At the end of my summer in P-Town one of the other art students asked me for a ride back to New York. So I said yes. Well why not? He was the big cheese of our little summer school. Had a Fullbright for the coming year. He was going to Brussels. A country that is half French and half Walloon, whatever that is. It’s a very gray country. It always seems to be about fifty-two degrees (Fahrenheit, that is) and raining. At least that’s the way it is in Brussels. There are lots of bankers in Brussels. It doesn’t seem like a real center for the arts. But that’s where the Fullbright people sent him to paint for a year.

He did big canvases. It was during that whole abstract expressionist time when Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning and Franz Kline and all those temperamental self-destructive guys were driving through globs of paint and then driving their cars over huge canvases in their garages out on Long Island. Those were heady times in the art world.

It was also a very macho time. I can remember only three women artists who were getting any recognition at all. There was Georgia O’Keefe, of course. She was already famous in a certain segment of the population. At least in the ART WORLD. And there was Helen Frankenthaler, but she was only famous in smaller art circles, which are really pathetically small. Marisol was well known in art circles, too, because she made large sculptures out of wood. They were all groups of people, like one was a wedding party with all the wedding members – the mother of the bride and the father of the bride and the bride and groom and the maid of honor and best man and all the others including the ring bearer, a little carved out girl carrying a pillow with the ring painted on it. All the figures were attached to each other – actually carved out of one huge chunk of wood I think – and they were all painted up in their ceremonial wedding outfits. And Marisol (she had no first or last name, long before Cher) had painted her own face on all the wedding party members. She did that on all her sculptures in those days. I have no idea what she’s doing now.

One other woman got recognized not too long after that – Louise Nevelson. She made wall-size wood assemblages. Really big ones. I never liked them. But she got pretty famous. She had a rich husband.

Helen Frankenthaler was married to Robert Motherwell, who taught at Columbia and also painted huge canvases with large blotches on them. I never liked his work at all. He was very famous among the arty set too. Collectors paid lots of money for his wall-size art. You can see it in a lot of museums. I still don’t get it.

I get Jackson Pollock. He was great. Until he drove his car head on into a tree. De Kooning was great too. He was the only one of that group of men who lived to see his old age. Mark Rothko – well, nobody really knows what happened to him. But he sure could paint. That man was a painting god.

This was before Pop Art got really big. But that summer, Pop Art was just beginning to catch on and the two New York painters who ran the art school were feeling a bit threatened by it. I realized this when they kept asking all the young students what they thought of it.

They even asked me.