“Crushing My Enemies” is Todd Van Buskirk’s newest novel, completely appropriated from an interview found in the American Archive Oral History Program, started in 1958 to document the history of the visual arts in the United States, primarily through interviews with artists, historians, dealers, critics, and others. This is an interview with painter Tom Wesselmann, conducted 1984 Jan 3-1984 Feb. 8, by Irving Sandler, for the Archives of American Art. Wesselmann speaks of his family, childhood and education; his U.S. Army service; his early interest in art and drawing; the influence of humor; going to the Cooper Union School on the GI bill; artists who influenced him in his early career; experiences which changed him; early experiments with collage; his first awareness of pop art; collage technique; his affiliation with the Tanager Gallery; his early nudes; eroticism in his paintings; politics and art. He recalls Alex Katz and Jim Dine. Excerpt: TW: First of all in the second year I was still a cartoonist. I didn't know about painting. I really didn't know about it. When I started painting -- I think my first painting was more like Paul Klee than anyone. I didn't know what I was doing. I had no point of view. I hadn't seen paintings. I hadn't seen anything. I hadn't gone to galleries yet or to museums. But as the year progressed I began to get a little bit drawn into painting and I decided to take a walk to Tenth Street. I think because Alex Katz was having a show then and I saw those little collages. IS: Was he a teacher? TW: No. I don't know quite why I knew him, except that he did teach at Greene Camp. He was an assistant at Greene Camp that year. As a matter of fact, maybe I saw his show after that. I've lost my sense of time. Alex, as I said in my book, was very important to me. We went to Greene Camp the end of the second year and did landscapes, real landscapes. That was the first time I had taken a serious position in relation to art. Up until this time I was still a cartoonist; I wasn't a painter. I was riding right on the surface of art school. I went away to Greene Camp. It was raining for the first five days and we were painting outside from inside. I'm painting this tree - I'm trying to design this silly tree. And Alex gets frustrated trying to explain something to me, and takes the brush from my hand and says, "This way; this is what I mean." And he showed me something -- and all of a sudden with that one thing I understood the difference between painting and design. I'd been designing all this time. Suddenly I thought, "What an enlightening feeling! Now I know!" You don't design a painting; you create a painting out of some other thing. You don't design it. So I started to paint with a kind of earnestness about those landscapes. And by the time of the end of the spring term I felt like I was going to be a painter. In the two weeks I made that kind of transition, and I was proud of what I had done. I came back from Greene Camp, took my easel and canvas and went up to Westchester and sat down to paint landscape one day and realized that I didn't have a clue. I was confronting reality. I didn't know what I was doing. I was nothing, nothing. It was at that point that I kind of decided that I couldn't be a painter. I was going to have to wind up in advertising design if I couldn't make it in cartooning. My personal crisis at this time has probably been building within me. I had a conflict about the marriage; what to do about being a painter. I realized that, if I didn't have a strong enough need to paint, there was no sense even bothering. I didn't think I had that much need. That was a serious issue, by the way -- feeling that I didn't have a need to be an artist, that it was a choice. It was like choosing a career, and I don't think you choose to be an artist that way; you're driven to it. You have to do it. But the fact was that I couldn't make the clear commitment within myself. I felt depressed because I was going to do something I didn't want to do -- advertising design. By this time I'd lost my cartooning ability because I'd lost my sense of humor. I kind of skipped ahead a little bit. The thing is, I got so involved in my intellectual personal crisis that it became my delayed adolescent rebellion. I never had an adolescent rebellion; I never challenged anything, anything! Oh, maybe while I was in college. While I'm on that subject, it was an early lesson. I went to a little college named Hiram. IS: Yes, you mentioned that. TW: I don't think I mentioned anything about the religious class. IS: No. TW: I guess it was a trivial detail, but it did tell me something about the world. It was one of the early lessons I got. We had to write a term paper about our feelings about God, I guess, including things like the hereafter and all sorts of stuff. And I really laid it on the line, the way I felt. I still acknowledged that there might be God and all that, but couldn't go very far with all that stuff I'd gotten in class. It was a church kind of school. My roommate, who was my best friend who was a complete con man, wrote a whole lot of bullshit because he knew what they wanted to hear, got an A. I got either a C or a D. I thought it was a very good paper and I really wrote it from the heart. But the guy said -- wrote on the paper, said, "These are dangerous views." Dangerous views! So, back to Cooper Union and New York City and trying to make this decision about marriage and painting and throwing out God and finally deciding, yes -- throwing out God. John Dewey had a lot of intellectual clout with me,plus my own feelings. I've kind of gotten lost here. Rambling too much. IS: No, no. You were talking about this whole sort of coming together . . . . TW: Let me go back just for a moment. The problem with my sense of humor was that I'd gotten so involved in serious matters in my own personal crisis that I lost my ability or any desire to make fun. So I couldn't be a cartoonist if I'd lost that. I lost touch with it, walking on the streets now, deadly serious about life for the first time, on fire by the end of the third year toward graduation. I was on fire. The good thing about Cooper -- they didn't teach us very much, but they set us on fire to do something. And I was really on fire by the time I graduated. I decided I wanted to be an artist. My fear was that I didn't need to be an artist. So there was this adolescent kind of self-created conflict. I think the separation from my wife . . . . IS: That took place after you graduated? TW: Yes. Literally immediately, and it was almost ridiculous in its timing. IS: And when did you go into analysis? Before that? TW: After that. I'd gone to see an analyst in Brooklyn, a guy named Rockala which was a hideous name for a hideous man! He spent a session with me and said, "You don't need psychotherapy; you need shock treatment." That was the end of that. I wasn't about to have electrodes. He was quite dead wrong. I did need psychotherapy, but not from a guy like him. But he said to me, "If you don't come to me, your marriage will be through in a very short time." Which was true. I think I must have unconsciously decided that anyway. IS: But that all took place after the psychoanalysis. TW: The visit to that first psychiatrist was in Brooklyn where we lived for two years. I was still in art school; no psychoanalysis yet. The marriage breaks up. It was very upsetting to me in two ways: because it was so cold on my part -- it was something I knew I had to do; it was cold, awfully cold. So I felt badly about it. I began psychoanalysis because I think I was somewhat desperate. Ah, yes. O.K. Teaching school. I spent that first summer after graduation from Cooper Union, taking required classes to be a school teacher. IS: Where were you teaching then? TW: Hunter College. They were the basic education courses to be a teacher. I found the courses quite stimulating. I liked them. I just had a hard time getting used to this strange existence, on my own for the first time ever, my own apartment. Desperately lonely. I didn't know anybody. Anybody I did know was out of town for the summer. The place was in the village, a studio about ten feet square. I need to get my bearings here. O.K. So I started teaching school and I began having these anxiety attacks about teaching. Jimmy Dine told me about a friend, I forget who it was, but this friend was having severe trouble emotionally, so severe that he was even having trouble controlling his bladder and he'd gone to a psychoanalyst. That literally saved his life. He said this psychoanalyst was terrific. So I got his name and I tried him, and he was very good. He was so good that he assumed kind of a major role in my life from the point of view that he was brilliant, I thought. He was a brilliant man intellectually in his ability to deal with intellectual and emotional things at the same time. And to make poetry of it. I mean poetry -- to this day I regard psychoanalysis as kind of a branch of poetry. IS: Yes. I regard it as a branch of history and art. - Todd Van Buskirk
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