A Conversation with Werner Kramarsky

This conversation took place at the desk of Werner (Wynn) Kramarsky in midtown Manhattan on November 6, 2007. Present at the time were Wynn Kramarsky, Christian Rattemeyer (The Harvey S. Shipley Miller Associate Curator of Drawing, The Museum of Modern Art), Philip Van Keuren, and Theo Stanley. Theo Stanley filmed the conversation, and Stephanie Brown, the 2007-2008 Pollock Curatorial Intern, transcribed the conversation from the film.

Christian Rattemeyer: I’ve been reading a little bit, both in terms of previous interviews in this series and the dog interview with you [On Drawing: A Conversation with Wynn Kramarsky, Connie Butler, and Harry Cooper, Pollock Gallery, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas, 2000], and one of the things I realized is that, for me personally, I am very interested in the beginning, when it started for you. Not necessarily when you started collecting, as a conscious decision, but I want to focus a little bit on the moment when your, let’s say, formal sensibilities or the kind of stuff that you like worked itself out through contemporary artists. Because a lot of the material in this exhibition [at the Pollock Gallery] is of a younger generation—I suspect—of a younger generation than the material you started out with initially. I want to get a sense of how your sensibilities were shaped in the late 50s and early 60s to see how that translates into younger generations.

Wynn Kramarsky: Well, I lived in those days very casually in a lot of places in Greenwich Village and places like that. I knew a lot of artists. Nobody had any money and I was very fortunate because I actually had a real job, which meant that I regularly ended up buying meals or beer for a lot of people who were artists and who were my friends. They came to whatever place I was living in. I went to their places. That was the time that I saw a lot of things that today are known as “abstract expressionism” but at that time were unnamed as yet. It was really in the early 60s that I saw some Sol LeWitt work and that really settled it. I mean, I had collected quite a few things before then, but seeing the LeWitt work and beginning to understand what he was thinking was pretty determinative for me. I had bought work, interesting work, before then, and I think that probably the story that everybody loves is the fact that in 1958, when Jasper had his first show at Castelli, I bought a little drawing. A very small drawing that cost $175 at the time and it took me six months to pay for it. It’s the only work of a living artist I have ever sold. And I sold it because after about seven years it started to fall apart, or so I thought. I went to see what it would cost to have it stabilized or restored, and although I was single when I bought the drawing, by the time that it started to fall apart I was married and had a couple of children and a third one on the way. I couldn’t afford $1,000 to $1,200 on the off chance that it might survive. So, that’s the only work of a living artist I’ve ever sold. But I think to some extent this was also formative for me because even then I was interested in how something was made. It’s always been sort of “how is it made?” From very early on, from childhood on, I was interested in “how does this work?” and “how is this made?” In drawings, for me, that was always an easier thing to probe than it would be in a painting because you can actually see what was happening. Then, maybe fifteen to twenty years later, I said, “Well, you know, I’ve got a fair group of nice things. I ought to really focus back on the people who are young now, because these people were now twenty years older and twenty years more expensive.” So I started looking in studios. I was always interested in the minimalist, post-minimalist, minimalist-related, constructivist-related, and, to some extent, earthwork-related. All that material interested me because it’s all about how something is made.