Eugene Binder is a former Dallas gallery owner who was active in the Dallas art community from the late 1960s until relocating to Marfa, Texas in the 1990s. Binder was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, before arriving in Texas to attend the Northwood Institute in the late 1960s. While in Dallas, Binder worked for artist Chapman Kelley at his Atelier Chapman Kelley and also worked odd jobs for artists Alberto Collie and Mac Whitney. Binder eventually went on to work at the Laguna Gloria Art Museum in Austin, the Janie C. Lee Gallery in Houston, and Carpenter + Hochman Gallery in Dallas before opening his own space in Dallas in 1986.
Interviewee: Eugene Binder
Interviewer: Leigh Arnold
Date: March 15, 2012
Location: 218 North Highland Ave., Marfa, Texas
Leigh Arnold: All right, so it is March 15, 2012. We are in the Eugene Binder Gallery in Marfa, Texas. What’s the address here?
Eugene Binder: First of all, I don’t use the “G” word.
LA: Okay. [Laughs] Eugene Binder Space?
EB: Building, exhibition space.
LA: But you haven’t—
EB: Yeah.
LA: Okay.
EB: Yeah, 218 North Highland.
LA: Okay. Marfa, Texas, and the following interview is part of the Dallas Museum of Art’s History of Contemporary Art in Dallas research project, funded by the Texas Fund for Curatorial Research. And I’m Leigh Arnold, project researcher at the DMA, and I will be speaking with Mr. Eugene Binder, former Dallas gallery owner—exhibition space owner (laughs)—who currently lives here in West Texas continuing those interests that started in Dallas in the 1980s. Mr. Binder’s history with the arts in Dallas dates back much further, and today we hope to hear some of the memories and stories he has to share with us on this subject. So thank you, Eugene, for agreeing to be interviewed.
EB: Thank you for being here.
LA: And let’s just start at the very beginning. You haven’t always been a Texan?
EB: No. I was born in Detroit, Michigan, the cultural Mecca of the Midwest, also the homicide capital of the world for more than several decades, which—elicits a certain civic pride.
LA: Right. And how did you—your parents came there from Germany?
[00:02:03]
EB: Yes. They emigrated from Germany in the mid-1920s. Well, my father came here in 1926.
LA: Did your mother come with him or did he come first?
EB: I don’t know who came first, but they met in Detroit. There was a German community, ostensibly there to work in engineering and toolmaking at various automotive companies, and they were one of a fairly large group at the time.
LA: Do you think that their status as immigrants informed you in any way in your own life?
EB: Well, I think it’s always a situation where you want to sort of become the opposite of your parents at some point in your life and where they were very cautious and had a certain life in which they were—well, fortunately for me, very comfortable. I, on the other hand, flaunted convention for certainly—especially in the ‘60s, much to their dismay. Yeah, so that was sort of the opposite of that. And fortunately, they offered me, unbeknownst to them at the time, the opportunity to be “counterculture” or whatever description you’d like to attach to that sort of mid-‘60s, early ‘60s kind of thing.
LA: Were they interested in assimilating into U.S. culture? Or did you speak German at home?
EB: Well, we spoke German in the home, but they—and as we spoke about yesterday, there was certainly a German area that they would have lived in early on. But quite soon after their arrival in United States, they became U.S. citizens. And I guess because of my father’s brief profession in business, social contacts, we were probably more assimilated than most in terms of being Americans. I did speak German at home and I was—I didn’t want to speak any English when I went to kindergarten, which was probably not as popular as it might have been—had it not been shortly after World War II.
LA: Yeah.
EB: But nevertheless, yeah, I was fortunate in that respect in their ability to provide themselves, and of course myself, with a comfortable life.
[00:06:02]
LA: Good.
EB: And I might add, my mother was very—well, my mother I guess I should say, was very interested and watched Diego Rivera paint the mural at the Detroit Institute of Arts when he was doing it.
LA: That’s so great.
EB: And she took me there as a child quite often.
LA: So you were introduced to the arts pretty young.
EB: Yes.
LA: Do you remember any specific work in the collection at Detroit that kind of—you revisited or you had an attraction to?
EB: Well, that Diego Rivera mural was interesting because it was in a long room, a long rectangle of a room with a high ceiling. At one end, it’s sort of the passage of a Detroit worker through the, as it turned out, relatively inhumane life of working in the line, producing cars and sort of this perspective of endless people working pretty much on the same tasks. So it started with the fetus at one end and a skull at the other. I guess thinking about in retrospect, it was sort of like—I think this is sort of a metaphor for getting the hell out of Detroit, which it later became.
LA: Yeah.
[00:08:00]
EB: I mean, there are a lot others that they own—a Caravaggio. They really had a well-funded board, which included the Fords. And people of very good taste bought major paintings in the ‘20s and ‘30s. And at that time, these were scions of privately held automotive companies, and they did what they damn well pleased, and for the most part have a pretty good eye.
LA: Fortunately.
EB: Yeah.
LA: So what made you decide to major in journalism in college?
EB: Well, it was sort of a compromise between art and business. It’s what my parents really wanted me to do, so I thought I’d—
LA: Meld the two?
EB: Yeah. [Laughs] I made some attempt to not be submersed into something that I knew I really didn’t want to do, although I must say, later, business probably would have served me well.
LA: Right.
EB: But at the time, it was not something I cared for.
LA: So did you write in high school then?
EB: Yeah.
LA: Creative writing, reporting, or everything?
EB: Everything.
LA: Everything?
EB: Yeah, and I continue to write. I have—well, it’s somewhere. I’d give you that article or that essay I wrote for the Seriality exhibition at the University of Texas [at Dallas], which I just pointed out because it just happened to be—
[00:10:07]
LA: Recent?
EB: Yeah.
LA: So what brought you down to Texas? I know that—well, yeah, just—
EB: Well, I was getting away from something, mainly a city that had been shocked, I guess, and certainly devastated by the riots, Detroit riots as it were, but also riots that moved to other cities around the country in August of 1967. And it felt like this was not an environment in which I had a future.
LA: But you had a future in Texas. What—
EB: I had a future in my mind. (Laughs)
LA: What specifically brought you to Texas?
EB: Well, also I had gone to a boarding school. I was away but also went to school in Michigan. But then I attended college for a year and didn’t do very well for whatever reason, and then decided at the last moment that I would, in a shameless attempt to evade the draft, seek some school that might, at the last moment, accept me, my foibles of my previous years attempt at academia and thereby give me a deferment.
[00:12:08]
LA: And that school was in Texas?
EB: It was.
LA: And what was that?
EB: It was called Northwood Institute. Well, coincidentally, Robert Smithson was there and talked to board members and other people about doing a sculpture there, which of course would have been--
LA: Amazing.
EB: Amazing, yes. He showed his short film on the Spiral Jetty, so that was a real awakening, I guess, in 19671 on contemporary art and certainly at the cutting edge and perhaps still maybe described as such.
LA: So staying with Northwood for just a little bit longer, it was this experimental contemporary art program that Chapman Kelley was trying to start there.
EB: Yes.
LA: And he did. He ran it there with—Bob Wade was there.
EB: Alberto Collie.
LA: Alberto Collie and Henry Hopkins.
EB: Yeah.
LA: Do you remember—did you take courses with Henry?
EB: I did.
LA: And what was he like as a professor?
EB: I thought he was brilliant, and he was extremely articulate and his observations were, in my opinion, profound. And of course, you have to remember that was the first and last art course I ever took, or art history course.
LA: Wow! That’s interesting.
EB: So it was really fascinating. It was quite inspirational. I mean, it inspired me to do a lot of reading.
LA: Good. Yeah?
EB: And really informed myself in a way that I thought might be along the lines of his observations and wisdom essentially. And then also the epiphany, somewhere—I guess when I was reading a lot of Barbara Rose, and I knew Barbara for a time. She was a good friend of an employer of mine years after that. But as I read Barbara Rose and I got to know her a bit, I thought, well, there are some observations, but there’s also a kind of making up of things that may or may not be accurate, but is in Barbara’s case interesting. That had some intrigue for me as well. So, I guess I could say I learned from the experts but never trusted them over my own observations in wanting to also have kind of thoughts about a narrative.
LA: All right.
EB: So anyway, that’s jumping ahead a bit, but yes, Henry was great and he’s just a wonderful instructor. Brilliantly observant of not only contemporary art but had really a knowledge of—I mean, of any period really.
LA: Did you realize at the time kind of how important it was that he was in the area, how lucky you were?
EB: Yes, because I had seen the show that he did in LA of the ‘60s, which—
LA: That 50 LA Painters show?
EB: I think it was called LA of the ‘60s.2 I don’t know, maybe not. I might be wrong but I’m thinking that happened.
LA: Yeah.
EB: In the late ‘60s, and that was a truly wonderful show. He had the power, I guess, and knew these people to put the show together and really get great work. I’m thinking it was one of the best shows that the now-called Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth ever did in terms of—it was work of that time. It wasn’t a retrospective. So it had a big influence on me. And also, I have to say that that was the time when the DMA and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth—I don’t even know what it was called then—would have juried exhibitions every year. I’ve thought about that a lot and it really brought a certain energy. And Henry Hopkins would be the juror in some cases or—
LA: Bring somebody in?
EB: —bring someone in that he knew. So this was a pretty happening thing, and what I was later to realize was really the early stages, certainly in my development of contemporary art, but basically like Earthworks and conceptual art and dare I say, minimalism. So this was a big—
LA: Big deal?
EB: —big deal for me and an awakening. And of course, you never realize how significant it is until you see it from some perspective later on, just like growing up in Detroit. I thought, well, every city would have its Motown equivalent, but no. So yeah, it was a really interesting time, especially if you were—
LA: Young? You were what, 19?
EB: Nineteen, and this was all pretty great stuff, and these people were articulate. They weren’t confused about what they were doing. Not that they would be, but there was a very confident kind of—I mean, the work was edgy but they were—they had a vision.
LA: Yeah. Were you around when Smithson came to Northwood?
EB: Yeah. I was at his talk. There were like 12 people in the room or something. There weren’t—
LA: Where was it?
EB: At Northwood?
LA: Do you remember? Northwood, 12 kids in a room, did people get it?
[00:20:06]
EB: No, I don’t think so. But I remember he really didn’t have this outgoing personality, which is something I ended up seeing with Donald Judd. These people had this sort of—not sort of. They had this vision and they had their work, and this was an important thing. And while they wanted to project it out into the world, they also, I’m sure, had their share of naysayers. There was a certain concentration that they had that was very interesting to me in their presence, and that was getting it done.
I remember Smithson being kind of aggravated, I guess, because people didn’t jump up and say, “Yeah, I want to be a part of this.” As his other meetings with collectors in the area, and I truthfully don’t know who they were or how many they were or the idea of doing it on this campus, but I know that was a sort of disappointment, like "okay, I made my pitch and it’s not happening here. Stay? Go?"
[00:22:01]
LA: So Northwood was a pretty big moment for you in turning you on to contemporary art.
EB: Well, I was an editor of the school paper but I really became much more interested in—I worked for Alberto Collie for a while. I worked at Chapman’s gallery for a few years installing shows, meeting the artists, and that was pretty much it.
LA: That was not it.
EB: No, I mean “it” in terms of providing this—
LA: Where your kind of base came from.
EB: —interest and inspiration. There wasn’t really anything I had to think about in terms of what I wanted to do because it was obvious this was going to be a part of what I did. That sounds a little vague, but that’s about as much as I could. And just really being actively involved in this on a daily basis was quite inspiring and interesting and more interesting than anything else I could think of or came in contact with, and I guess it still is.
LA: Let’s see. So Chapman Kelley, he seemed to be pretty influential and kind of was almost a starting point for a lot of people in their careers in the arts in Dallas. Was he nurturing in that way or in that respect? Did he take on the mentor role?
EB: Well, he also was driven by making his own work, but he was very generous and had a large group of people that he was—I mean, I couldn’t imagine him not doing something for somebody. He was also the liaison for the contemporary art [program] at Northwood to people like Betty Blake, who were on the board.
LA: The Lamberts?
EB: Yeah, Evelyn Lambert. So unlike other artists that may not have been so skilled at getting people interested in the art school, he was quite effective when he did it in terms of getting more—it’s always fun being involved with projects in different buildings off campus, just a litany of things that happened while he was there.
LA: Where were you living at this time? Do you remember?
EB: Yeah. I was living in an old building in Oak Cliff with an artist named Richard Childers who had a studio there.
[00:26:09]
LA: And what was going on in Dallas around that time? Do you remember?
EB: Well, I do remember.
LA: Come on. It’s only like 45 years ago.
EB: Well, there were a lot of shows. Murray Smither had just started a gallery with Betty Cranfill. Murray had also worked for many years for Chapman Kelley. Friends of mine were having exhibitions around town. I guess at that time, I wasn’t really going beyond the city limits for—well, like I said, the museums did annual exhibitions, which was a big deal for people in my group, the Tarrant County Annual and the DMA. I guess I’d called them annuals, and who got in and who didn’t get in and who won the prize and that sort of thing, sort of—
LA: Is it political? Did artists complain that it was political?
EB: Well, artists always complain it’s political.
LA: Yeah.
EB: Or whatever, name a topic, but yeah, sure.
[00:28:02]
LA: Yeah.
EB: It’s like, “Why did this person get in and I didn’t get in?” Anyway, I think Merrill Rueppel was the director at the time and there was a prize, first prize, purchase prize. I heard this rumor of somebody discovering a Rauschenberg in the basement of the museum who submitted it when he was in Beaumont to one of the—I don’t know if this is true or not.
LA: I’m going to find out now.
EB: Yeah.
LA: That’s exciting.
EB: But that was some—I have no idea where I heard that or if there’s any validity to it. And with two museums doing an annual exhibition, it was a big thing to be—an artist who is a student at Northwood named Charles Waldrin [ph] did this—he basically stretched a canvas, primed it. It was pretty large, and then took a torch and cranked it up so that it was really smoky, and made this painting with it. I remember this guy being ostracized by the other artists who were trying to do some craft. That’s really not a good way to explain it, but certainly the idea that he, in their minds, effortlessly did this smoke painting, was anathema to the people that didn’t get paid for their shows. And I think it’s sort of the end of his art career since he was so ostracized for doing this.
LA: That’s too bad.
EB: Yeah, it is too bad because he actually had something more interesting than all the people that ostracized him. Anyway, such was the climate of the time, this being late ‘60s.
LA: Were there other artists living in Oak Cliff? Was that kind of a neighborhood that they—
EB: Well, it was cheap. It was run down. It was basically white trash. Lee Harvey Oswald’s house was a couple of blocks away from the building I lived in. Yeah, it was fine with me, and the Oak Cliff 4 or Oak Cliff 5, depending on—
LA: Oh, there's a—?
EB: Well, it was whether Mac Whitney was in the group or not.
LA: Okay, I've never heard that. Did he want to be in the group?
EB: Yeah, I'm sure he did. There's a painting—I think I have the postcard of this—that Jack Mims did of Mims, Roch, Wade, Green, and Mac.
[00:32:04]
LA: So that would imply that—
EB: That would be the Oak Cliff 5.
LA: Yeah.
EB: It was short-lived. Based on historical references, one could go either way. But Mac really wasn’t doing anything with these guys. He wasn’t a painter. It's just difficult to compare someone doing large steel sculpture with the facility, a different facility of, say, painting or the sort of photorealist thing that they were doing at the time.
LA: You worked for Mac Whitney at that time, too?
EB: Well, I think later.
LA: What kind of things did you do? What was your job for him?
EB: Just roughing out pieces of acrylic that he had cast, polished. I wasn’t making any decisions or anything. These were the acrylic works, so they just required a lot of finishing and working around certain things that had to be, for whatever reason, taken out or worked around.
LA: So how did you see yourself fitting in to this life in Dallas, this contemporary art scene, if there was such a thing?
[00:34:10]
EB: Well, I didn’t really. I felt, myself, I wasn’t an artist. I just enjoyed being on the periphery and wished that I could have or would have switched my major. It didn’t really matter anyway, but at the time I ended up spending more time with these people and being interested in their work and hanging out with them than I certainly did doing this journalism thing. Still interesting to me but dwindling in favor of contemporary art.
LA: So, you left Dallas for Austin?
EB: Yeah.
LA: What was that position in Austin? How did that come about?
EB: Well, it came about through someone I met at an exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston. Also, someone that Mac Whitney knew. I was ready to do something else. I was doing a lot of different things. I was working, doing installations, helping Mac work in his sculpture. I was making saltwater aquariums with Alberto Collie for the Hammacher Schlemmer catalogue
LA: For the what?
EB: Hammacher Schlemmer.
LA: Okay, yes—
EB: The catalogue. What else was I doing? I don’t know, bartending, just stuff, house painting. That was pretty much the range of my activities in terms of attempting to make enough money. And so, the idea of this job in Austin to actually have a steady paycheck was—
LA: Appealing?
EB: Yeah.
LA: So what was Laguna Gloria like when you started at the Laguna Gloria Art Museum?
EB: Well, it was the Clara Driscoll building on the lake, the house that had been built in the early teens. And I don’t know, there was a director, there was myself, there was a woman that ran the bookstore—or the gift shop and the bookstore—an accountant, groundskeeper, a woman at the art school.
[00:38:09]
EB: I think there are probably eight people, which—
LA: A small staff.
EB: —ended up, when I left, to be more like 22 people.
LA: Wow! What were they showing before? Do they have a permanent collection?
EB: They did but really not that—they were showing, like the Tarrant County Annual or whatever it was called, or the DMA Annual, Laguna Gloria also had these—there was a Texas Fine Arts Association annual juried invitation, and then there was Fiesta. There was some time left between the two, but it seemed like it zipped by awfully quick. And so we instigated more of a contemporary kind of program that—
LA: “We” being you when you started?
EB: Myself and Laurence, who was also the new director.
LA: Laurence?
EB: Miller.
LA: Laurence Miller?
EB: Yeah, which culminated I should say with us doing the Carl Andre retrospective, which went—
LA: Everywhere?
EB: Well, quite a few places as it turned out, and also to the museum—I can’t even pronounce it in French, but the Contemporary Art Museum of Montreal.
LA: Okay, so it became an international show?
EB: Yes, and it was also reviewed in Time and Newsweek. I think in one of the articles actually gave the museum credit.
LA: Oh?
EB: Yeah. So yeah, that pretty much was—there were quite a few shows I did, but that was probably the most “important.” And then my title there was always fluctuating at the whim of the powers that be, so I was just—
LA: What are some examples?
EB: Let’s see. I was the head of exhibitions. There were just a number of odd titles. And then I think it ended up to be associate curator, even though there was no other curator, right?
LA: Right.
EB: It's clearly—
LA: Why couldn’t you just be—
EB: In-charge of the—well, they’re like, “You don’t have a degree.” Anyway, I don’t know how it ended up, but basically I was the person that was responsible for organizing the exhibition.
LA: How did you come up with Carl Andre?
EB: I had seen a show of his actually at the Barbara Cusack Gallery in Houston. And actually, the choice was Laurence’s. Also, as the show progressed, I became more involved, really became immersed with this thing. It was also, in retrospect, a pretty amazing show for, I don’t know what I was at the time, like 30 or late 20s I guess. I worked with Carl’s dealer at the time, Angela Westwater, and it was not like working with the artists’ assistants. It’s just basically them and sitting around talking about works that should be included in the show and if we could get them on loan and how they would be shipped. The whole logistics of putting that together were basically myself, Andre, Angela Westwater. Laurence seemed to be involved in other museum business, obviously fundraising and the board. So I did the majority of it. And also, there was a catalogue which unfortunately did not give the museum credit but—
LA: How did that happen?
EB: Well, I just don’t really even want to get into it, but—
LA: That’s fine.
EB: Basically, it was supposed to have been published by the Trinity University Press. And for whatever reason, it didn’t happen. It just made the artist and his dealer exceedingly unhappy. And obviously, there was a catalogue that was discussed in the prospectus for the travelling exhibition that went out to every major museum in the country basically. So in the end, Ms. Westwater had it published by Jaap Rietman, the now-defunct Jaap Rietman and that was it.
LA: What did you like about museum work, or not like?
EB: I don’t know. Well, I do know. Basically, I like that you did an exhibition, however ambitiously. It had to be up at a certain time. You worked with someone or did it yourself to design announcements, auxiliary material, brochures, catalogues. At the time, I also did—I gave some gallery talks and just installed the show. For example, with the Carl Andre show, I installed it with Carl, and also did a site-specific piece for the museum, contemporary. There's Carl Andre and there was a Bob Wade installation that I think many of the trustees would have liked to have seen me fired for that.
LA: What was it?
EB: Oh, there were live chickens involved. Actually, I don’t think they were all that pleased about the Carl Andre show, but I remember it fell on me to be the person to talk about why this show was important.
[00:48:08]
LA: So you remember what you said?
EB: Not really. I remember that I had a bad cold and I had a couple of drinks. I think Mr. Miller made some comment about my talk being convincing and they agreed to do it. I think I started it out with something about—well, that the exhibition was being organized and the good news is that Carl Andre agreed to do it. The bad news is the museum can't afford to ship it.
LA: So did you have to fundraise, or did Larry do that?
EB: No. Actually, I remember Ollendorff was—I think he allowed us to—well basically, we were able to work it so that each museum paid the incoming shipping. The Ollendorff Company, and I worked directly with Mr. Ollendorff, we were able to make installment payments. But it was pretty elaborate crating job, which they did beautifully, and I'm sure you can find those two reviews.
LA: I would. I will look for them.
EB: Yeah.
LA: Was that kind of the training grounds for your next move in your next career?
EB: Yeah.
LA:In your lifelong career, I would say?
EB: Yeah. Well, I didn’t know it at the time, but then in ’79, I started at the Janie Lee Gallery.
LA: And how did that come about?
EB: Oh, I think against the—I guess I've felt like I'd been at the museum for five years and I was ready to do something else.
LA: You wanted something different?
EB: Yes.
LA: Did you know Janie Lee when she was in Dallas? How did you end up with her?
EB: Actually, I had done this show called Monumental Sculpture.
LA: At Laguna?
EB: No, at the River Oaks Bank & Trust. They have this huge lot.
LA: Is this in Austin?
EB: No, in Houston.
LA: Oh, in Houston.
EB: Yeah, which Donald Judd was coincidentally included in.
[00:52:10]
LA: What was this again?
EB: It was called Monumental Sculpture3 and it was funded by the River Oaks Bank & Trust and Kathryn Swenson, some wealthy person, who generously gave probably a lot more money here than she had intended to.
LA: Do you remember when that was?
EB: No.
LA: Before you started working for—
EB: No. I was at Laguna Gloria at the time and I was able to get some leave to be able to do this show.
LA: That’s great. And so, Don Judd was in the show?
EB: He was, and actually spending some time, I guess working with Janie Lee on something. At any rate, there was this kind of crisis moment where—I really forget how this all transpired—but basically, I called her at home when she was having dinner with Judd and I said, “Could you come by the site and just bring Judd to see if these boxes are going to be—” we’re installing and we have the crane. But also as kind of a morale booster, we’d just been working with these guys, moving around their own sculpture and everything. Anyway, they did come by and I guess everything was fine, and that was it.
LA: Do you remember what pieces Judd had in that show?
EB: Yeah, they were the pieces that ended up at the museum at Tyler. I'm thinking cold-roll steel boxes, so they would have been that dark middle—well, cold-roll steel.
LA: And that’s how you met Janie C. Lee?
EB: Yeah, that was the first time I met her.
LA: Interesting. I'm trying to think of the dates when she was open in Dallas as a gallery. Were you in Austin when—
EB: No, I was in Dallas.
LA: Yeah. Was that a gallery that was on your radar, or were you even going to galleries?
EB: Yeah, I was going to galleries. Yeah, it was a gallery that was on everybody’s radar. She had a Flavin show. She had an Oldenberg show. I don’t know if she had a Stella show but—
LA: She did. She had—one of her first shows, it's like a group show with a Judd, a Richard Morris, and a Richard Serra felt piece.
EB: Robert Morris felt piece.
LA: Robert Morris felt piece, and it was—there are some installation photographs I've seen in it.
EB: Yeah.
LA: There's a Judd stack just installed in her apartment.
EB: Yeah. Well actually, I lived on a street called Hood Street in Dallas, and her apartment was in the building behind that block of old houses.
[00:56:05]
LA: So you would have lived really close to kind of the Fairmount Gallery District, okay. So you probably had no idea that you would be working for Ms. Lee.
EB: No, I didn’t.
LA: But here, you moved to Houston to work for her.
EB: Yeah.
LA: And how long were you with her?
EB: Five years, yeah, that seemed to be my—
LA: That’s your limit?
EB: Well, I just felt like that’s—
LA: That’s enough time to do something?
EB: It’s sort of a respectable time and then it's time to do something else.
LA: How old were you then?
EB: Thirty.
LA: That’s pretty good, director of a major gallery. Do you remember some of the shows that you felt responsible for, or had a major hand in pulling off in her Houston gallery?
EB: Well, she basically chose the shows. She had a de Kooning drawing show. She had a Jasper Johns drawings show, a Joan Mitchell painting show, and like that, an exhibition that we did celebrating her two decades of working with Leo Castelli. We did a lot of things with André Emmerich. It was a time where this was possible. I know that sounds silly, but the sort of communication and awareness without the internet, which also sounds a little trite, but essentially it was—so you read the newspapers or something, but basically, the accessibility to this imagery and exhibitions and being informed was something that is not quite as easily accomplished without actually going to where an exhibition was. And my point in saying this is simply that having this work at a gallery in Houston, it became more accessible and was certainly of interest to the people that were interested in art. It was certainly top-quality museum kinds of little shows based on the size and the space.
LA: Was Houston responsive to the shows?
EB: Yeah. Houston, in my opinion, always had a bit more depth in terms of the importance of supporting those exhibitions than, say, Dallas, which I think is borne out by the museums that are already there and the depth of collecting that goes on there. Obviously, I haven’t lived there since ’84. The galleries that I know that have made a name for themselves are to a great degree supported by the art community in Houston.
LA: Did you travel a lot also while you are in these various positions or were you—
EB: No. My job was to basically run the place while Ms. Lee went to Italy for three months or went to wherever place, spend a month in New York. Actually, my job was to make that all possible, which of course meant that things had to be sold in her absence. For example, I gave a gallery talk on the Jasper Johns show that we did, but it really didn’t require someone being educated on the work. Either you saw something and you had the money and you always wanted a Jasper Johns drawing and who didn’t, and at that point it was, to some, amazingly accessible and that was basically it.
[01:02:15]
LA: So was it easy to sell?
EB: It wasn’t easy to sell—in a way, you can once again in retrospect, think, “Oh my God, I bought a Jasper Johns for $18,000.” But at the time, it wasn’t—there was still a bit of a push. And believe it or not, I remember being in Chapman Kelley’s studio and showing de Kooning paintings to somebody, and they were $15,000. At the time, it seemed like a lot of money.
LA: Yeah, in retrospect.
EB: But they were the women paintings from the late ‘60s, and Chapman also would have these works shipped down from respective dealers, not necessarily as an exhibition but to make presentations to clients.
LA: Right.
EB: And amazingly enough, quite often they decided against the work—well, not quite. I guess more often than not, but every once in a while, something was acquired. If you are not in New York and you are not getting that kind of traffic or have that kind of space, it's still not that easy. And now especially, when I started my place, you are not going to always ring up people and say—go around New York and say, “Could you ship that down?” That’s not possible anymore. You don’t really—well, people have that inventory but it’s not that—
LA: Fluid or—
EB: Well, it’s very coveted. There’s not that much work around of quality. The auction houses have certainly taken a lot of what was happening at that time and now are sort of a big factor in the sale and how things are sold. So it is a very different kind of world but at the time, it was just sort of—and again, it seemed like, "Well, this is Jasper Johns’s drawings show, great!”
LA: Were you meeting these artists? She is doing these shows that are pretty amazing.
EB: Yeah.
LA: Were the artists coming to these openings or were they—
EB: Some.
LA: Sometimes?
EB: Yeah. Mark di Suvero, Dick Bellamy—well, actually they come down—well, Mark di Suvero came to these shows, Helen Frankenthaler because she regularly did shows with Janie. Georgia O'Keeffe, Juan Hamilton, Joan Mitchell was supposed to come but didn’t. I guess it was kind of a haul for her, she lived in Paris at the time, or spent part of her time in Paris, and Nancy Graves.
LA: So in all this time away from Dallas, did you have any relationship with Dallas while you were in Austin or in Houston, or were you very in the moment when you were living in these other cities?
EB: Oh, definitely. It was a lot of work doing these shows. I didn’t really know that I would go back to Dallas or what would happen. It was just sort of that five-year—at the end of that five-year period, I didn’t always know what I was going to do, but then—
LA: Opportunity happens.
EB: Yeah.
LA: So you spent five years with Janie Lee?
EB: Yeah.
LA: Or thereabout?
EB: Yeah.
LA: And then you ended up going back to Dallas.
EB: Well, I had a little space in Houston.
LA: I didn’t know about that.
EB: Yeah, nobody knows about that.
LA: Well, let’s hear about it.
EB: Well, it didn’t really materialize or anything. Well, basically, what happened is I started in on that and then got the job offer from Laura Carpenter and her partner at the time, Irena Hochman. And I think I wanted to go back to Dallas anyway because I think Janie felt a certain competitiveness—
LA: With you?
EB: —with me.
LA: How did she feel about you opening a space? Obviously, competitive but—
EB: Well, yeah. I think there were some mixed emotions there. She was certainly—and truthfully, what occurred to me was that I am not going to be able to show this kind of work because she is doing it, and I don’t want to be calling these people up whom I knew from talking on the phone every couple of days for five years, but that’s really not my—I certainly want to be able to at least think that I can do something other than what someone else has been doing in the past that I've worked with and not have to rely on these same contacts, whether it’s dealers who they work with or clients who they work with. And so, it was almost a foregone conclusion that it would be better if I—
LA: Got out of there?
EB: —got out of there.
LA: But when you decided you wanted to do your own thing—
EB: Well, at that time I got this job offer from Laura.
LA: So it was bigger?
EB: Challenging.
[01:10:10]
LA: Yeah. I guess you are at this great job as a director of a gallery in Houston and then you hit that five-year mark and you decide, “Okay, I'm going to do my own thing.” Did you have ideas that you thought you could do something with that you couldn’t do under somebody else’s name? Where it’s just the sake of reporting to somebody? Did you want to start doing the traveling?
EB: Oh, the traveling, I was quite—no. I think it was just—I just had had enough.
LA: Yeah.
EB: And it’s just time for a change. I think there is a great danger of being somewhere and you become this—this five-year thing, you either stay—
LA: Or you go.
EB: —or you go. And I didn’t really have much of an idea what I wanted to do, and it just worked out that this situation came up and I accepted it.
LA: And aside from getting out of the competition with Janie Lee, how did you feel about moving back to Dallas?
EB: I thought things might have changed a little bit or something, but no.
[01:12:14]
LA: They were the same?
EB: Yeah, pretty much.
LA: And what were they?
EB: Well, the same group of people interested in art. It's logical that this would be after—well, it is not logical, but after a decade, there are some new faces and it was a different—the first show that I did there was a Jean-Michel Basquiat show, which is—
LA: It is pretty wild.
EB: I guess they were $12,000 at the time or something, the big paintings. And then Jean-Michel came to Dallas I think while that show was up or maybe after the show was up.
LA: And you met him?
EB: Yeah. As a matter of fact, he was quite adamant about wanting to paint my Jeep, which is the car that I had at the time.
LA: And what kept you from letting him do that?
EB: Well, it was really—I remember saying to him, “Look, Jean-Michel, I can’t really drive this thing around with a portrait of Toxic on the side and all those stuff is—” “No, Eugene, I really want to paint your Jeep.” And foolishly I opted—
LA: No?
EB: —no. Basically, I had to drive this thing everyday. But again, hindsight—
[01:14:08]
LA: How did Laura know about you? Did your reputation precede you or how did she—
EB: Well, I had actually met Laura when I was working at Chapman Kelley.
LA: Okay. So you had known her for a while.
EB: Yeah, a long time.
LA: A really long time.
EB: Yeah.
LA: Ten or 15 years at that point?
EB: I guess so.
LA: How did you meet her? What was your relationship when you were working at Chapman Kelley? What was she doing at the time?
EB: She was just interested in galleries. I remember her coming in and visiting the show. I was the only one there, and we talked a little bit. She knew one of the young artists that—actually, I shared that building with in Oak Cliff, Richard Childers.
LA: How did Dallas respond to Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work?
EB: I don’t know that we sold the show out, but there were a couple of things that were sold at the time. It was a pretty gutsy kind of thing but definitely from other corridors, i.e., New York, he definitely was somebody that was on the rise. At the time, he was no longer represented by Annina Nosei, he was represented at Mary Boone. So it wasn’t out of nowhere. There was definitely great momentum.
[01:16:17]
LA: Did Laura also—Carpenter + Hochman, they have a New York branch.
EB: Yeah.
LA: But did she work with a New York gallery like Janie C. Lee did with Castelli as far as getting inventory? How did she find the kind of—
EB: Yeah, she did. She worked with Mary Boone to get the—
LA: The Jean-Michel Basquiat?
EB: —the Basquiat show. And that was typical of how those shows arrived in Dallas, or Houston for that matter.
LA: Right. Other shows at Carpenter + Hochman that stick out in your mind or were—
EB: Well, Christo, he brought the model for the Reichstag work, full-scale model, which was huge.
LA: How big was that?
EB: I remember it was in that front room, and it pretty much took up the whole room. I'm thinking it was—well, it was done in meters, so I'm thinking it was like three meters long by—I don’t know, maybe a meter high.
LA: Did he bring Jeanne-Claude?
EB: Yeah.
LA: Did they give a talk or any type of lecture?
EB: They gave a talk on the radio.
LA: Oh, cool.
EB: Yeah.
LA: What station?
EB: KERA, I think.
LA: All right. It would be interesting to hear if they have that anymore, probably not.
[01:18:01]
EB: Yeah, and I drove him over there in my Jeep. There was this whole thing with Jeanne-Claude. She was very protective, but the show did well.
LA: Yeah. What would have been in the show, drawings?
EB: Collages.
LA: Collages.
EB: Reichstag, Valley Curtain, I think some works that would have been a precursor to The Gates at Central Park, the Parasols—that’s somewhere in Asia. I guess I should be more specific. There were some beautiful storefronts still around.
LA: In Dallas, you mean?
EB: In that show, yeah.
LA: Okay. Others that stick out?
EB: I was only there for 18 months because Laura closed the gallery.
LA: Did you see that coming?
EB: Yeah.
LA: Was there any frustration that you come up for a job and 18 months later, the job is gone?
EB: No. If you are in this business, it’s changed but I think you basically—I guess I felt I should have sold more or I could have done something to prevent it. But it was a wacky—what happens is people, all of us in this business, you can do it in a lot of different ways but, should we say Laura and Janie chose to travel at a certain level and so on, and so forth, so if you are doing this a lot, it requires a lot of money. I don’t know. Maybe there is no way to do it on the cheap, but that’s how they did it. And also the expenses in shipping, there's a lot of ways that you can do things and picking up the phone and ringing up so and so and having him ship an exhibit to arrive at your door a week later is theoretically possible but it is exceedingly expensive. And often, planning or confusion or other things would mandate that things had to be done like this.
[01:22:04]
LA: Right.
EB: Yeah, so enough said about that.
LA: Yeah. And I guess it gave you an excuse to open your own space.
EB: Well, I actually didn’t open my own space. She shut down and I asked her if she’d lease me the building and she came up with this number. At the time, I thought that was okay. And so for the first year, I was in there, or maybe not even a year, it was maybe like March through December. And then I had a temporary space while this other building was being renovated, a building of David Gibson’s, which was interestingly enough a former bindery.
LA: It was meant to be.
Well, I guess at this point, you’ve lived in Austin, you’ve lived in Houston, and had been in Dallas, and now you’re back. Did you notice anything about these cities, how they related to each other or could you characterize each city as far as their art scene?
[01:24:03]
EB: Well, they are more individualistic than one might think, and that’s not really surprising because there are different groups of people, different families, different kinds of experience with the art that these people had been exposed to, from the de Menils to Wendy Reves. It’s like wildly—there is a wild parameter of what these people are interested in, what they were doing, their acquisitions, things they acquired for the museum, people who were board members of the Contemporary Arts Museum as opposed to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Of course, at the time in Dallas, there was no contemporary arts museum. It’s just very, very different in terms of how this all unfolded and continues to unfold based on personalities, and who knows? From liaisons and political alliances to feuds, so it never changes.
LA: Do you have any relationship with any of these cities still?
[01:26:05]
EB: Yeah. Actually, I probably have more of a relationship with Dallas than I do with Austin or Houston, I guess just because that is the last place before leaving for New York that I had spent some time. And actually, I would say that I spent more time in Dallas. Clearly, I spent more time in Dallas in total from ’67 to whenever it was I left, ’95, than I would have in either Austin or Houston. Austin and Houston, the five-year limitations were in effect. Dallas, for whatever reason, was a longer run.
LA: One thing I meant to ask earlier, did you have any preconceived notions of what Texas would be or what it was before you moved here?
EB: You mean in ‘67?
LA: Yeah.
EB: Nah, I had no idea.
LA: You didn’t have any idea what you were getting into?
EB: No, but I loved it when I was here. The first Friday night I was here, there were some other people from Detroit and we were driving around in Dallas. I don’t exactly know how but anyway, we asked somebody where there are some places to drink and dance and nightclubs. And there was some shaking of heads and someone says, “Well, if you go to the Red Jacket, but that’s all black, you’ll probably get stabbed,” and it was like, we were there because we were from Detroit—
LA: That was comfortable for you.
EB: Oh yeah. Unfortunately, it wasn’t that comfortable for the people that were in there dancing and not really used to having white kids in there. But yeah, and that was right next to the Stoneleigh P.
LA: The club that you are talking about?
EB: Yeah, which—
LA: Stoneleigh P is still there.
EB: —burned.
LA: Right.
EB: I mean, the Stoneleigh P burned but that—because that neighborhood at the time was sort of the edge of a middle-class black neighborhood. And I was going to the Stoneleigh P for lunch when I worked at the Chapman Kelley Gallery, which was when it was a pharmacy.
LA: Was that kind of the hangout? Was there—
EB: Well, that Red Jacket thing was basically short-lived I guess, and then I think Shannon Wynne started another Red Jacket club on Greenville, or somebody did. But at any rate, I remember the sign being at the back in the parking lot of the Stoneleigh P for years, and I wish that I would have gotten it. Yeah, so that was probably mid-September 1967.
LA: But was there a gathering place even—either time you came to Dallas and went from Dallas, was there kind of a central gathering place where artists or—
[01:30:13]
EB: No.
LA: People were spread out?
EB: Not really. It’s interesting because—I guess the Cedar Bar obviously, and Odiom, but there weren’t a lot of places in Dallas that—I don’t know. Are there any now that would be artist hangouts?
LA: Not that I know of. I guess the Meridian Room is kind of a gathering place down in Fair Park/Exposition Park area.
EB: Which would be the old State Bar.
LA: Okay.
EB: Yes. That was a hangout.
LA: Yeah, the State Bar. Because that would have been right around the corner from your space.
EB: Yes, it would have. I can attest that come about 5:30, there is nothing more that I wanted than to assuage the previous night’s martini then.
LA: And to start back up again.
EB: Tonight’s martini or multiples thereof.
LA: Is it still like that?
EB: No.
LA: Can you get a good martini in Marfa?
EB: I don’t know. I don’t think it would be good for me, too.
LA: Start back up in that lifestyle.
EB: Yeah, but it was great while it lasted. I think the State Bar lasted five years. Anyway, now that you mentioned it, the State Bar—well, you mentioned the Meridian, or where it used to be. And oddly enough when I worked with Alberto Collie in this little small studio to fabricate these saltwater aquariums, it was this little space next to the State Bar, which at the time was a Mexican bar called LaMana I think, or something.
LA: The what?
EB: La Mana(ph).
LA: La Mana, the hand? I don’t know.
EB: Yeah.
LA: And that Collie job was your first?
EB: That was one of many as I mentioned when I was talking about—
LA: One of your many jobs that you had before you—
EB: Installing exhibitions, yeah, housepainting, you name it.
LA: So, how did you cultivate your relationship with local artists?
EB: Oh, I don’t know. Cultivate—
LA: Establish?
EB: Well, basically someone would start a new gallery in Dallas and everybody would race over to want a show there because it was—
[01:34:03]
LA: New?
EB: Yeah.
LA: So, when you opened, people were thinking, well, did they have—I guess when you opened your own space within Laura’s old space, did you get that stampede of artists?
EB: Yeah. Well, it's basically when one place closes—Laura had amazing exhibitions. And when she decided to close, obviously some people wanted to continue in another venue or somehow continue showing. Obviously it's a livelihood. It's an important thing to someone who’s in a fairly limited kind of place anyway in terms of choices of galleries to show.
It's just an interesting phenomena and I got to the point where people that I've worked with, I would just say, “Well, if you're not happy here, I’ll give you your slides. Go over to Gerald Peters.” There was this phenomenon that would happen where some artist that was represented by another gallery would make an appointment with me and sit down and say, “Well, I'm not happy with my current gallery and I just want to feel out how it would be just to”— That was the short version. And then I would say. “Well, while you and I are sitting here talking and going down the list of all these things that you're dissatisfied with, there's someone that I represent at another gallery saying the very same thing.” So it’s sort of how it is. I recall that the people that I would give that example to didn’t think it was that funny.
LA: Did you have kind of your own idea or any factors that you took into consideration when bringing an artist into your stable or seeking an artist out?
EB: Well, obviously a prerequisite is to have seen one or usually considerably more exhibitions of the artist’s work over the years, or maybe had the artist in a group show—I don’t know. I would like to think I was pretty careful about making these choices, but never careful enough. There's a funny thing that can happen, which is things really go well and the artist for, maybe not reasons that are going well, but for maybe other reasons has an explosion of creativity or it suddenly does work that blows out all the limits of previous work that they’ve done or starts working on a different imagery. Just knowing the things that can happen that either they change in a way that people really respond to the work or—I mean, anything can happen.
And doing these kinds of shows, I would like to think that I could have, or maybe did at some point, create a situation in which the artist was inspired or somehow felt confident to do work that may not have been within previous parameters of what they’ve been doing, if that makes any sense.
[01:40:09]
LA: Yeah, it does. How do you find your artists usually?
EB: Oh, really there are not that many people that you want to show or I would want to show. I try to keep it small just because expectations were such that you really wanted to be able to deliver the artist’s show, really make the exhibition great. And quite frankly, there's—if you're showing zillions of people of mixed qualities, then the cachet of being a good gallery vanishes, so that’s kind of how it worked.
LA: Your first exhibition as EB in Laura’s space was contemporary Italian artists.
EB: Yeah.
LA: So, what made you decide to do that? How did you come up with that idea?
EB: Well, I had done this work on the Carl Andre show, who is an artist that Angela Westwater represented. And then as time went by, I stayed in touch with her. We got along great despite the snafu of the catalogue that, in fact, was not printed by Trinity University in San Antonio. And then I went to New York as much as possible looking at shows that she did at 142 Green St. at the time. And her partner, Enzo Sperone, was instrumental in discovering these young Italian artists. At the time that work had just popped on the scene in New York, it really had not been shown outside the confines of Manhattan or Milan. It was wonderful because the Sunday New York Times magazine cover had Francesco Clemente the day after I opened with his work in the show.
LA: You can’t buy that kind of publicity.
EB: Well, sometimes you’re lucky and sometimes you’re not. It was just a nice moment. I got to say Angela was very generous in giving me everything I wanted and there was a big space, 6,500 square feet. So the show happened and that was I guess March of ’86?
[01:44:15]
LA: Can you describe for me a typical opening in your gallery and reception and who was there? You don’t have to name names, but I mean, was it your typical crowd? Were they buying? Were they just glancing? Were you serving cocktails? Did you allow smoking in your gallery?
EB: Gee, I can’t even remember. Well, first of all, this show would have been up certainly a few days early and people on my list would have been contacted to come in and see the show. I remember explaining this to some writer who kind of bristled at the idea that there would be a—
LA: Private showing?
EB: Yeah, or somebody could come in and get something before everybody else. I said, “Well, welcome to the art business.” So the idea was obviously to sell as much work as possible prior to the opening. I guess it was at the time where I would have red dots on the wall, which seem to mean something to somebody or validate the thing. I remember the opening show was very low key because I think we did it from 2 to 6 or something. It wasn’t even an evening opening. And over the years, I did a lot of—I would have a collectors’ preview cocktails of this or that.
It’s basically spinning the stuff around so it seems like it’s something special. And then after you do it for a couple of times, it’s not special anymore and you have to think of something else. But basically, that’s pretty much gone through all the people who might be interested in acquiring something out of that specific show. The opening reception at that point in my life was pretty much—you really need to get it done by the opening reception. And some people would come and—but the idea of someone buying something in an opening, it’s not something you could leave until, in my opinion, the last moment. So a lot of work had to be done prior to this moment of the opening.
LA: So what was the opening for you then?
EB: It’s nothing. I mean, it was a social setting. It’s people wanting to come to an opening and some of them were actually fun. It was a nice gathering of people but to me, it always was—unfortunately in some circumstances, and it was not the case, but it was something that I certainly tried to create as kind of like, okay, it’s an opening and we’re celebrating the artist and this, but the sales thing is something that requires more effort and concentration than leaving it up to the capriciousness of someone coming to an opening and deciding they want something. That happened, but it’s not something I thought particularly smart to rely on.
LA: Did you learn that by experience from your work?
EB: Yeah because mainly, I was responsible for these things. After the opening, the show was old news and the thrill is gone so to speak. So if you don’t jam it before the opening, then it’s a lot harder to sort of bring people back. A review might help or something, but basically it’s not something that should be left to chance if you want to maintain your job.
[01:50:17]
LA: Right, if you want to stay.
EB: Yeah.
LA: How did EB, your space, how did it kind of situate itself within the broader context of the Dallas art scene?
EB: I have no idea. I wasn’t—
LA: Did you participate in the DADA gallery walks?
EB: I was a founder.
LA: Oh, you were?
EB: Yeah, of DADA, yeah. That was kind of a silly name, but anyway.
LA: I guess what I’m asking is if you were to say “I wanted my gallery to be thought of as this or that,” or having had done something, what’s the legacy I guess of your space in Dallas?
EB: I don’t really know. You’re doing this activity of organizing exhibitions and making choices from who you’re going to show it or where the works are being installed, to pricing, to trying to get the people to write about the work, to producing the catalogue, to writing about it myself, which obviously I want to be the best possible thing of all those categories or the best possible quality of all those categories. And how that gets positioned in the Dallas art world, well, you certainly want it to be the top of people’s impression of the top quality or something not always attainable, not for whatever reasons.
But I didn’t really—I guess I could say I didn’t really care about people’s opinions. I certainly had a pretty good idea of how I wanted it done, how I wanted it to appear and what needed to be accomplished for this to happen. But certainly you either did it or you didn’t. Once it’s sort of up to someone’s opinion—again, like selling before an opening, at that point you don’t really have to—you can’t go around changing someone’s opinion. You really have to do the job, make the choices to have this happen and have someone form an opinion that is positive or you don’t. You don’t get paid, basically.
[01:54:07]
LA: Speaking of opinions, what was it like to have two newspapers, and was there any kind of alternative source to get your art news or art criticism?
EB: Well, two newspapers were good. Circa 1986, the shows would have been reviewed by—you know, it’s one of these things where it’s basically if some review happened in the Times Herald, I’m sure the editor would say to the art critic, “Don’t you think we ought to have a review of this show? It sounds pretty important.” And with one paper, you don’t really have that, so then without that competition, you don’t have as interesting of coverage. It’s not only that the coverage diminishes, but there’s not any reason to be “on the spot” or get the “scoop” or get an in-depth article out of a particular exhibition.
LA: Yeah. The sense of urgency is kind of gone.
EB: I would never put my closing days.
[01:56:00]
LA: I think I noticed that when I was trying to get an idea of your exhibition history.
EB: Because someone would be like, “Okay, I’ve got this time to get a review done,” and then something would come up or it would go by the wayside or even if it did—I mean, in a way that—anyway, sometimes a late review would get some people in at the end of the part of the show. That was rarely the case.
LA: Was there a difference in the kind of coverage that the newspapers provided? A difference in quality, a difference in—I don’t know.
EB: Well, these are people that—
LA: Was it quality criticism?
EB: It wasn’t criticism.
LA: It was just reporting.
EB: It was basically opinions about the work, information about the artist, that kind of thing. I don’t know. I think that’s basically just reporting on an exhibition. I can’t remember if anybody came out and said, “This is really a bad show.” I guess if I can’t remember it, it—
[01:58:01]
LA: It didn’t happen.
EB: Or it didn’t happen to me.
LA: What was your relationship with the museum, or was there a relationship with the museum and galleries?
EB: It just depended on who was there at the time.
LA: Do you mean directors and curators?
EB: Yeah.
LA: Was there a director that was particularly supportive or available or around?
EB: Harry Parker was very supportive. I remember he and Ellen came to my opening in 1986. I mean, he wasn’t necessarily going to buy anything, I understand, but it was nice to have him breeze in and breeze out. Jack Lane, a little bit more elusive. Rick Brettell would occasionally come by, but we definitely have, shall we say, a different way of doing things. And the curator was also—just depending on the personality. Some are wanting to be more outgoing than others. Annegreth Nill bought some things out of a couple of shows. Other curators prior to her could care less. So it just really depended on the person.
[02:00:11]
LA: And how did you balance showing local artists and emerging artists? Did you show emerging artists or did you want to show artists that had been given shows and were a little more established?
EB: I did very little of that and I actually wish I would have done more with the, as they say, blue-chip artists.
LA: Why?
EB: I guess just for maintaining contacts in that area, and also having less sales but for larger amounts of money because I had done that for so many years. I wanted to do something a little different. But in retrospect, I probably would have done more of the— Of the established work, not necessarily Jasper Johns or Jean-Michel Basquiat, but it’s not a bad place to—
LA: Come from?
EB: —have a platform as it were.
LA: Right.
EB: But I just had done that so much it just seemed like I wanted to use my judgment as it were.
[02:02:10]
LA: And did you ever see yourself as that person who kind of developed an artist from “emerging” to “seasoned?” I mean, when I think of John Pomara, he credits you with kind of putting him on the map. Did you ever recognize that or did you ever see yourself in that role?
EB: No.
LA: Did you want to be seen in that role?
EB: I don’t really care. As long as the work was good and—sorry, I'm just thinking about something else. As long as the work is—it’s sort of like what I was saying earlier, if you can create a situation where the artist is really going even beyond what he thought or she thought were the confines of his or her work, it’s a good situation. And it’s so tricky because it’s not always like, “Oh, you just had a solid show.” That’s always helpful.
LA: Yeah.
EB: It’s very, very difficult to predict or you try to make this situation happen but it’s not quite as easy as it sounds. And all these variables really have to be just right there.
[02:04:13]
LA: How did the Berlin exhibition happen?
EB: I wanted it to. We came up with this flimsy notion of whatever it says in the catalogue, 150th anniversary of Texas and 750th anniversary of Berlin, which of course is—Berlin is a city and Texas is a state. All the great print people thought it was wonderful, I guess, but it really didn’t happen for any kind of—
LA: Any other reason besides your personal interest in that.
EB: Yeah.
LA: But was your space open? And if so, why was it at the Crescent Gallery, I guess?
EB: I don’t remember what the circumstances were. I guess they were paying me a curatorial fee, which never happened at the end of the show.
LA: Oh no!
EB: And then I got Pan Am, too, which is kind of funny sounding. It’s certainly a retro thing, but I got Pan Am to pay the flight—I mean, ship the work over here, then I have to get somebody else to crate the stuff and bring it to the airport, and then we had customs. So I really couldn’t do it by myself. I agreed to do it and they had some PR people.
[02:06:28]
LA: That’s how it happened?
EB: Yeah, I just couldn’t really—
LA: So when did you start traveling to Germany frequently?
EB: Well, my first trip to Germany was in 1950.
LA: As a child?
EB: Yes.
LA: Very young child?
EB: Yeah, so early Documenta shows were interesting to me. It was also interesting that a New York artist named David Salle basically knocked off Sigmar Polke and for years got away with it until people finally figured it out. Well, people would look at a Polke and say, “Well, that looks like David Salle,” but essentially—
LA: It’s the other way around, yeah.
EB: And again, just like bringing work from New York during an era where the communications were much different and things weren’t quite as accessible and the immediacy of all that as they are now, and also because in Dallas at the time, there was not really a lot of interest I guess in European art. I guess there was, but people really had, in a way, to see much of it or know about certain currents of activities, work being made in Europe as much as they would now. Okay, I just lost the point here.
LA: Germany, your trips to Germany—
EB: Yeah, so it was interesting to me to see these exhibitions that were organized, and then I obviously began doing them myself.
LA: Yeah, and I guess this all culminates in you opening a gallery in Cologne?
EB: Yeah.
LA: Which we kind of got into yesterday, but at the same time, for posterity, it might be interesting to hear the story of what took you to Germany, why open a gallery there, why not just bring the work over here and show it in Dallas? What about having a gallery in Germany was attractive?
EB: Well, my idea was to establish a European market for some of the artists I represented.
LA: Okay.
EB: And the interesting thing about that is nobody else really thought that was a good idea. And to this day, I really can't understand why not. But I was sort of like, okay, we don’t really—well, I guess people worry about their work travelling so far, whether it would come back, how this work would be received out of context.
There’s a lot of legitimate concerns. But to me, well, if this thing could have really happened, which it didn’t, I'm thinking that—it might have been nice to have a group of European collectors or build a following via art fairs and stuff in Germany, and also because of the—at the time, I thought the European economy could persevere where it would be a low in the United States economy. But obviously, that’s not possible.
But certainly, if someone could have really gotten some traction there, I think it would have been a good idea. But I don’t really think anybody else was with me on that. And also, the timing as it turned out was incredibly bad because the Gulf War started shortly after I was there, which the dollar sunk to an all time low against the Deutsche Mark—well, Deutsche Mark since its inception shortly after World War II. So that meant my fixed costs went up like a third overnight and things began to be very difficult.
LA: It’s interesting because I feel like Germans have this romanticized version of America and the Wild West, and I am characterizing Germans of the ‘80s, but I am actually thinking more of like George Grosz and the earlier German artists.
EB: Actually, George Grosz was in Dallas.
LA: I know, yeah, and we’re having a show of his watercolors that he did this summer, so you should come by. So I'm wondering if those kinds of notions still were in place in the ‘90s, in Germany in the ‘90s. Were they still thinking of America as this Wild West? And for you to be bringing Texas artists to Germany, what kind of response was that getting out of German art collectors?
EB: Well, it was getting a great response, but basically, it came to someone actually buying an artist out of context that they did not know from an American gallery, that was not going to work. Whereas, David Zwirner who obviously—his father had a gallery there at the time and in fact, I remember David Zwirner’s first show at his father’s gallery, which was like a Jason Rhoades installation. I think that’s right.
Yeah, that whole plan was all wrong. I guess you have to experience that to really realize that it was all wrong and there was no other way to do it. But Germans really aren’t that open when it comes to a new gallery started by an American, artists of the region of Texas in this case. It was simply not to be and unfortunately, I was quite—well, I just wanted to succeed obviously, so I kept it going longer than necessary to prove a point but I didn’t want to have proven.
LA: Right.
EB: So that’s kind of how it all went.
LA: Do you have any exhibitions that you look back on as being successful, not in terms of financially successful, but just successful as being really well received by Dallas, or maybe opening Dallas up to something new that they received well?
[02:16:12]
EB: Yeah. I’ve done a quite few exhibitions. Actually, in Germany, I did one with Janie Lee, which was—one of the things I was trying to find was a poster for that exhibition, which was like Barnett Newman drawings.
LA: Wow!
EB: And de Kooning drawings of the surrealist period, and it was a major show.
LA: And that was in Germany?
EB: Yeah. I also did an outsider show there. I had a couple of William Edmondson sculptures and half a dozen Bill Traylor works. It was an extraordinary show and I think a lot of people came to it at the time, but still it was not going to happen.
LA: Yeah.
EB: In Dallas, yeah, there were a lot of shows.
LA: Anything more memorable?
EB: Anything more memorable? You know, the interesting thing about that is that there are—like John’s [Pomara] first show was—not his first show, but his second show, which is that article.
LA: Right.
EB: And in fact, I have images from that from which I was going to make a catalogue. And that really put him in a different level in terms of the work that he was creating and all the things that we talked about a few moments ago. It’s interesting because I'm just sort of blanking out.
Jonathan Lasker was a great show. Jonathan came down for that at a point where he wasn’t quite as well known. Jonathan is an interesting artist because he’s really not well known by a majority of people, even now. There’s a guy named Roscoe West who used to be an assistant of Kenny Price, who did a Day of the Dead show a couple of times. It was really great. There were a lot of shows that—and obviously, I'm not listing them specifically at the time that ended up being surprisingly wonderful.
The Richard Schaffer show at the time nobody felt compelled to review. But usually, what happens is that other things have to happen to validate this work. And by that, I mean museum exhibitions, museum acquisitions, other museum shows. It just really requires much more than a gallery show.
Again, there are a lot of variables that may or may not be able to be brought into the equation in terms of—there is just a hell of a lot more cultural gatekeepers now than there were before. There’s a whole bevy of curators and there’s this and that. For example, the Whitney Museum came here a week ago and, they didn’t come here, but I think that’s because they really don’t want to see new things that haven’t been validated, or in my personal theory is that the last thing they want is to be in a space to see something they’ve never seen before and have someone ask them what they think because that hasn’t been clarified by previous cultural gatekeepers and the whole validation process.
As it turns out, I'm not the least bit interested in any of that and it really ends up being when I walk, ride my bike, or drive two blocks from my house to here, do I like the work on the wall when I turn on the lights everyday?
LA: And that’s it?
[02:22:00]
EB: Yeah. I guess I could be out at Basel Miami and maybe it’s my age or this or that and who knows, I might be buzzing around there at some point in the future, but I don’t really care about that periphery. This little area in here of—well, these two little rooms in here of approximately 3,600 feet are what I can install, choosing the artist’s work that I want in the way I want, and everything in the world that happens outside that parameter is not something I have much responsibility for. And if somebody wants to come in and look at something and say, “Oh yeah, this is interesting,” I certainly would enjoy that and I certainly will try to make that happen in any way I can. But increasingly without some peripheral activity or other validation, people aren’t really making those judgments, and that’s just my observation.
LA: Yeah.
[02:24:01]
EB: And I got to say, yes, I would like them to do so, but I think it’s just how things are at this moment. Getting back to Gerhard Richter, he’s 80 years old, so it doesn’t happen overnight and it takes a long time to get all these things in line and certain situations and certain imagery and again, a litany of variables which may or may not achieve success, and I'm not sure I really would know what that is in a way. I can’t really say that I’ve been wildly successful. Some things have been; others haven’t been. I certainly don’t have any regret. I think that’s just how it is, and it takes a different kind of person perhaps than myself to have a sort of social thing happening where regardless of the work somebody has a bunch of people coming and buying it because it’s so and so.
LA: Yeah.
[02:25:56]
EB: I mean there’s a lot of different ways that people are able to accomplish this, and I've been very lucky in having these moments, but I guess I'm really not that interested. I'm interested in the work but the peripheral activity in which to make this a great success, I think that’s for someone else to—usually, the way it happens is somebody will see it here and then they will go to the next level. But I'm more interested in the discovery part, which of course has an inherent flaw because the discoverer doesn’t really—basically, the situation in New York, for example, in which a gallery shows arts for many years and then Gagosian picks them up.
EB: The hard work is really what that gallery does in the early stages, because these women [he is referring to parents with two young children who had come into the gallery at that moment of the interview] have opinions, and they are happy to discuss the things that they like and respond to and not to worry about whether someone else has validated it before they’ve walked in the door, so there you go.
LA: So after your gallery in Cologne, do you come back to Dallas?
EB: Yeah.
LA: And continue your gallery show or your exhibition space in Dallas for a few years?
EB: Yeah. I moved from 840 Exposition to a Commerce Street location, which most people saw as a comedown.
LA: Really?
EB: Yes.
LA: Why?
EB: Or a comeuppance.
LA: What was that about? I don’t understand.
EB: Well, I couldn’t afford to be in that space any longer—
LA: The 842 Exposition?
EB: 840 Exposition I think it was, yeah.
LA: Yeah.
EB: And my lease was up, and so I thought I would find something else for less money. Also, I wasn’t quite getting the crowd that I had been getting at the Exposition [space]. It was just one of those funny things where it’s all right for a while and then—I can’t really explain it. Anyway, this was a little closer to downtown and obviously on Commerce Street, which I thought everybody would know, being one of the three main streets of Dallas. But as it turns out, there was some confusion. You know, Deep Ellum, I don’t know whether that was a draw or not, probably not. Anyway, I think I was in there for—actually, I liked the space and the McGrath, the Elizabeth McGrath catalogue had one or two installation shots of that. I guess I was there two years or something.
LA: And you noticed there was kind of a difference between when you were there in Dallas before and after Germany?
EB: Yeah. I had of course this big blow-out with my gallery space in Cologne, which was next to Sotheby’s. The economy, the Gulf War, basically it was a hard time and I thought I could come back and it was—things always change.
[02:32:07]
LA: Yeah.
EB: That’s just how it is, and it didn’t really—and the other part of that is that I changed and I didn’t feel like I wanted to—once again, the five-year plan of there’s got to be something else. I basically came back from spending a lot of time in Europe for a lot of years and not being altogether happy about continuing in Dallas through situations of my own making and through financial hardships. So it just seemed like a good idea to make that next five-year plan.
LA: Yeah. You’d given Dallas quite a bit of time actually.
EB: Yeah. I was very fortunate. It was a time and moment that I just had some resounding successes. Again, it’s just how a business works. You do not sell every exhibition out, and they’re not all wonderful, even though some of the ones that would be deemed unsuccessful to me were the most memorable and the most interesting.
It’s really hard to know in advance certainly, but even if something closes without selling anything, it sort of gets back to controlling the aesthetic in a white room that you invite people to come into and see what they think and if they want to come away with anything. And sometimes there is great enthusiasm and sometimes there isn’t. That’s kind of how it works.
LA: Yeah. So you go to New York, and how long are you in New York?
EB: I opened—
LA: I guess you’re still kind in New York.
EB: Yeah, I'm still in New York.
LA: Yeah.
EB: In fact, someone—I think I’ve mentioned this to you, but someone came by the other day and said, “Well, now is the time to be in that neighborhood.” It’s just now starting to—
LA: Pick up again?
EB: Yeah.
LA: You’re talking about—you mentioned you’re just kind of not interested in the peripheries and these validation, levels of validation you have to go through. I’m wondering, is that what brought you to West Texas? Because you’re kind of isolating yourself in a way. There is no “art scene” here the way you would have an “art scene” in Dallas.
EB: Well, but there is during certain times a year, which is awfully sparse. And that’s also changed, in this environment. I came by opening this place whimsically, at best.
LA: Had you been out here before?
EB: Yeah.
LA: For Chinati, for—?
EB: I'd been out here for Chinati—I was out here in 1986 actually with a group from the DMA.
LA: Oh, okay.
EB: As we mentioned earlier, I met Judd at the Monumental Sculpture exhibition, whenever that was, so I'm thinking 1978. [Monumental Sculpture was held in 1975 in Houston, Texas.] I bought my house here on a whim like at night from the car.
LA: From the car?
EB: Well, it was kind of a drive-by thing.
LA: Like driving by and seeing the “for sale” sign and calling?
EB: Well, there wasn’t even the sign. I was driving by with a realtor who had just come in from vacation. She didn’t really know what the—anyway, and then it was okay, you're here, now what do you do? And for a few years, this was sort of a playground of the A-list in terms of discovering Chinati, and now it’s slightly different, and that’s how it works. I certainly have enjoyed every minute being here, and I love the climate. I love the light. And where this leads, I have no idea, so we’ll see.
LA: Do you have any sort of relationship with Dallas now?
EB: Yeah, I have lots of friends.
LA: Do you go back frequently?
EB: I wouldn’t say frequently, less each year actually, but I do—yeah, there’s a great group of people there that I enjoy seeing.
LA: Did any of your collectors in Dallas—
EB: By great I don’t mean necessarily large, but a small group of great people.
LA: Did any of your collectors—do you have a loyal group of collectors I guess to have followed you, anybody that’s followed you from Dallas to New York to here?
EB: Yeah.
LA: And same with the artists?
EB: Yeah.
LA: That’s good.
EB: Yeah.
LA: How have you changed?
EB: I’ve gotten older.
LA: Besides that?
EB: I don’t know. That would be a question that someone else would have to answer.
LA: You’re older and wiser and—
EB: Not at all wiser. In fact, I'm sort of feeling like I might be ready for some wild fling of high risk, who knows what.
[02:40:18]
LA: Where do you go to look at art?
EB: Where? Well, studios, I visit a lot of studios, go to a lot of museum shows.
LA: Are there major cities you’re attracted to more than others?
EB: Yeah. New York. LA really never worked for me. I'm sure there are a lot of great things that I've missed over the years. I mean it never worked just because of the whole layout that you have to drive a car. That sounds so fussy but basically I just don’t want to drive. I like to walk. I like to have that whole thing. And New Yorkers are, which I'm now putting myself in the context of, but are very spoiled and very—they want it that way and that’s basically it. And Europe—
LA: Do you go back to Germany a lot?
EB: Not a lot. Let’s see. I think about a year and a half ago, I went to Munich and Berlin and went to see the Caravaggio show in Rome.
LA: That would have been nice.
[02:42:04]
EB: And obviously the churches that the paintings have been in for the last 400 years plus. Actually, there was an anniversary of his death, so they would have been in there longer. And look at galleries there, I have friends, mostly in Germany. It’s an important part of me basically continuing to look and see—you know, while I was in Rome, I wandered into wonderful Morandi show—I'm sorry, now the name escapes me. The Morandi show, I saw, was at the Met. Anyway, de Chirico.
LA: Oh, okay.
EB: It was just phenomenal. I had no idea. I just walked by the side on the street. And then gallery shows. I, on the other hand, enjoy walking and seeing work that I haven’t seen before. And to me, it’s just the greatest thing in the world, so it’s difficult for me to understand why people just don’t want to explore.
[02:44:00]
LA: Well, because this is a history of Dallas, I'm going to ask you a question that you may have a very quick answer or you may have to think about, but do you have a favorite memory or a favorite story in relation to your time in Dallas?
EB: Gosh, there would be lots.
LA: Anything you want to put down?
EB: Well, for quite a few years, I enjoyed talking to a woman there named Dorace Fichtenbaum.
LA: Who is she?
EB: She is a very low-key person who is really quite a wonderful woman and really enjoyed looking at art without much pretense and just really was a very special person.
LA: Okay. Anything else you want to get off your chest?
EB: Oh, no, that’s not really on my chest. I just enjoyed her company for a lot of years in terms of looking at things at my place, looking at things in New York, looking at things in Europe, always somebody who is ready to see new work and spent a lot of time with the work. But I have a lot of great memories from Dallas. I just don’t know where to begin, but basically just fun stuff. I was treated very well there. People were supportive. I'm just trying to—maybe you’re searching for some specific incidents that I could relate. But there were just a lot of wonderful people that were amazingly supportive and really kind of open-minded.
LA: Good. That was all my questions for you.
EB: Okay.
LA: But do you have anything else you want to share?
EB: No, I don’t think I do. Should I?
LA: We've been talking for quite a while, but it went by pretty quickly.
EB: Yeah, it’s great fun.
LA: It was. Thank you very much.
EB: Sure.
LA: And a lot of people are going to benefit from this, I think.
EB: I don’t know about that.
LA: Good.
[02:48:15]