all the cellars.  He hadn't been in any of the houses. 
            As I grew up and became a teenager, I started doing a lot of art work.  My father liked it.  I think he thought being an artist was OK.  He thought the best thing a person could be was an architect — where you do art and you help society.  When I did lettering over the weekend, he didn’t think that was so hot.  He'd tell me to go outside and play, but I did it anyway.  I got serious about doing art work when I was quite young.  I really liked doing it, and there were other guys on the block who were interested. 
            One was Dick Crockett, who was unusually talented and had an adult mind in advertising.  He was the person who told me to go to this funny high school, Woodrow Wilson Vocational High School, because you could do art half the day.  You'd take academics in the morning and do art all afternoon.  So I went there, against my parents' advice and against the advice of my grammar school principal. 
            When I was in the 7th grade, I talked a lot, and I was a disturbance.  I wasn't compulsive about studying, but I got fairly good grades.  There were some people in the other class who were allowed to skip, and none in our class, because we had lower grades.  Then some of the parents of people in our class complained, so the principal said, "Well, the only thing to do is give all the children the same test and see what happens." 
            He gave it to the all the kids who had an 80 average or above, and they found out that I belonged in high school someplace, in reading and a  whole bunch of other subjects — two or three years ahead of where I was.  Maybe that was the reason I was making so much trouble.  The principal thought I should have gone to study at Music and Art High School in Manhattan.  My parents wanted me to go to an academic high school in Queens; they didn’t approve of the subway ride to Music and Art; but I always did what I wanted, and I went to Wilson. 
            Trade school was fun; it was totally goofy.  You could do artwork for three or four hours, and they really didn't care what you did.  When I went there, I saw these antique drawings, cast drawings, that I thought were beautiful.  I spent two years drawing cast drawings every day.  The teacher would criticize them.  He'd studied at the National Academy, and his criticism was intelligent.  He gave me an intellectual structure for making drawings.  It was a nice way of starting to draw. 
            When you start to draw, you should try to make a drawing that looks like another drawing, rather than trying to imitate life or express yourself.  In trying to make a drawing look like an antique drawing, there arises a system.  You learn the system, and the system relates to other systems.  The teacher spoke in terms of light and dark harmonies — one shouldn't violate the dark harmonies or the light harmonies — and these were the same words my design teacher in Cooper Union, Carol Harrison, would be using years later about Cubism.  Cubism was a snap for me after formal antique drawing.
             The lack of humanities at Woodrow Wilson was a joke.  When I graduated, the English teacher came over to me and said, "You know, Alex, you wasted four years here."  I said, "I know, but I really had a great time." I learned a lot about style, because the school had a strong music and clothes culture.  A lot of emphasis was put on dancing and clothes, and the differences were discussed and discernible.  You received an education in style and styling. 
            It took a long time before I could put that sense of style into what I wanted to make as a painting.  Painting was interesting, but it was remote from the time in which I was living.  It was out of the past.  In high school, the immediate art of the time was jazz and dancing.  The fine art that I was doing, the cast drawing, was just something I liked to do.  It didn't have the excitement of being in the contemporary world.  I think the real excitement in art is somehow being in the contemporary world, getting out of the tradition a little bit.  Music was the vehicle.
            There were two glamorous people I saw in my teens.  Once, I was selling hot dogs at the Jamaica Arena, at a black dance, and Lionel Hampton came over.  That was the first time I saw glamor up close.  I couldn't believe it.  He was in a one-button lounge, royal blue suit, and he looked fantastic.  He said, “Hot Dog.”  I said, "Mustard?" and he said, "Yes."  Another time, the best dancer in South Jamaica came to one of our parties.  We danced and we danced and we danced, and he just read a newspaper.  Then he danced.  It had so much style.  We just couldn't believe it.  We walked out and had beers, left the whole party, left the girls there.  Those were my first contacts with glamor and style, both of which I find myself attracted to.
            In high school, I wore the zoot suit.  I liked it because it had fluid lines.  I liked it because it was free.  It was socially free.  I liked it because it was a romance suit.  It was away from tradition, away from constraints, and I liked the music that went with it.  My favorite band was Count Basie — it was so big and alive.  I was playing the violin then.  I kept trying to write music, and it always ended up being Count Basie.             
               Dick Crockett was extremely talented.  He was a year or two older than I and had a pragmatic way of doing things.  He quit school when he was sixteen.  The teacher asked him why, and he said, "Because you have nothing more to teach me."  He was an art director by the time he was eighteen.
            Dick and I used to go and make watercolors.  We’d get on a bike and ride 20 miles or so to find something he thought was a motif and paint it.  Dick’s paintings were more facile — they were almost like illustrations — and mine would always come out clumsy and clunky.  I remember showing them to my father, and he said, “You know, Dick, you’re going to be a great commercial artist.”  Then he looked at my stuff and said, “You’re going to have to be a fine artist.”  He would criticize the color, and he was usually right, I later realized.  When Dick left, he said, “You know, Alex, you shouldn’t go looking for scenes.  You should paint your own backyard.”  It was pretty good advice.
            After I got out of the Navy, I got into Cooper Union.  By the time he was nineteen, Dick was earning more money than anyone's father on the block, and he was just beginning.  Dick would go to work with the liberal newspaper under his arm, throw it in the wastepaper basket, and pick up the Times to walk into his office.  He was extremely careful about everything.
            Dick asked me to quit Cooper Union and go with him.  He said, "I'm going to the top.  It's gonna be real quick, and you can come with me."  He offered me 60 dollars a week to start, which was a good salary then for someone who was basically not well-trained; but I told him I was just having too much fun at Cooper Union.  He thought of going to night school, but he was working real big hours.  Dick and I worked flat out on artwork.
             The last time I saw Dick, I had been out of school a couple years — I was in my mid-twenties — and Dick showed me this crummy office.  He said, "Don't you like this office?"  I said, "I don't see anything nice about it."  He said, "Those walls are lined with green.  It's my boss's office.  I'm doing more and more of his work, and soon it'll be mine."  It seemed like  rational behavior.  I asked him about art work.  He said, “The art work is not important.  What is important is whether the ad goes in Friday or Monday.”  I learned how to be serious from Dick Crockett. 
            The other person I knew in St. Albans who was interested in art lived across the street.  His name was Ken Pfeiffer.  He was going to Pratt Institute to be an industrial designer or architect.  His father was a sea captain in World War II, who went down with his ship.  Ken took it upon himself to support the whole family, quit school, and started his own business in advertising and industrial design.  When I was sixteen, he hired me to make airbrush illustrations and lettering.  We bought an airbrush together.  I still have my part of it, from when we split up, in a drawer someplace. 
            Ken was interested in more sophisticated art than I had been exposed to at the time, and he gave me books on Mondrian to read.  I liked the paintings a lot, but the philosophy seemed ridiculous to me then and now.  Mondrian was really hot then.  It was in the air.  Ken was interested in Bauhaus, and he had a real position about what he thought was right and wrong. 
            I had graduated high school early because I was skipped, and I had six months before I’d be drafted.  I decided to go into the Navy instead of  being drafted.  I got a job in an offset house on 11th Avenue and 49th Street, doing paste up, mechanicals, and lettering, then signed up for the Navy.  It was at the offset house that I met Jimmy Stevenson, who had gone to Cooper Union.  He interested me because of his skeptical mind.
             I saw him frequently over a long period of time.  He said, “Everyone paints like a student in Cooper Union; then you do something when you get out.  You change.”  That helped put things in perspective a little when I went there.  He was the opposite of Ken Pfeiffer, who was coming from the Bauhaus point of view.  Jimmy Stevenson’s paintings were essentially romantic.  He was working with a lot of glazes, and I think it was the neo-romantic movement he was working from.  He was against the out-and-out modernism of Picasso and Matisse.  His paintings were very internal, too.
              Finally, after I had been studying in Cooper Union for two years, Stevenson said, "Why don't you change and get out of it?" but then I saw the Matisse show in 1949 at the Pierre Matisse Gallery.  It really knocked me out, and I said to myself, “That’s it!”  I couldn't deny what I experienced when I saw those paintings — I was fainting!  I caught myself before I hit the floor.  So I drifted away from Stevenson, but he was a terrific guy, and I learned a lot from him.
            When I was still in the Navy, I met some guys who had gone to Pratt Institute, who thought I should go there.   When I went to Pratt to see if I could get in, the building was all closed down.  I knew there was a test at Cooper Union, so I went, and I got there just in time to take it.
             It was right after World War II.  Eighteen hundred people took the test, and about ninety got in.  When I consider my background — Woodrow Wilson was a Blackboard Jungle kind of school — I ended way up near the top of the test.  I don't understand it at all, because I was very unsophisticated.  The guy who had the highest mark was even less sophisticated than I.  He came from St. Albans too.  We used to take the subway in to school together.  At that point, when I got into Cooper, it was the biggest kick in my life.  I always felt I was  screwing everything up, no matter what I was doing.  Then, all of a sudden, "Here's something I can do."  
            My father had died when I was sixteen.  I went into the navy when I was eighteen, and my mother went to Europe, working as a translator just after World War II.  I returned before she did.  I had $300 mustering-out pay, and I went to buy a car.  They all looked terrible, so I thought I’d surprise her and paint the house.  The house on one side of ours was red, and the house on the other side was green.  I decided our house should be aquamarine blue.  I told Ken Pfeiffer, who thought it was an excellent idea.  I couldn’t buy the color, so I bought a big garbage can and mixed it.  I cut down our pine tree so that I could paint the house.  I was nineteen.  I never thought twice about cutting down the tree.
            When my mother returned, she made a little face, but she didn’t say anything about it.  I realized later that she was a real sport.  It did take a month to paint the house.  My mother told me that she and my father had wanted to make the house feel like a seagull.  They wanted it romantic, all greys.  I realized it had been a big shock to her.  It had been a big shock to the whole neighborhood, but I think I may have the distinction of having been the first to paint a house aquamarine.