2023Hans Ulrich Obrist

HANS ULRICH OBRIST: I want to ask you how it all began: how you came to art, or how art came to you.

PETER BRADLEY: I’ve been an artist, I think, since I was a child. I never stopped and that was it. It’s all I did.

HUO: Do you remember your first epiphany with art?

PB: No. We had a twenty-seven-room house. My studio was in the attic and my mother would come to the attic in the mornings with me and stay there and read the New York Times. Once I started drawing, she’d say, “I got to go,” and she’d go downstairs and I wouldn’t see her until lunch or dinner. I was there by myself all the time, all day. I painted with oil paint on canvas or on board, and it was terrible. I couldn’t get it to work, couldn’t stain, so I stopped doing it.

HUO: Was this figurative work?

PB: I was just copying old things. I remember making one painting, when I was a child, of Alice in Wonderland—two little figures jumping around. My mother said, “That’s not happening.” [laughs] I let it go. I never made anything like it again. I went to art school in Michigan when I was 17 or 18 years old, and I couldn’t paint abstract there either because nobody liked abstract painting. Then I went to New York and I met Kenneth Noland. Ken and I talked about painting for a long time. I lived across the street from Frank Stella. I started understanding abstract art, and I started painting. I worked at Perls Galleries, and when I wasn’t dealing with a client, I was painting on the top floor of Perls. 

HUO: Before we move on to the art, can you tell me a little bit about this twenty-seven-room house? You had a studio for painting, and there were also a lot of connections to jazz music.

PB: My mother fostered seventy-three children in order to pay for the house and everything. I was the only one who was adopted. The house was quite interesting. All the jazz musicians around the world would stop by our house, because there was space, on their way to Pittsburgh or wherever. So I got to meet all the great jazz musicians when I was very young. In fact, I had a great trumpet—a blue one like Miles [Davis] had. I took music lessons, and I was playing very well. I went to play one day with the teacher there, and the teacher told my mother that I would never be a trumpet player because my lips were too big, so she took my trumpet and hit him across the head with it, and she said, “His lips aren’t any bigger than Louis Armstrong’s.” That was the end of me playing the trumpet, so I left. I didn’t do it anymore.

HUO: I read this amazing polyphonic conversation between you, Steve Cannon, Quincy Troupe, and Cannon Hersey in BOMB Magazine. Miles Davis pops up again and again. There is even that rumor that he is your father.

PB: I think that was just a rumor that came from my mother’s brother who sort of looked like you and despised Black people. He was very light-skinned with straight, bright-red hair. Miles would come to our house in Western Pennsylvania with [Count] Basie and others. [My uncle] would sit at the table and start to chew and stare at me, and he would say, “He’s as ugly as that old Black father of his,” and he would point to Miles. That’s where it came from. I don’t believe it’s true. I’ve asked him, but he never said a word. I was adopted at seven days old.

When I lived in New York, he came to my apartment a lot. We had the same Ferraris, two cars. He was at the Ferrari garage all the time and his car was never working, because he didn’t know how to drive. He would just ride in my car every now and then.

HUO: You kept in touch with him afterwards? Was it an ongoing dialogue?

PB: No, he was never in the United States, he traveled all the time. We’d see each other at the garage when he’d come by. The last time I saw him was at my studio at 654 Broadway. All he did was talk about how hip his car was. He didn’t even know how to drive it. I never saw him again. 

HUO: I wanted to talk about Detroit, because you spent much of the late 1950s there, at the Society of Arts and Crafts. What was your time in Detroit like? What was important for you during these years? 

PB: The most important thing was me getting out of Detroit. [laughs] I went to New York and got out. The head of the school was a man named Sarkis Sarkisian, and he knew nothing about painting, but he kept paintings of the president sitting on the chair all the time. It was just a dumb time for me. No one had acrylic paint, I couldn’t afford all the acrylic paints so I used a lot of house paint. None of the teachers paid any attention to me, because they never will pay any attention to anybody Black, unless you’re going to copy what they were doing. They paid attention to the pretty rich girls on Grosse Pointe. That’s what art schools are about, as far as I’m concerned.

HUO: Then you arrived in New York, and you began to work in a framing shop in 1963. Many artists I have interviewed have told me about their beginnings in frame shops. And you met Alex Katz there. So that was the beginning in New York?

PB: Yes. I worked for Feist Frames on West Fifty-Fourth Street. Alex, two or three other painters, and a couple of musicians all worked there with me. Alex’s wife got me my first studio on Ann Street, in downtown Manhattan, and it was on top of a barbershop or something like that. I remember opening up the door and the wall started to move— it was cockroaches; it looked like the wall and the whole space was moving. I worked there for maybe three or four months. I met Mary Tyler Moore at Perls, and she told me that it was best for me to get a studio instead of pretending to be an artist in the situation I lived in. It’s the only reason why I met her, I never saw her again in life.

HUO: That’s fascinating. So many young artists now have these parallel realities: they’re curating, they’re painting, they’re doing music, they’re teaching. But in the 1960s and ’70s, that was unusual. But you had so many roles—like in quantum physics, these many parallel realities. I always thought of your work as like quantum physics, because there are so many dimensions to you. How did that happen so quickly? How did you arrive as a young artist in New York, become an art dealer with Perls, the curator of The De Luxe Show at the Menil, an influential painter of your generation, a sculptor? And then in the ’70s, you became a teacher and a musician. It was an explosion, in a way.

PB: It was hard work, I’ll tell you that. I worked as a guard at the Hispanic Society of America, a museum way uptown. I was drawing one day and this man came and said, “Can I buy the drawing?” and I said, “No, but I have an engraving.” He bought the engraving, it turned out to be the head man at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and he bought it and put it in their collection. From that point on, once I felt that I could get some attention making art, I left the museum as a guard. I was working in conservation at the Guggenheim when Perls hired me to be the head salesman at their gallery. I had advised them on how to hang Alexander Calder’s The Ghost (1964) from the top of the Guggenheim. I went to Perls and Dolly Perls said, “You don’t have any clothes, you have to go to Bloomingdale’s and buy some clothes.” I said, “I’ll go to Meledandri and get my clothes,” and that was it. I was at Perls for 10 years and then I went to Yale.

HUO: The Perls time was also important because of these amazing encounters you had there with artists between 1968 and 1975. Which were the most important encounters for you during those years?

PB:  I think my most forward movement was with Kenneth Noland, who got me into Emmerich Gallery. From that point on, I never looked back at anything, and I still don’t.

HUO: How did you meet each other, and what did he tell you? 

PB: He thought that I was gifted and could be an important artist. He lived under me at 654 Broadway, and then he went to Emmerich and bought a building on the Bowery. I’d go to the building to see him at the end of the day, and we’d hang out. I figured out there were a lot of people that were great that weren’t so great. John Lennon was there a couple of times, and I didn’t think he was that great because of the way he acted. It was an outrageous space and a lot of famous people were there. I painted every day and worked at Perls every day and traveled every day. Noland took me to Emmerich, I think. All the other white artists called me names and said I was full of shit and this, that, and the other. Then I met Larry Poons, and some gifts were traded back and forth. When I say gifts, I’m talking about ideas. It was nobody Black that was showing at Emmerich on Fifty-Seventh street and Madison Avenue. There was a lot of antagonism about that, about the fact that I would show there, and nasty words, hostilities, and different things like that. That’s what happens. It happened in baseball with Jackie Robinson, it happened in football with a lot of great athletes. It’s what goes on and painting is the same thing. You have to paint every day, like athletes have to practice every day.

I’m looking at the Black artists now that are getting a lot of attention. There’s all these portraits of Black people’s faces and things like that, which I think is kind of stupid. It’s already been done by white artists. Why are they going back and doing it? We made African art and actually invented abstract art. I told Picasso that to his face—that we invented abstract art. Where else did it come from? 

HUO: It’s an interesting question. Gerhard Richter has this idea that we always see figures, even in abstract paintings. 

 

PB: You can find figures in wrinkles, you can see something figurative everywhere if you look hard enough, because human beings are figurative, and that’s why they keep looking at these other figures. If you look at something that’s supposedly abstract, like a tree trunk, for long enough, you could see a figurative movement in it

HUO: What would you say is the first work your the catalogue raisonné? The idea of the catalogue raisonné is interesting, where an artist decides where the art all begins. What would you say is the first painting you were happy with?

PB: The first one I ever did. Simple as that. Anyone that wants to be an artist, if they do something with their hand and they look at it and like it, that’s the end of the story. You try to continue and expand on that concept. Art becomes difficult because most people don’t know anything about art history when it happens to them. Art history’s deeper than what they’re trying to do, including me at that point. Being Black and of African descent, I assume we invented Cubism and so forth. Art history doesn’t think that, but if you take a hard look at African art, you can see it was first.

HUO: Did you talk with Picasso about that?

PB: Little bit. I knew his son, Claude, better than I knew him. He and his wife would come across for dinner. I felt lucky to be able to meet people like that. At that time Black artists weren’t considered artists. We were musicians at that point, not pictorial artists. Of course, we produced some of the greatest musicians of our time, including Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Miles, and Dizzy Gillespie, and on and on.

HUO: You befriended so many great artists at that time. What about Rothko? 

PB: Rothko was great. He used to come and see me at Perls every other day—he lived around the corner—and sit in the gallery all day long. We had this telephone signal. Beep-beep-beep, and that was my signal and I picked the phone up. The girl at the front desk would say, “Can you get Rothko out of the gallery? Perls does not want him sitting in the gallery all day long.” He was a good guy. I liked his paintings and he wasn’t racist. Most of the white artists that had gotten recognition were horrible racists, just horrible. I don’t know why. I don’t know why we were trying to copy them when they were copying us. They were copying African art. Why would they be so uptight about it?

HUO: Some of the artists in the Perls Gallery were racists?

PB: Yes, I think all of them were.

HUO: With the exception of Rothko?

PB: Rothko was a big exception. I was closer to Calder than Rothko. Calder, all he wanted to do was drink some wine and walk around and look at things. He didn’t talk much. Calder took a lot from African art. What the hell was the racism coming from if they’re stealing from us from the beginning? I told them I think you’re robbing us and getting away with it, making a lot of money. 

HUO: This is the moment, I think, to talk about the most important thing, which is your own work. I wanted to know how the spray paintings began. 

PB: The problem was, I had to work eight hours a day with Perls and when I came home at night, I would just spray the canvas, eat dinner, go to sleep, and then go back to work the next day. Spray painting actually helped me get the color on the surface. That’s what it’s about, getting the color down on the surface.

You can’t stand around with a brush talking about, “I’m painting.” I think that’s bullshit. Painting is paint. That’s all. I painted professionally for a company called Rambush. I had to paint the Federal Courthouse and other major places in Manhattan, using two gallons of paint a day with a brush, we weren’t allowed to use a roller. That’s how I lost my shoulder. Now I think that you can get paint down a lot of different ways other than just with a tiny little paintbrush. I painted on an easel when I first left art school, and then I stopped. It didn’t make any sense because you had to adjust the easel, and then you had to stretch the canvas, and then you had to put it on an easel and paint it. That’s too much work to do for something you can’t get any money for. I didn’t really want to do that.

HUO: What is your process with these spray paintings? Do you prepare anything or is it improvised? 

PB: It’s improvised because the color is what’s important. The colors make you see the subject matter at all times. Once you can get the color right, you think you’ve got a painting. That’s what I felt about it. I didn’t have any reason to stand there with a brush and say, “Well, I’m going to paint the nose, the eyes.” I thought that was stupid because the camera takes that over. Photography at that point was coming in very strong and it made no sense to try to copy photography if you’re a painter. A painting’s the paint, and photography’s photography. I was lucky I got to the point where I could handle gallons and gallons of paint a day and I understood it from that point on. Most people buy a gallon of paint, and they still have some of it left six months after they’ve opened it up—but once I open it up, it’s gone.

HUO: When do you realize that a painting is finished? Because this is an improvised process, when does the process come to a halt? 

PB: When there’s no more song in it. When you can’t hear any more music out of it, it’s all over, you have to go onto the next one.

HUO: That’s a beautiful answer. That leads to my next question, about titles. I was looking at Pink Elephant this morning from 1970–71. How do you choose titles for your paintings? 

PB: Well, I recently made over one-hundred paintings, and I never gave credit to the people that gave me the influence to paint them, so I named all the paintings after great musicians whose music I listen to all the time. It doesn’t mean anything, I don’t think.

HUO: You listen to music when you paint?

PB: Yes, I have a great sound system, and I listen to music. I listen to jazz and classical. I’ve noticed there’s no jazz on television anymore, and there’s no jazz musicians that are held as great musicians since Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie are dead, so there’s a big gap there. 

HUO: You paint very fast. I read that you live fast, and you also paint fast. Do you make several a day, or do you work on several paintings at the same time?

PB: I work on four or five paintings at a time, inside and outside. The weather helps me out a lot sometimes. When it rains, it does something to the paintings that I couldn’t do or think about, and I can take it back inside and try to create it over again. Or I just continue to work every day, and if you work every day, you’re bound to get something that’s going to work for you. People have to eat every day, they go to the bathroom every day, why not paint every day?

HUO:  In 1978, the paint chemist Sam Golden invented this acrylic gel paint that you used. Moholy-Nagy says, “New stuff gets invented, and then the artist brings it immediately into their work.” 

PB: I tamper with it every now and then. The Golden paint that I use, there’s so many different chemicals that you can put into that paint, it changes the whole look of paintings that hadn’t been seen before, ever, depending on how you use it.

HUO: Over the years you started to bring 3D elements into the paintings, collaging in objects or elements. How did that happen?

PB: I don’t know about collage, but the elements are stainless steel and different things that I like to see in the water. Or if you look in deep space, you can see stuff like that. It’s strange. I can’t identify all the things I do because I’m not sure why I do them.

HUO: Can you tell us about your first show at Emmerich? You had six shows there.

PB: The first show was on Fifty-Seventh Street and Madison Avenue with André Emmerich, which no other Black person had ever done before. The noted white artists came to the opening and they stood in the hallway. None of them would come inside and look at the paintings, which I thought was pretty funny. 

HUO: I’d like to talk about yet another dimension of your practice, which is curating. Virginia Jaramillo said The De Luxe Show was so important because it was the first show in American art history that was racially integrated. Can you talk a little bit about your vision for the show? You said that what the work has in common is that it’s good, hard abstraction.

PB: Very few Black people or any minorities were making abstract paintings [in the 1970s]. I got to see who was doing what they were doing, and I used the concept of Black artists that were painting abstract pictures, like Sam Gilliam and Virginia Jaramillo. 

HUO: Why did you call it The De Luxe Show?

PB: Because there was a movie theater in the ghetto of Houston, Texas, called the De Luxe.

HUO: Can you talk a little bit more about the criteria for selection in the show? Because you said once that good, hard abstraction is abstraction that artists have actually suffered for. 

PB: Well, galleries wouldn’t show them. The galleries were only showing regular paintings at that time, or landscapes. Clyfford Still, I think, was the first one to break through with Pollock to show abstract paintings in New York. It was very hard to go in galleries. I worked at Perls for ten years, and only one Black person came in. In ten years. With her husband. I don’t know any white artists who were upset about not being in The De Luxe Show.

HUO: You wanted to have serious painters in the show?

PB: Yes. People who want to be artists instead of bullshit. You go to art school, you see them all the time dragging their little case around, they’re not interested in painting, they’re interested in making friends and having something to do.

HUO: Without history it creates these boxes. For example, there’s Arte Povera and whenever I speak to an Arte Povera artist, they say we are not really Arte Povera artists. Very often they’re like constructs of our history. Of course, with these artists in The De Luxe Show, sometimes they’re associated with Hard-edge, sometimes with Color Field. What do you think of such categories? Are they artificial or is there something to them?

PB: I think it’s artificial. That’s all. I don’t think they understand anything about Color Field. Clement Greenberg invented color for painting. I saw this much. He was a very special person. He wasn’t liked by galleries. I met him through Noland. Greenberg was interested in non-figurative paintings. If you’re a pretty girl and painting figuratively, I think he might have been interested in those, but that’s about it. He didn’t want to write about it or anything like that.

HUO: You are a painter, a curator, an art dealer, a sculptor, a musician, and a teacher. I want to ask you about this important dimension of being a teacher. In 1975, you taught at Franconia College and at the time, Leon Botstein, whom I know from Bard, was the dean. How did you start to teach? What prompted you to teach? What did you advise these young artists?

PB: I don’t know how I got that job. The students that I had, a lot of them weren’t interested in doing anything but smoking drugs and pretending to paint. Some of them got important from that. The rest of them I never heard of since. 

HUO: How do you teach? How can one teach?

PB: With a lot of canvas and a lot of paint and a big smile on their face. Put the paint on the canvas and if you see something you relate to, continue it. If you can’t relate to it, try it again. That’s about it.

HUO: Then, in the 1980s, you were in South Africa. What prompted you to move to South Africa? There’s this amazing abstract painting context there. 

PB: Someone asked me if I would I go to South Africa as a teacher. I said I would do it for two or three months. I went and I made sculpture at first and everyone made fun of that and laughed. Then a big American institution put a big piece of my sculpture in front of a building. That worked for a while. It was very dangerous in South Africa when I was there. I was in a restaurant eating lunch one day and I saw a man throw another man out through a second-story window, killing him.

HUO: What prompted you to spend so much time there?

PB: I was working on a piece of sculpture. I made some sculpture and left. That was the most important thing for me—a steel company donated enormous amounts of steel to me, and welders. I got what I wanted done and I left.

HUO: Where are the sculptures now?

PB: Desmond Tutu dedicated one of them to something and then it disappeared. It disappeared in South Africa. Some people have told me that it’s on a farm or ranch or some very wealthy person’s house or something like that. I don’t know. I want it back in America. I’ve asked for it several times. It’s a big sculpture made out of steel. I painted it red because I didn’t want the steel to rot. All the South Africans said, “Why is it called Silver Dawn if it’s red?” I said, “That’s just a primer,” and I left.

HUO: I hear that you’re doing sculpture now, as well.

PB: Yes, I’m continuing. I have some skill, but I need a welder.

HUO: You were also back in the US in the 1980s. Studios play an important role, very often the work is so connected to the space, but the spaces are also where the artist’s encounter happens as well. We began by talking about the house with twenty-seven rooms. Then, of course, you had this amazing place in New York near Broadway opposite the St. Andrean Bar. Then later in the ’80s, you had the firehouse, and these places are very important because they have to do with communion. 

PB: The Broadway studio was terrific, a huge space, six-thousand square feet, and I shared it with William T. Williams. Then I moved next door, and that was a big space too, but I didn’t paint so well in it. I didn’t like it. Then I moved to the firehouse, and it was stolen from me by Downtown Television, and then I lived in the streets. My wife found me, and I got married. I was sleeping in doorways and abandoned cars for four or five months.

HUO: They stole the firehouse from you because you had a fixed rent deal there. They just took it.

PB: Yes, they took it. The great British architect Paul Heyer designed it for me. He was a teacher at Pratt Institute. He did several places for me. New Hampshire, a place on Jane Street, and the firehouse.

HUO: There is another very important place for you, which is where you’ve been for a long time: upstate. You work in the countryside.

PB: Yes, the house is three-hundred-and-twenty years old and it’s stone and I paint in a container. I just received a lot of paint from my dealer and now there’s no room to paint, so I need two more containers. That’s the deal. That’s what I’m working on now so I can go to work as soon as the sun starts to shine.

HUO: I have a last question, which is the only recurring question in all my interviews. We know a great deal about architects’ unrealized projects, because they often publish their unrealized projects. We know almost nothing about artists’ unrealized projects, but if we know about them, we can maybe help to make them happen. Of course, there are many reasons why a project is unrealized—it could be too big, a dream, too expensive, too time-intensive. Could you tell us a little bit about some of your unrealized projects? Your dreams, things that haven’t happened yet that you would love to do.

PB: I would like to have two more studios, containers, and I want to start making sculpture and bigger paintings. That’s about it. I’m 80 years old and I think that I can continue on with that until I’m gone.