SMW: Of course, I didn't claim it which I should have done, because they liked it so much. It was unfinished. I've come on three different pictures in the last 15 or 18 years that have been stolen...

SMW: I don't know. It might be a stupidity on the part of the people that took it; they might have got a suit of clothes that would have been much better.

SMW: No, I think it's just the contrary. I think painting is always the same. I think the French have a saying: "Plus ca change la plus ca la meme chose." Which means "The more a thing changes, the more it remains the same thing." I think the outside of a painting, the exterior, the surface of it, would change as a person, let us say, grows older; but I don't think the fundamental quality of either a human being or a painting ever changes. I think it remains the same. I think people that knew my painting when I was 22 years old would recognize that painting today. I don't mean that it looks the same; I mean that there's an indelible mark placed on it. But I think that's true of everybody. I don't feel any change in myself except for becoming old; I get weaker and probably stupider or something like that.

SMW: Yes. That is a theoretical thing which I think can be borne out in actual practise. It's what the Germans call "einfuhling" and we call it "empathy," and the Japanese have their own word for it, which is a form of "Kunja," which has to do with feeling itself. And I think it has been proved that it requires a great deal of discipline. Of course the art production of today has no interest in such a thing. In the great periods of art they did have interest in it. I don't mean the great periods such as the Renaissance because all Renaissance painting was a commercial painting. But I speak of the Middle Ages, for instance, up through the Romanesque period, great artists painted from the time of, let's say the 16th and 17th century; the artists did the same thing in the 14th, of course, that's primitive painting. And we find the great periods of that kind have that feeling... that they put themselves into their work because they feel that in order to know a thing one must become a thing. Do you realize that in India itself in the old days a sculptor had not only -- was forced to take the rock itself out of the ground (the stone which he sculpted) but he had to live with it. He was not allowed by his masters to get away from it. They insisted upon his dreaming about his rock. And remember that the models which they used were all divinities. Not being able to bring them down in visible form, they went into such profound periods of meditation that they visualized them to the merest details which served the Indian artist (that is the ones who made the set formulas for the production of those things which were very strict). They posed for them, these imaginary dieties did, much more definitely than had they been actual.

SMW: You were speaking of empathy. That's what it is. It's a feeling into something. As the Japanese, which takes from the Chinese says: anything which interposes itself between the artist's brush and his canvas, or between the brush and the paper, immediately means that the whole picture is ruined! It's no longer of any value at all. It has to be that way. But people, as I say, are not interested in such statements any more. We are not interested in art; the artists are no longer interested in art at all. They are interested in selling paintings. And that's the reason I don't exhibit.

SMW: No, he doesn't.

SMW: No. In the Forum show, every man, as I told you, had a forward. I believe there were sixteen men exhibiting that that time -- I wouldn't say, I might have gotten mixed up, nineteen, sixteen or something, but I think it was sixteen. I could name many of them now. Out of that number anyway, the totality of the people, I had 80% ask me to go around and get from them their statements of what they were doing. I went around. They hadn't the foggiest notion of what they were doing and it ended up in my writing for them 80% of that which was published in the Forum catalogue.

SMW: Not particularly discouraging. It might be revealing.

SMW: I think Pietro della Francesc...

SMW: Well, Mrs. Hoag, I don't think the public in the Middle Ages at the time of Giotto, or any other time in the history of the world, including the Greek, or the Italian, the Persian, the Chinese, the Japanese, that the people ever had the foggiest interest in what the artist was doing.

SMW: They knew the old gods and goddesses, yes; but what they were interested in was the literary teaching that had to do with words and names, not with forms and artistic or aesthetic meanings. That's something that has never touched them at all. And they have never been interested in it. But in the time of Giotto, for instance, remember that all the men at that period, the men before him, and the men slightly after him, and even men up to the time of the 16th century, or perhaps the middle of the 17th century -- there was so much inability to read or anything of that kind, the Gothic cathedral, as well as the paintings even of Romanesque period, -- taught these people Biblical lessons. And they also in the later Renaissance art became the status symbol of families, such as the D'Estes, and the Medicis, and the rest of them who utilized the artists merely as a status symbol, as one does now a Cadillac or a Lincoln-Imperial (Continental), or something of that kind. That's all they amounted to. And they were not interested in them in any other way. I don't say that that was absolutely the totality of people. There were a few people who were interested in art. But I don't think in the history of the world there have been many people who have been interested in art. And when you talk about folk art or folk music you are really stating something that has no sense to it. When you see folk music anywhere, you see it's grown up, it hasn't been made by a lot of people getting together and deciding that's good. It's been made by one man. That man might have belonged to the folk clan but he was the artist. The rest of them heard it after he said, this is it. They sang it. It's the same thing with folk art, and so forth. There's one type of picture in Japan which is now very popular, due to the fact that it's probably very bad. It was a picture called Otsvae. Otsvae pictures were done in Otsu. And these so-called artists lined up outside of temples and the worshippers went through there. As they went by they could see these pictures lying on the street where they painted them right before them. And those pictures done in the -- I think they began in the 17th century -- and they went up to maybe 50, 60, 70 years ago. And those Otsvae are strictly amateur- done. They're pictures of demons; they're pictures of gods, they're also pictures of other more or less lay subjects, but mostly demons and mostly gods. They're very expensive today. When they were bought originally they were bought by the people. They were bought that way in the same way that Christians bought pictures of Christ. The Japanese government shut down on Christianity and made the people, once a year, gather in a place where the Christians were, and if they failed to trample on the ground on those pictures of Christ, they no longer had a chance to tramp anywhere else because they lost their heads. Those things are handled -- don't get the idea that because people buy pictures they like pictures; they don't. They like a message which the picture might give them. What people buy pictures for now is the same reason they buy my pictures and other peoples' pictures. My pictures have gone up 300% in ten years. That's a good investment. It's almost as good as General Motors.

SMW: Of course it is. They buy pictures of mine never having seen them.

SMW: Most people do, Mrs. Hoag...

BH:... buy them because they love them and enjoy them.

SMW: I don't think so. There are very few people that like pictures as pictures. The collectors that I've known: there isn't one out of a hundred collections that I've ever come in contact with where they really like pictures. They like them for other reasons. Many families now buy pictures having no possible idea what they're doing, what the painter is doing, and neither has the painter, for that matter. But they buy these things for status symbols, because they're advertised as such. Why does everybody run down when they hear of a new-type automobile and buy it? We have compact cars now which we use. A "compact car" because the American would not stand for a moment riding in what's called a small car. So they change word "small" to "compact." That, he can take. But nobody would ever have bought a car if it was named a "small car." But now it's a "compact car." In Europe they're small cars. But here they're compacts. And we have to give those semantic idiocies to practically everything we do. And it's true with art as well, so-called art. I mean you will find in me an idealist as far as art is concerned, but not an idealist as far as being sociologically-inclined enough to think for one moment that people who buy pictures like them. They don't.

SMW: I certainly do. And for nothing else.

SMW: Not at all. I don't give anybody a thought at all. When I'm painting a picture I'm not thinking about anybody loving it, my loving it, or anything else. As a matter of fact, I, like probably every painter in the world, when I'm painting a picture think of practically everything in the world except the picture. I reconstruct whole pasts for myself. I think of what's going on here. I think of whether I want this or that for dinner. I think of what somebody said to me some other time, that has nothing to do with the picture. One paints pictures, if one is an artist, subconsciously. That is, after you have learned by a long discipline your composition and then it requires no conscious thought. Your mind is perfectly free at that time.

No... I was on a radio program here about a year ago with Dr. Harvey. I don't know whether you heard it or not, probably didn't. Well, he asked me that question. He said, "Well how can you say that? Does the artist feel no responsibility to the public?" I said, "The artist feels just as much resonsibility to the public as the public does to the artist, which is nothing." He said, "You have no feeling of responsibility to the public itself?" I said, "Less than none."

Those are all mistaken ideas that people have got from people who have written about art who knew nothing about it. And of course that is in years gone by. What they write now is strict gobbledegook. They don't know anything about it (wouldn't have anything about that). The writers look at something and they write something ostensibly about that picture. But it's actually about what I, the writer, like to feel about myself when I can read my own words on the thing. It has nothing to do with the subject. However, don't get me on that subject. That is something that I suppose every man who has a modicum of intelligence finds out after he's been exhibiting for two years. And I've been exhibiting since 1912, which gives me a pretty profound idea of what I'm talking about.