Memoir of Creativity, A

A Memoir of Creativity unites art theory, politics, journalism & memoir into a fluid whole. Its point of departure is a theory about abstract painting that defies the dictionary. Piri Halasz argues that instead of being non-representational, abstract painting can be seen as a new, “multireferential” form of representation, and tells how she arrived at this theory from varied personal and professional experiences. Among these experiences:

o Her 13 years at Time: how the magazine worked, its epic battle with Newsweek in the ‘60s, what it taught her about the economy; how she rose from research to writing, and how she became the

o First woman in living memory to write a cover story for Time---the famous one on “Swinging London;”

o Her initiation into the art world, her meeting with the distinguished but controversial critic, Clement Greenberg, her departure from Time, and subsequent career in graduate school, with

o A portrait of Greenberg, the first not to demonize nor lionize but simply to humanize him, followed by

o A look back at the ‘60s, the antiwar movement as seen in historical perspective, plus its long-term effects on intellectual developments & art history; also

o How print media (major & minor) dealt with abstract expressionism in the ‘50s & pop art in the ‘60s

o A psycho-economic insight into how the U.S. electorate had lost its “disenfranchised left” & become increasingly conservative up to and through 9/11, with further insight into why this led to an overexpansion of the economy & subsequent plunge into depression in 2007-08;

o Throughout, tips on creativity, as exemplified in “Swinging London,” “multireferential imagery, “ and “the disenfranchised left,” with further hints to readers on how to develop their own creative gifts

o FINALLY, setting American art of the past half century into a psycho-economic framework.

“A fresh and revealing account of the American art, art history, and journalism of the past half-century through the eyes of a participant.....” Terry Fenton, Artist, Author: Kenneth Noland, Sir Anthony Caro

“A native New Yorker, Halasz was one of the first women elevated from researcher to writer at Time, in the years just before the feminist movement of the 1970s....this fascinating chronicle of an intellectual coming of age in America tells how.... she eventually arrives at her current work as a passionate – and fierce – art critic…” Katherine B. Crum, President, Art Museum Partnership

“Early on, A Memoir of Creativity takes us deep inside New York’s publishing world, which Halasz recreates for us with authority and detail. Her discussion of the chain of command, levels of creative activity, and interplay of personal and professional motives at Time may very well become a classic essay on how a great magazine was produced. Equally impressive is the author’s quest to define and clarify abstract expressionism amidst the many important movements in modern art. A Memoir especially comes to life when Halasz recounts her dealings with the leading artists and art critics of her time .At once informative, witty, outrageously honest and distinguished by just the right amount of irony, this book should be of interest to many readers.” Leigh Winser, Professor of English, Seton Hall University

Piri Halasz is an independent scholar who received her MA and PhD in art history from Columbia University. She has taught at Columbia, Hunter College, and Bethany College, among other schools, as well as publishing more than 200 hard copy articles in Arts, ARTnews, Smithsonian, NYArts, and elsewhere.

Halasz’s online column of art criticism, From the Mayor’s Doorstep, is at http://piri.home.mindspring.com, where interested readers can also find posted the table of contents, introduction and index of names in A Memoir of Creativity. The book is available at barnesandnoble.com, books-a-million.com and amazon.com.

A Memoir of Creativity chronicles one woman’s life journey as she derives a theory, revealing meaning in abstract painting, from varied personal and professional experiences, and tells how she locates this theory within a broader social context.

In 1966, Piri Halasz became the first woman within living memory to write a cover story for Time (and not just any cover story, either: the notorious one on “Swinging London”). With wit and wisdom, she provides a glimpse into her “red-diaper” childhood, as well as reporting on her climb at Time from research to the writing staff. Vividly, she describes her controversial career as a female journalist during the sixties, offering an inside view of newsweekly rivalries during that tempestuous decade. Halasz then moves on to her initiation into the art world, her lively interaction with some of its most distinguished denizens and her immersion in graduate school. She concludes with what she has learned about art, art history, and history itself since the early eighties, applying that knowledge to better understand the twenty-first century. Through sharing her life story, Halasz encourages others to remain open to new experiences, to try different ways of seeing, and to use creativity to tackle hurdles.

Manhattanite Piri Halasz majored in English at Barnard and earned a PhD in art history from Columbia. In between, she worked at Time for thirteen years, and has since taught and published over two hundred freelance hard-copy articles. Her webzine From the Mayor’s Doorstep is at http://piri.home.mindspring.com. She enjoys theater, charades, and bridge.

Excerpt from TLS, the London Times Literary Supplement, 23 October 2009 (Reviewer: Keith Miller)

This self-published memoir….contains about three potentially interesting shorter narratives….As a young reporter on Time, [Halasz] sent dispatches home from Swinging London in the mid-60s. As an art historian, critic and blogger, she has formulated and promoted a distinctive theory of ‘multireferentiality’….the book contains strong insights and, in places, good writing….Halasz’s journalistic skills…stand out....

Introduction: What This Book Is About

(2008)

THIS BOOK IS a memoir, but not written for the usual reasons. True, my mother may have been a bit difficult, but who can bear a grudge for sixty years? She gave me life (and along with the negatives came many other positives). I’ve no husband or children, so none of them have suffered from addictions, horrible ordeals, or diseases. Nor have I—except for maybe twenty-five puffs of marijuana back in the Ancient World of 1969 to 1972, all the drugs I’ve taken were prescription pharmaceuticals, and only in prescribed dosages. True, I’ve had mental problems, but isn’t this rather common? Seems like every time I research mental illness, I read about a new book by somebody with depression or bipolar disorder, and my symptoms have mostly been mild and infrequent by comparison with those tales of woe. I’ve never been a threat to myself or others (except perhaps for occasional bashful bachelors who panic when I get manic and come on to them strong). No way can I be classed as a celebrity. Maybe I’m not completely unknown within that curious little subcommunity in American society that we call “the art world,” but my fifteen minutes of fame in the larger society (national and international) came again in the Ancient World of 1966, when Time, the weekly newsmagazine, ran a picture of me up front. I’d written a cover story for it on “Swinging London.” The story was controversial then, and has survived surprisingly well, but that’s still not why I wrote this book. So—what is?

Those who must have categories might want to call this an “issue memoir.” After the London cover, I was assigned in 1967 to write Time’s Art page, and after doing this for thirty months, I cared more about art than I did about Time. Particularly, I cared about the arcane subject of abstract painting, and an art critic named Clement Greenberg, whose taste in abstract painting of the ’60s was more arcane to many than abstract painting itself. I thereupon quit Time in 1969 and eventually went back to graduate school, taking my PhD in art history from Columbia University in 1982. One year later, I developed a radical theory that finds meaning and subject matter in abstract painting, and introduced it in an article in Arts Magazine in 1983. I wrote this book because I want the theory to become more widely accepted, in hopes of making both abstract painting in general, and Greenberg’s kind of abstract painting in particular, more broadly accessible, but I’ve wound up presenting my ideas very differently from the way I originally expected.

I had envisaged an art-historical tract dealing exclusively with my theory. This instead is a three-part narrative telling how I developed it from varied personal and professional experience, and how I fit it into a broader political and cultural context. Part One, after a chapter on my progressive childhood, deals with my first ten years on Time, then a conservative magazine. I show how it was put out, how I started as a researcher, especially in its Business section, and how I graduated to the writing staff, first in two gossip sections, then in foreign news. As one of few women writing for Time in the ’60s, I see it differently from the many men who’ve done books about it. As the first woman within living memory to write a cover story for Time, at a moment when Time was especially unpopular, I became a bit of a media target. How I got to write that cover, and the response it evoked, form the climax of Part One.

Part Two takes me from my initiation into art on through the lengthy experience of leaving Time. Leaving was so traumatic that I escaped into a dream world for two years, ending (for three weeks) in a London mental ward before returning to reality. As I knew little about art in 1967, I introduce my readers to the subject as I learned about it (this procedure may help educate readers as innocent as I was). I tell of the people I became friendly with in the art world (especially Greenberg), and of what I learned in grad school. The climax to Part Two is the discovery of my theory in 1983.

Part Three brings me up to the twenty-first century, and tells what I’ve learned about art, art history and history itself since 1983. It shows how writing this book made me look back on the times I’d lived through, and rethink them. Part Three wasn’t envisaged when I started the book, but creating it forced me to plug gaps in my knowledge of art history and sociopolitical history that led to a broader and (I like to think) deeper understanding of both. The climax to Part Three is a startling insight into the U.S. electorate that came to me in 2001, triggered by the appalling swing to the right of the body politic in the wake of 9/11. While substantiating this insight, I learned that all three climaxes exemplified the creative process of problem solving, as described by Graham Wallas and others, so in addition, the book became a study in creativity.

Now to my theory of abstract painting. Normally, abstract painting is opposed to representational painting. People assume that if a painting is a pure abstraction (what some call a non-objective painting), it doesn’t represent or refer to any object in the natural world. My eleventh edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (2003) defines “abstract (painting)” as “having only intrinsic form with little or no attempt at pictorial representation or narrative content.” Grove’s 34-volume The Dictionary of Art, published in 1996 and updated online, as of June 2008 still defined “abstract art ” as “term applied in its strictest sense to forms of 20th-century Western art that reject representation and have no starting- or finishing-point in nature.” Still, dictionaries are the work of human hands. At best, they’re indices of usage, a means of facilitating communication between people trying to speak the same language. In this case, they need revision. There can be another definition for an abstract painting, even a pure abstraction. Maybe not every one of them, but many, can be seen as a new, richer form of representation (or mimesis, a Greek term primarily meaning “the imitation of life”).

In a traditional representational painting, each object on the surface of the canvas refers to a single object in external nature. You see an apple in a Cézanne, and, however many secondary or tertiary meanings a scholar might find in that apple, primarily it corresponds to an apple in external nature: that is to say, the painting is uni-referential. In an abstract painting, the image is ambiguous. It refers to or looks a little bit like a lot of things, but not a lot like any one thing, so one viewer may be reminded of one object in external reality, and another viewer, of another object. The way I say this is that this abstract panting is multireferential.

You may protest that my idea makes an abstract painting like a Rorschach inkblot: you can see anything you want in it. But not even with a Rorschach blot can you see anything you want (if you’re reasonably sane and normal). The ten blots in the test were chosen because each offers a different set of possibilities. In books for psychologists interpreting these tests are lists of “popular responses” to each blot, objects that people most often see in them, and are therefore to a degree inherent in the image. Abstract art has a similar range of possibilities. Let me show what I mean.

Figure 1 shows the difference between a traditional representational painting, a semiabstract one and a pure abstraction. A, on the left, shows a tree with trunk, branches and foliage. This is traditional representation, uni-referential imagery, a one-on-one image. In B, the foliage is gone, leaving trunk and branches. It could still be a tree, but also a fork, candelabrum or Triton’s weapon. This semiabstract image can suggest or refer to more than one thing, but still has enough detail so the number of allusions is limited. Giving a title to such a painting limits the allusions further. If I’d called this picture “a fork,” it would have been harder for you to see the tree or candelabrum. With C, I’ve taken away the branches and left a vertical line. This is a pure abstraction, very multireferential. It could be a tree, but also a knife, person, obelisk, building, phallus, and dozens of other things, but it’s never going to suggest a horizon line, or a person lying down (for most people, anyway). You’d need a horizontal line for that, just as you’d need a circle if you wanted to suggest a doughnut. If every abstract painting suggested an infinite number of objects, all would look exactly alike.

I further maintain that the reason viewers are reminded of certain objects by an abstract painting is that the artist herself or himself has seen such objects, or seen objects similar to what the painting’s viewers have seen. Nobody can paint a picture of something he or she has never seen, so the abstract painting becomes a synthesis or composite of many things the artist has seen—not everything, but many things that for one or another reason are relevant to that particular artist’s personality. In other words, not only the artist’s feelings about things seen in the external world, but images of the things themselves are communicated to viewers through the painting. The artist wasn’t aware of embedding these images in the painting, and couldn’t have done so if she or he had been trying to do it. The abstract painting communicates so many different images to so many different people because the artist (again without being aware of doing so) has synthesized these many images of nature within her or his unconscious, and presented this synthesis as one ambiguous, abstract image on the canvas. (Some people have a problem with the concept of the unconscious. If that’s your problem, then substitute the word “memory” for “unconscious” in the following paragraphs. If you have trouble with the concept of “memory,” too, then this book may not be for you.)

Every artist (and every human) has a vast storehouse of images in his or her unconscious (or memory), things that she or he has seen. All artists (like all humans) synthesize these images within their unconsciouses. You can identify a tree as a tree, even if you’re seeing one you’ve never seen before, because you’ve seen so many other trees. All these sightings have caused images of different trees to be stored within your unconscious, and synthesized into a composite picture of what a tree can look like. When you see a new tree, your mind compares it with the many different images of trees that it has previously assimilated, enabling you to identify the sight you have never before seen as a tree (people who through surgery have been enabled to see for the first time after they’re grown often can’t recognize what they’re seeing).

Abstract artists differ from most of us in that they can synthesize many images stored at the back of their minds to a far higher degree; they can even combine disparate, often diametrically opposed images into composite painted images whose components refer back to their origins only in a very simplified, stylized way. I haven’t yet figured out how they do it, but the fact that they do at the moment is enough for me.

When I explain this theory in conversation, people outside the art world often get it immediately—so immediately that they are apt to exclaim, “But that’s so obvious!” Then they look at me suspiciously, and ask, “Are you sure nobody else has thought of this before?’‘ Proving a negative is practically impossible. As a Renaissance scholar of my acquaintance remarks, you are always going to be up against the Norwegian Festschrift, the obscure article that somebody else will know about, even if you don’t. Abstract painting has been with us for nearly a century. Thousands of books and articles have been written about it. I haven’t read more than a fraction of them, but I have read some writing from the ’60s to the ’80s by scholars dealing with subject matter in abstraction. I’ll discuss it in more detail further on. Here I’ll just say that nothing I’ve read has offered multireferential imagery as a general principle in abstraction, incorporating objects from the natural world that have been assimilated by the artist’s unconscious, and synthesized in that unconscious into an ambiguous, abstract image on the picture plane through which different objects in the natural world are suggested to different viewers. Nor has any of this writing applied its theories to a range of artists, as I’ve done, publishing my ideas in relation to Picasso, Jackson Pollock, and two lesser-known artists (Friedel Dzubas and Jules Olitski). If anybody else has done what I’ve done (and before I did), it hasn’t made a dent, as those dictionary definitions attest.

Many people like the idea that an abstract painting depicts nothing. As this concept has never had much appeal for me, I find myself at a loss to explain it adequately, but I suspect that in some (if not all) cases, the appeal may be almost mystical: one’s ability to admire a painting about nothing becomes proof of one’s capacity to accept the reality of all things unseen. For artists, the thrill may lie more in discovery. This view was expressed by a very great abstract artist, Helen Frankenthaler, when I interviewed her for Time in 1969. She described how, in the early 1950s, when she was young, she and her then boyfriend, Greenberg, would go to the country, set up easels, and paint the landscapes they saw before them, in a style that inevitably owed much to nineteenth-century French impressionism. Afterwards, they’d return to Manhattan, and Frankenthaler would paint abstracts in her studio. “The landscapes were the discipline, the abstracts were the freedom and the joy,” she recalled. “Though I enjoyed the discipline, one was confined within a tradition that was déjà vu. For me, just about everything has been said about landscapes, but I don’t think everything has been said in terms of colors and shapes.”

Frankenthaler’s abstractions have had many admirers, but from all I’ve seen, in the four decades that I’ve followed art, there are and have always been many more people for whom the apparent lack of subject matter in an abstract painting is a drawback: while they may respect the abstraction, they find it difficult or impossible to love. That fact, more than any other, explains to me the giant reaction against abstract expressionism in the early ’60s, after a decade when it had reigned as the avant-garde. This reaction against abstract expressionism (which was really a reaction against abstraction in general) relegated the abstract art made after 1960 (even that of Frankenthaler) to a secondary role within the art world, condemning most of it to near oblivion in America at large, and fundamentally altering our entire society’s way of looking at and evaluating not only art but culture in general.

In future chapters, I’ll consider that reaction, away from the multireferential and back into the uni-referential, together with its implications. Here I’ll merely say that it has led to many forms of uni-referential art that, despite superficial novelty, are to me fundamentally backward-looking. To me, abstract art (or, any rate, the best abstract art) is still the most daring, truly avant-garde art style that we have. But in this, I’m in the minority. To lovers of the status quo, who vastly outnumber me and the people who share my taste, we’re the old-fashioned ones. It’s a real looking-glass situation.

My theory of abstract painting developed out of my grad school experience, seeing how little time my professors devoted to abstract painting, and how limited was what they could say about it. I hoped to provide a teaching tool to rectify the situation, so I planned a theoretical book for academics to be published by a university press. Seeking funding, I applied during the 1993–94 academic year for a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. I didn’t get it, but since the NEH is a government agency, I could ask to see readers’ reports on my application. Once I saw them, I began to suspect I’d have to rethink my book. The readers were presumably typical of the prevailing esthetic in academia, one in line with the prevailing esthetic in the contemporary art world. They didn’t really understand what I was trying to do. To the extent that they did understand it, they didn’t want it. I shall analyze these responses more in Part Three; all I need to share here is that they told me no university press was going to buy the book I’d proposed to the NEH. In 1995, I sent a proposal for a similar book to a non-academic art book publisher. It, too, was rejected, and again I got hold of one of the readers’ reports. Same ignorance and negativity.

I was already thinking of turning the theoretical tract into a memoir telling how I’d developed the theory out of many past experiences. I hoped this approach might make the theory more accessible to art historians. Equally importantly, I hoped that the material about Time might enable me to sell the book to a trade publisher. Shortly after I’d left Time, I’d tried to make a nonfiction novel out of my experiences there, and though I hadn’t been able to sell it, trade publishers had been willing to read it. I knew that trade publishers weren’t interested in art theory, but I thought that a memoir would enable me to prattle on about the art world people I’d known (in addition to all the Time types). Weren’t books about artists and their bohemian life styles reasonably popular?

By January 2006, I had a completed manuscript (or so I thought, though obviously it’s been revised since). I started trying to sell it. Since I thought that my art-in-context approach might be more academically acceptable than an art-as-theory approach, I sent proposals to the three university presses most likely to publish a book like mine. One sent me a form letter of rejection after a week. The second kept my proposal for a month (leading me to hope that they’d sent it out to readers). Then I got another form letter of rejection. The third kept the proposal six weeks, then sent a letter written by a real person telling me that my proposal wasn’t “scholarly” enough. This (I suppose) is a valid objection, to the extent that I’ve long since outgrown some conventions of the academic niche that I occupied in grad school, just as I’d earlier outgrown my niche on Time. Today, I see myself as an independent scholar (and art critic), equidistant from journalism and academia, freer to use the tools of each to critique the other, therefore capable of more substantive comments on both. Both disciplines are dedicated to the gathering of information and the dissemination of knowledge. Both have been powerfully affected by changing technology since I was closest to them. My hope is that students of both will be able to take the lessons I learned in the print world, and apply them to a world dominated by cyberspace.

I sent letters of enquiry to seven or eight literary agents. None were interested, the two most honest admitting that they didn’t know enough about art to be able to sell my book. (The retired editor for an art-book publisher with whom I had an e-mail correspondence told me that few books he’d worked on were represented by agents, and that most agents don’t handle art books because they so rarely earn much money.) I sent six letters of enquiry to editors in trade houses whom I’d selected because they’d worked on books about art. Enclosed were self-addressed, stamped postcards with three boxes to check: 1) Yes, I’d like to see the manuscript; 2) Yes, I’d like to see a proposal, and 3) Thanks but no thanks. Five out of the six sent back the postcard with box 3 checked. One, whom I shall call Editor P, checked box 1.

Editor P kept my manuscript for three months, then returned it with a warm note saying that I’d blended the genres to create an esthetic whole, and gone far toward defying the received wisdom on abstract painting, but it wasn’t right for his list. P probably knows more about art than anybody else in trade publishing (he has relatives in the business). When I got his note, I said to myself, if he isn’t going to publish my book, nobody else in trade publishing will, either. My fantasy is that he regretfully decided that publishing it didn’t make economic sense. I know that trade publishing these days is big business. Virtually all the major houses are owned by big companies who demand that every book make quantities of money. This can only be done by selling many copies. To judge from what art books get published by trade houses, the only ones that might sell enough copies to justify publication are a) about a famous artist, b) by a famous critic, and c) with lots of pretty, almost invariably representational pictures. My book meets none of these criteria.

People in publishing will tell you that smaller “independent” houses are willing to make only a little money by publishing a book with shorter press runs, but having cased displays by small presses and independents at several book fairs, I’ve found that to the minimal extent that they publish art books at all, they subscribe to the common fallacy that the prevailing art-world esthetic is what’s “revolutionary” in art, whereas abstract painting is old-hat. Heigh-ho! I’ve heard stories about books rejected by thirty-six publishers, and then become bestsellers when published by the thirty-seventh, but I didn’t want to spend the years needed for that process. The material in my closing chapters was already getting dated, and the longer I waited, the more rewriting I’d have to do. That’s why I signed a contract with iUniverse, a publishing house that I pay to put out my book. I’ll get royalties from every copy sold, but the odds are overwhelming that I will at best turn a trivial profit. I still have something to say that needs to be said, and I don’t know any other way of getting it into print.

In the old days, what I’m doing was known as vanity publishing. Today, it’s called self-publishing. The two differ in procedure and content. In vanity publishing, a publisher printed a few hundred or thousand copies, and left the author with few ways of disposing of them beyond selling or giving them to family and friends. Self-publishing is “print on demand.” Thanks to improved technology, iUniverse will only print a copy of my book when somebody has placed an order to buy it. This saves money. Thanks to the Web, my book can be bought beyond my immediate circle (assuming I can get word out that it exists, though many publications refuse to review self-published books, and “brick and mortar” bookstores rarely stock them).

Self-published books may also differ from traditional vanity publishing in terms of content. The prevailing attitude toward both is that they’re written by untalented amateurs who can’t compete in the real world of publishing, and that because a “legit” publisher isn’t putting them out, they’re not worth reviewing, buying, or reading. Many self-published books are the work of untalented amateurs, but some are limited not by the capacities of their writers but by the capacities of their readers. Only a limited number of readers may have the necessary aptitudes to understand a subject, also the background and interest in it—the sum total of factors that determine the potential audience for a book but reveal nothing of its innate quality (unless you’re the most vulgar sort of a populist, whose only definition of quality is sales). Despite all I’ve done to broaden my appeal, this book is still largely about art, and, although artists like to think that the world is fascinated by everything they do, my experience suggests that most Americans couldn’t care less. Admittedly, museums are increasingly crowded, but art books are still only a tiny slice of the publishing industry’s output, and my take on art (as already indicated) is very much a minority take, within that slice.

With six years’ experience as a writer on Time, and more than two hundred articles published in over a dozen periodicals since I left Time, I don’t see myself as an untalented amateur. Therefore I conclude that the limited numbers of copies that this book can expect to sell are due to the limitations of its audience, not my own (except to the extent that I’m not interested in targeting a mass audience). But I’m not alone. Once upon a time, the publishing world had more room for books with a limited audience, but given increased costs of production, declining numbers of books bought per capita, and consolidation of publishing facilities under profit-hungry overlords, that’s less true today. The result, I think, is that many books that once would have been published by trade houses now must be self-published.

There may be increasing recognition of this, at least to judge from iUniverse titles good enough for some of our most distinguished libraries to acquire. I checked the databases of ten such libraries, and found that of the ten, only Harvard was the holdout. The other nine listed the following numbers of iUniverse titles: Princeton, 36; Yale, 36; UCLA, 36; University of Chicago, 40; Berkeley, 44; University of Michigan, 49; Columbia, 51; City College of New York, 67; New York Public Library (research and lending divisions), 164. Some of these were reprints of books originally published elsewhere. Others must have been written by alumni of the schools in question, and of course iUniverse books represent only a tiny fraction of all these libraries’ total holdings. Even so, those numbers suggest that, in terms of quality, the line between publishing for profit (however modest) and publishing for what is primarily (though not exclusively) the love of it may not be as firmly drawn as it was.

Having signed the contract with iUniverse in February 2007, I began fact-checking the manuscript. The contract stipulated that I turn it in within a year. I figured that would be ample time to fact-check it, since I’d gotten much experience in doing this as a researcher on Time. Shortly after I’d begun fact-checking this book, I fell ill with a bad back that required major surgery. When I got out of rehab five months later, I was way behind schedule. Hoping to catch up, I recruited fact-checkers to help me out. By the end of 2007, I’d spent as much on fact-checkers as I could afford, and still had far to go, so I got an extension on the contract and finished the job myself. I don’t regret hiring those fact-checkers. All were younger than I was, and some of their responses told me more than they knew about reaching readers of their age.

One prospective fact-checker I interviewed had majored in psychology in college. During our interview, I told her that my theory of abstract painting was based in Freud, and that my understanding of creativity owed a lot to Graham Wallas (whose ideas in turn owe a lot to Freud). After our interview, this young lady sent me a charming e-mail in which she offered to provide me with a reading list of more recent psychology books on the mind and creativity. I began hearing about negative attitudes toward Freud in college psychology departments when I myself was an undergraduate, and I’ve been getting complaints about my own Freudian methodology ever since I unveiled my theory, so I reconstructed the thinking behind this e-mail as follows.

Oh my God, its author had most probably been thinking. This old woman is way out of touch. Doesn’t she know that Freud is totally exploded? Doesn’t she know that you can’t prove that the unconscious exists? I’ll deal with such attitudes more further on, but only after I’ve told what I learned about psychology during my fifteen years on the couch, and in the thirty-nine years since I left my last Freudian (having become profoundly discontented with him). Anybody who assumes that I just got up off the couch and am hopelessly brainwashed by my shrink is making a mistake.

My theory of multireferential imagery is admittedly derived from what I learned about dream interpretation in analysis, but only because what I learned in analysis has been confirmed by other experiences I’ve had, and will deal with in this book. Freud believed that the dream image is a composite or synthesis of things people have seen while awake. I many times found this true in analyzing my own dreams. Freud likened these composites to the multiple exposures of Francis Galton, the nineteenth-century British geneticist, who superimposed photographs of the faces of family members to create what he thought was a picture of their common ancestor. In the twenty-first century, Conan O’Brien on late night TV similarly combines photos of celebrity couples to create an image of their possible child.

For Freud, dreams expressed unconscious desires that present themselves to our conscious minds in sleep; ergo, we all have an unconscious mind as well as a conscious one. For me, he was dumb about some things (most notably, art) but right on target about the unconscious. I know I have one, and I’ve heard much evidence that other people do, too (even when they won’t admit it). My expertise is in art, not neurology, but I’m confident that neurologists will locate those portions of the brain which keep people from being continuously conscious of the vast amounts of information stored in their minds; I’m also confident that these neurologists will discover the biological mechanisms that allow specific information to be accessed (if they haven’t already, as recent popularly written stories about neurology in The New York Times seem to hint). There must be a scientific explanation for the simple fact that if I say, “How much is three and two?” you can answer, “Five,” even though two minutes ago, you weren’t consciously thinking of the number five.

Another aspect of preparing this book for publication was securing permissions to quote from books and periodicals. That too was illuminating, forcing me to look carefully at how I’d quoted such passages, and be sure I wasn’t doing so out of context. One article I quote appeared in Esquire and concerned Newsweek in the ’60s. During this crucial decade, Newsweek and Time were engaged in an epic rivalry that centered around opposed views on Vietnam, but showed in other topics, too. Around 2000, in one of the many revisions this manuscript has gone through, I’d realized that I was biased on behalf of my former employer, and that what I’d written was correspondingly unfair to Newsweek. Since I wanted to give the fairest possible coverage of the rivalry, I’d added every good thing that I could find about Newsweek, and made sure that my portrait of Time included plenty of warts. Still, drafting the e-mail requesting permission to quote the Esquire article, I reviewed what it said about Newsweek, and how I’d handled what it said. Bit by bit, I had to revise that part of my manuscript still further, forcing me to admit that while my head tells me that Newsweek was expressing my own political opinions in the ’60s, and Time was doing just the opposite, nevertheless my heart belongs to Time. This is nothing I can help, so I simply warn the reader of my bias.

Analyzing that bias, I see three reasons for it (none relating to Time’s politics). The first reason is purely professional: Time made me into a writer—not that I couldn’t write well when I was first named to the writing staff, but I wasn’t writing like a professional until after I’d spent those six years in its great glass writing school. The second reason I’m biased is personal: I liked almost all the people I worked with. When I was contemplating going to work at Time, I was told that the people were nice, and they were. Many of the nicest aren’t mentioned in this book. Space required that I limit myself to people who were most relevant to my career, or to my life in other ways.

The third reason Time means a lot to me is both personal and professional: it allowed me to enter the art world on a level where its members were eager to teach me all they could about art. Representing as I did more than fourteen million readers, I was in particular cultivated by a high-ranking curator who introduced me to the art he most admired. This would enable me to relate to Greenberg when I eventually met him, and that meeting was the beginning of the rest of my life. I’m biased on behalf of Greenberg, too, though again I’ve tried to present him as fairly as I could, and with understanding of the many people who have trouble relating to him. I think that he was a truly great human being and our greatest art critic. I also believe that the art of the ’60s and since with which his name was (and still is) associated is the finest art of these years, despite the neglect and/or hostility that both the man and the art so often (though most certainly not always) continue to encounter.

Another issue that arose during fact-checking was the extent to which any memoir must be fiction—not because the author is lying, but because nobody remembers everything perfectly. There must be some unintentional fiction in this narrative, but also no guarantee that any of my readers who remember situations in which they and I interacted will remember them more accurately than I do. I have a pretty good long-term memory, but I haven’t relied upon it any more than I could help. Whenever possible, I’ve checked my recollections against the written record (published and unpublished), and I’ve lived closer to that record than many other people. My account of the events in my life described in greatest detail (from March 1965 to April 1966) is based on the nonfiction novel that I wrote in between 1969 and 1971, when I was closer to the action and remembered it more clearly. The account given in second-greatest detail (from February 1969 to October 1969) is based upon another nonfiction novel that I wrote in 1974. In both cases, I’d substantiated or qualified my recollections whenever possible by consulting published sources and my engagement calendars.

Most people you’ll read about in this book go by their real names, and are described as I remember them, but in a few cases, names and attributes are disguised (such people are introduced with advisory catchphrases such as “whom I shall call” or “shall we say”). Partly this was done for legal reasons, but partly because I don’t want to cause any more pain or embarrassment than necessary in order to present the key elements in my narrative, the essential links in my chain of events. Sometimes I felt I could be franker and even engage in a little levity by referring to former colleagues as “A,” “B,” or “Z.” One psychoanalyst, two psychiatrists, a literary agent and sundry editors are also designated by letters (none of which correspond to their initials). I know (or fantasize) that some of these people are still part of my life.

About creativity. I’m well aware that many latter-day psychologists have dealt with the subject, and I’ve browsed through a few of their theories, but the one that best corresponds to my own experience is still the oldie but goodie outlined by Graham Wallas, the Fabian political scientist, in The Art of Thought (1926). According to Wallas, the creative process has at least four steps. First is “preparation,” the definition of a problem and accumulation of information needed to solve it. Another stage is “incubation,” when the thinker puts the problem aside, and lets the unconscious select the key information and rearrange it in a new configuration: synthesize it. Next comes “illumination”: the story of Archimedes shouting “Eureka!” (having realized that, since his body displaced its volume of his bath water, he could use this to measure the gold in a king’s crown). Last is “verification,” substantiating or qualifying the insight.

Non-Freudian psychologists prefer explanations that don’t rely on the unconscious. Robert J. Sternberg, a cognitive psychologist, described problem-solving in a textbook of the 1990s as 1) identifying a problem, 2) defining it, 3) developing a strategy for solving it, 4) organizing information about it, 5) allocating resources, 6) monitoring the solution, and 7) evaluating the solution. His example is a student writing a term paper, and makes no reference to incubation or illumination (though a recent article on “The Eureka Hunt” in The New Yorker, without mentioning Wallas or using the term “incubation,” reaffirms its importance).

The climaxes to Parts Two and Three of this book occurred to me on the Eureka model, with realization flooding up out of my unconscious. The climax to Part One was a conscious creation (Sternberg’s model). As it occurred on Time, it was “collaborative creativity,” a type beloved of how-to books offering ten easy steps to greater creativity. This book is only incidentally a how-to book. Still less is it a medical study by a psychologist, psychiatrist, or psychoanalyst. I’ve learned about creativity in fifty years of observing artists and writers, by trying (unsuccessfully) to write plays and novels, but above all, I learned from thinking about the climaxes of this book, and how they did or didn’t progress through Wallas’s stages of development in the order he specified. Call me a test case (if you want to be polite), or a guinea pig (if that suits you better).

Psychoanalysis gave me practice in retrieving source material for my dreams. This is done through “free association,” letting your mind lead you through links of reminiscence until you can access much in the past. Free association has helped me retrieve many sources for creative insights achieved while I was awake, so in each of my climactic creative insights I’ll be describing my sources, an approach that may help readers to take fuller advantage of their own experience.

The biggest debate among creativity scholars is how to distinguish between the merely new and the truly creative. A doodle on a scrap of paper may be unlike any other doodle ever made, but does that make it truly creative or merely new—in other words, is it of value to anybody else? Beyond that, the art critic must ask, how much value? A Warhol soup can and an abstract painting by Pollock may both be creative, but does that give them equal esthetic value? I’ll revisit these thorny issues, saying at present only that some claim “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” and as a creator I had to consider which beholders mattered (practically, not esthetically: what audience was I trying to reach?). J. K. Rowling wrote Harry Potter books for many beholders of varied ages at the time she wrote. T. S. Eliot wrote poetry for a few literate contemporaries, hoping his following would swell in the future. I write for my circle within the art world, but also for the larger art world, and beyond that for people not unlike my former colleagues on Time, intelligent people who may not know much about art but do have an interest in the larger society around them. My hope is that they will be curious to learn how and why developments within the art world helped to shape that larger society, and how in particular publications like Time, Life, and Newsweek interfaced between the two.

As I see it, synthesis is the most important element in creativity, the mysterious process that goes on during “incubation” of integrating previous insights or information into a new ideological configuration. I also see synthesis as the essence of abstract painting, this equally mysterious process of integrating into a new visual configuration the dozens or even thousands of disparate images stored in the artist’s unconscious (or memory). To help explain the kinship between these two experiences, I argue that modernist abstraction is descended from a tradition of artistic synthesis going back centuries. The ancient Greek Zeuxis was said to paint grapes so realistically that birds pecked at them. Yet Cicero tells us that when the artist was invited to do a portrait of Helen of Troy for a temple in Crotona, he asked the five loveliest maidens in Crotona to pose. Then he combined the most beautiful parts of each to create his ideal portrait.

Leonardo da Vinci synthesized images of things he’d seen to create a new world of fantasia, though he too was famed for his ability to depict the real world. In his Treatise on Painting, he told “How one ought to make an imaginary animal seem natural....If, therefore, you would have an imaginary animal appear natural, and assuming, let us say, that it is a dragon, for the head take that of a mastiff or hound, and give him the eyes of a cat, the ears of a porcupine, the nose of a greyhound, the brow of a lion, the temples of an old cock, and the next of a sea turtle."

Mozart experienced synthesis. In a letter, he described thinking of a theme, related melody, counterpoint, part of each instrument, and so on, until “I have the entire composition finished in my head though it may be long....It does not come to me successively, with its various parts worked out in detail, as they will be later on, but it is in its entirety that my imagination lets me hear it.”

Eliot’s poem The Waste Land incorporates passages by other authors. In an essay, he wrote, “When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.”

I didn’t see the parallel between abstract painting and creativity until the twenty-first century. I might not have seen it at all if I hadn’t already experienced my third creative insight, of discovering the “disenfranchised left.” Since 1950, the proportion of U.S. voters who (by virtue of their occupations) were more apt to vote Democratic had declined in relation to the proportion of U.S. voters who (by virtue of their occupations) were more apt to vote Republican, forcing the Democrats toward a “centrist” position and enabling the Republicans to move to the far right. The “disenfranchised left” was all the people outside the U.S. who made goods for the U.S. market, but couldn’t vote in U.S. elections because they weren’t U.S. citizens. These were the economic descendants of working-class Americans who in the ’30s, ’40s and even ’50s had backed liberal fiscal policies that made it harder for the rich to get richer, and the poor to get poorer.

Aided by this insight, I also saw how art and U. S. history since 1945 have been interrelated, so in my conclusions, I bring them together, placing the art of our time in a political context that may differ from the usual art-historical one. I also summarize those aspects of my creativity that may benefit others (though for me creativity is more a life style than ten easy steps).