Transcripts

text | pdf |

---

CLAUDIA HAMPSTON: Hello. This is the WSCD Saturday Show. And I'm Claudia Hampston. Today, a conversation-- well, two really-- with Hungarian artist Bela Petheo, who discovered Duluth 10 years ago and, in exhibits last fall and again this summer at UMD's Tweed Museum of Art, showed us, natives and residents of the area, how extraordinarily beautiful this city is.

This program is being presented with the financial assistance of a group of Duluth art patrons, purchasers of a collection of pathos paintings for Tweed Museum. More about that purchase and what it means for the area later.

Artists, musicians, writers of prose and poetry have a way of experiencing their environment that seems almost a miracle to most of us. And in their work, the expression of that process, they return to us their vision, enriching our perceptions and indeed, our lives.

Duluthian Rex Hudson in his book, Black Stars and Collected Poems, has a poem which illustrates that idea. It's called "Enger Tower."

"Like some more steadfast firefly,

Soft green against the hill and sky,

The light on Enger Tower glows

Beyond the way the river goes.

And steady burns the tower light

Against the clouds beneath the night,

Not flickering as glow worms do

To light the dark there flying through.

The river, moving black and deep

Beside the shore where people sleep,

Murmorously makes its way

To rest upon Saint Louis Bay.

Across its surface, row on row,

The harbor lights reflected glow

In amber, emerald, and pearl,

Shimmering where the currents swirl.

Then steadying toward the night,

They arch the can buoys flashing light.

While port and starboard signals float

Like colored globes above each boat,

The night departing freighters slide

Their massiveness across the tide,

Darkening the channel more

And blackening the lights on shore.

When Mars is red and Enger's green,

And all the white stars burn between,

Then those of us who cannot sleep

A vigil with the tower keep

And know, when there is no repose,

The light on Enger Tower glows."

What Hudson has done here in verse, giving us the color and rhythm, the play of light on water, the mysteries of hill and harbor, as they are seldom seen by the casual observer looking out into the night, Bela Petheo, has brought to life on Canvas. Petheo, who is chairman of the art department and artist in residence at Saint John's University in Collegeville, has been coming to Duluth to paint for most of the 10 years he's lived in Minnesota.

I met him quite by accident this summer while lunching at UMD with a friend. He and Bill Boyce, director of the Tweed Museum, joined us. And I learned that a group of his Duluth paintings would soon be exhibited at Tweed.

Charmed by the man and his way of expressing himself, I asked if we might get together to talk about the works. What follows is that conversation.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

- Most people looking at the city of Duluth today on a very rainy, gray day, would see just that. But as an artist, what do you see?

- On a rainy day, I'm afraid, I see some very subtle, very nice colors. So the rainy days have their own poetry. The only thing is that the kind of poetry that a rainy day produces, for the long run, it's dull. So I try to select a different kind of poetry, which is the poetry of the late afternoon, which produces beautiful yellow, full-fledged, very saturated colors. And this is the main emphasis of the show. I'm not talking about Duluth as the rainy Duluth, I'm talking about the sunshiny Duluth.

- Yes, really. Your work, as I saw it in the gallery, is Duluth is-- I think, Duluthians never really perceive it. We have this overall gray day mentality. But in your paintings, I saw aqua skies and blues ranging to purples. Do you really see those colors?

- Yeah. They are objectively there. Everybody who has a kind of Mediterranean training, and I spent cumulatively, about five years, hanging out in Italy and in Greece, somehow, gets used to these kind of aqua skies and aqua waters, and the richness of these turquoise colors. And once you set up your palette, somehow, this way, your color vision that way, very quickly, you realize that, indeed, on nice days, the sky is very beautiful here, and so is the water, and so are the buildings are very orangish.

So I'm not surprised when you say that people usually relate to a gray Duluth, because my colleagues at Saint John's asked me, what the hell are you doing up there in that crummy city? And nobody believes me. And I couldn't care less. As soon as they see the paintings, the story is different. So I turn tables there. I hope they speak for themselves.

- You came to Duluth the first time on the recommendation of one of your colleagues at Saint John's, did you not?

- Yes, that is true. It was in the fall of '66 when a colleague of mine, interestingly enough, again, not a Minnesotan, a refugee, Viennese sociology professor, he told me, you have to come-- with a German accent, of course, you have to come to Toulouse. And I didn't even know about Duluth existence. I thought Duluth is spelled T-O-U-L-O-U-S-E. So I didn't even know that Duluth exists. Minnesota is Saint Paul and perhaps, the Mayo Clinic, that's it. So Duluth is nowhere, really. You have to live here.

And I was surprised. I was not too happy about the idea to come here because I just couldn't figure out what could be so peculiar about this place. And when I have seen it, I became a quick convert.

- Did you intend to do a major study of this city or did it just happen?

- No, I never intended to make a major study in a kind of high brow academic sense. What happened here, I found the same kind of visual factors, which promoted my paintings so nicely in the Mediterranean, existing here. So this is like, I don't know, it's very common and ordinary to see a Rolls-Royce on the streets of London around the Buckingham Palace. But it's very unordinary to see a Rolls-Royce in the middle of Africa, see?

So I said to myself, this is what's happening in here. All the beauties of those great Mediterranean cities are in a certain way here. And I should capitalize as an artist, not as an architectural historian or a sociologist of a city, or trying to make a document, what a small city in the Midwest looks like. I couldn't care less about that. This is not my field. This belongs to the sociologists and the architectural historian and whatnot.

The painter should paint what is visually tremendous. And if his work is conveying this, people look at his work and say, boy, that is tremendous, then he is right. If not, then he lost the battle.

- Are there many cities which have a portrait of them in such detail as your portraits of Duluth?

- Of course, this is a big question and one has to go back to history. Certainly, Venice has a tremendous history of-- it was always the first and last love of great painters like Claude Lorrain and Turner and Monet. So Venice is unique. And of course, some of those big European cities such as Naples, and I'm sure Versailles, London have their painterly interpretations done by really, the most outstanding painters of the past 300 or 400 years.

But if we get to American cities, the closest what I remember, and perhaps, I might be uninformed on this, the Museum of Modern Art put up a show a few years back, showing New York through the eye of several painters, and there were about 40 pieces in the show, and it was circulated, but not through the eye of a single painter.

And again, let's face it, Duluth is a small town, 100,000. That's all but the population what we have here. As such, it's like, I don't know, Albany, New York, or Rochester, New York, or Waterloo-Cedar Falls in Iowa. Now, who the hell imagines, in his right mind, to paint a Waterloo-Cedar Falls, a painterly essay? It sounds like a mad magazine title. With Duluth, it is not that way, especially if you look at the paintings, you realize that, indeed, there is something capturable there, something worthy to work with.

- These paintings. And how many of them are there?

- Well, actually, what you see in the Tweed is a selection of about 60 works, and out of which, 30 belongs to the Tweed. So the other 30 are dispersed in private collections in Minneapolis, Saint Cloud, Fargo, Moorhead, you name it. But these 30 belong to the Tweed. And I think it was a very good idea to keep them together.

- They were purchased by local benefactors for the tweed museum. And I understand that they will be then on loan to public institutions for showing for a period of time.

- So to speak, the whole thing is up for grabs. Of course, whoever borrows it, and it could be a church, it could be a high school, it could be a college, and it could be a museum, they have to provide relatively secure places. And there might be some a small fee. But it's probably good there.

- I was wondering, a speculative question, really, if when people see these works and they see them in their own environment rather than in a gallery setting, if it may change the perception of Duluthians from looking at this city as a gray city. We may begin to see the colors ourselves.

- Well, let's hope. See, an artist is effective not by fiction and not by arbitrariness. There has to be a grain of truth, and as a matter of fact, several grains of truth in its work. We are not really impressed by the work of a madman. We are not impressed by way out stuff and arbitrariness and all kinds of eccentricity. We are impressed by something which has been revealed to us. And you reveal things which are objectively there.

So what I am saying that under circumstances, in a beautiful, clear, sunny days, in late afternoon sunsets, this city is uniquely beautiful. And this is just as an objective statement as two by two add up to four, or I just don't know, whatever. It's almost a scientific thing.

So you cannot produce great art, which is based on fiction, or arbitrariness, or eccentricity, or extreme subjectivity, or just sterile speculative intellectualism. People look at these things. And if they provide a smile embarrassedly, if they are not polite, they, right away, use vernacular. But you do not really reach people by humbug. And if there is any merit in the show, it is just this, that it is not humbug. It has a real basis. Just people, perhaps, have not seen this before, but it was there.

[END PLAYBACK]

CLAUDIA HAMPSTON: The Petheo paintings purchased for Tweed will be more than a nice collection for that gallery, since part of the plan is that they will be widely circulated. Available throughout the city, area, state and even the nation to responsible institutions for exhibitions.

Duluthians and visitors to the city will soon be able to see the works on display in one of the local banks. Other institutions with an interest can learn how they might acquire the paintings for display by contacting the director of Tweed Museum, William Boyce.

Well, that first brief conversation with Bela Petheo suggested that we, perhaps, should plan on having occasional dialogues about art, since we had obviously only scratched the surface. The rest of the program is the initial exploration in that direction. We began by discussing how an artist, living in a small community and away from the mainstream of his profession, cities on the East and West Coast, and European art centers, can survive and grow.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

- Certainly, one has to find ways because one cannot live in a kind of inner emigration. It depends what kind of artist you are. If you are highly intellectual or brainy type person, a heady type person, then you have to be always on top of the latest events, what the computer is doing to graphics and what the neon light is doing to neon sculpture or whatever, what are the latest technical tricks.

However, I assume, personally, a more profound view about this that art is not really between one artist and the other. There is a New York critic, I guess, Leo Steinberg, who says that all art is basically about art. I think he is missing the point. All art is-- or at least a great part of art is between a man and himself and man and his environment.

And I doubt whether any major achievements in the last 100 years, such as the art of van Gogh, was really reacting to the art of some other people. It was really between van Gogh and between nature. Of course, there were some influences, but to put this issue in the center that an artist paints because he responds to the challenge of the other artist, it is somewhat childish. Art, if it is really reaching some deeper level, has to come from a deeper level than this kind of childish, I'm going to show off who the hell I am.

So if you have this kind of Constitution that you work with yourself and with the given surroundings, it could be, I don't know, any kind of natural motive, it could be a portrait or a self-portrait, but if there is a constant dialogue between you and nature, then you are not so much lost as one would suppose.

- How do you maintain that dialogue? Surely, there are up days and down days and all sorts of very human moods artists, I'm sure, have, just like everyone else. How do you sustain that creative drive when you're constantly forced back upon your own resources?

- Well, today I don't maintain any kind of dialogue because nature is so crude. It's not worthwhile to talk to her. We have a nice rainy day today. But anyway, by work, by reacting to the visual stimuli which reach you. And sometimes, somebody walks into your studio and sits down in a particular manner, or light is falling in an interesting manner, or I don't know, you watch a great drama of nature late afternoon hours with interesting shadows where shapes transform. Suddenly, a grayish wall, which is faceless, usually, during the day, becomes something magical just by the light and just by the background or just by what happens between light and shadow.

So if one has a fresh eye for these kind of things, then nature is awfully rich. As a matter of fact, it's much richer than any of the sterile intellectual stuff that comes out from so-called avant-garde art centers.

So if one is somehow given over to moods and says, well, nobody gives a damn about my art, why in the hell shall I kill myself? Then, of course, one is losing this direct rapport with what happens around. If one cannot respond anymore, then perhaps, this is the end of art. One is losing this kind of, how shall I say, the basic eye, the eye which discovers wonders every day. If this is not there, no matter how many cameras, and computers, and laser beams, and all the tricks we have, they are not going to help. Yeah.

- So you're saying that whatever we read in romantic novels, art is much more disciplined and being aware and being alert than it is some random romantic inspiration?

- Yeah. This is typically 19th century view that the artist is a loner, lives on the fringes of society, and at full moon, goes out and reads a line of melancholy love poetry, and paints the moon as it quietly sinks in the water. And then that's what art is about. Actually, art is more than that. Somehow, one passes this kind of adolescent phase of art. And art is so autobiographical and really self-serving, meaning that it's a kind of a FBI work in the soul. And you reveal all the secret tapes and records.

And usually, all these kind of revelations, self-expression, especially the vulgar type self-expression, is not contributing too much to the fellow men. We are not really interested in the eccentricities of somebody else's minor and private problems. We are interested, what are really the basic underlying forces which somehow integrate us and break down the kind of wall, what conventional society, breeding, education is setting up between fellow man and fellow man. Because I think one of the great tragedy of modern man that there is so little real communication going on between members of the society.

Everything what we do, everything when we communicate is scheme. How do you do? You got to come to dinner. It was so nice meeting you. See you again. We are surrounded by schemes, by schemata, and all these things make our life really robot-like. Art is supposed to counteract this and break down this kind of barrier.

- How do you communicate that to the larger community? I realized that, of course, one way that an artist does it is through his work and through exhibitions of his work. But it occurs to me that in this community in Duluth, we have come to the point where art is generally accepted. We've moved a step from total ignoring of it to the point where we believe generally that art is good in some, rather, amorphous way for the community. We're now in the process of building a cultural center.

So we're beginning to put our money where our mouth is in that sense. But it's much more than that. How do you get beyond that to those essential kinds of communications that you were talking about?

- Well, basically, art is not really a kind of private passion, a kind of little play saying, it has some kind of positive value. So it's supposed to intensify our life experiences and thereby, enhance our general positive feeling toward life.

The theory is that our life is somehow shapeless. Whatever impressions reach us, they are coming down as a kind of cascade after a storm, carrying a dead ox and wood trunks, and garbage heaps, and whatever. So out of this tremendous cascade of daily impressions, the artist is selecting something which is meaningful and creates a kind of order.

So by looking at this order and enjoying it, somehow, we discover a kind of stability, a kind of inner order in ourselves, or even if the artist shows this order. Somehow, he shows it in a controlled manner, and thereby, we are left with the feeling that even disorder could be restored and somehow controlled.

So no matter what happens, we come out on top of something which looked very chaotic and very tough at the first time. So there is hope in it. And thereby, if there is hope, there is no desperation anymore or desperation is not so bad. So this might be some of the psychological foundation of why we need art.

Now, the ordinary person, a truck driver or I don't know, somebody, an accountant, might not need or might not feel such an acute sense of deprivation that he needs this kind counteract and as art always. But I'm sure everybody has a few moments when he would like to look or listen at something, where there is clarity, there is order, there is stability, which is giving a rock-like little island in the rather wild seas of daily existence.

- You were talking about creating order out of chaos. And all of us have tools with which we work and parameters within which we work. I think of myself working on paper and with lots and lots of tape. And sometimes, it's very difficult to create order out of that. And I wish so much for another dimension. I wish, perhaps, for the visual dimension.

As an artist, do you ever wish to get beyond those limitations? Or have you mastered your tools so well that they're friends and not things you have to butt up against? Or is that the artistic crisis?

- Especially in our age, where there is no methodology-- see, I'm a painter, no methodology to painting as such. Everybody is left with his own little sense of color and design. Before, in the good old days, in the old masters, they learned a trade and they learned every shadow is nicely brown, and every highlight is a lead white with a little orange in it.

So there was a kind of systematic way of mastering the technique. Now everybody is left on its own. So one is humiliated daily because sometimes, the means are so complex that one just is not always coming out on top. It's highly unusual in the history of art, because art had always some kind of a method. And now in the 20th century, we don't have, we didn't even have in the 19th century.

Impressionism, as such, was already highly subjective. This is why some other people like Tzara tried to systematize the thing. But what he did is straight jacketing is really. But it shows the crisis that already in the 19th century, people felt an acute need to correct this situation. And of course, nobody corrected it. So it is a kind of bullfight. And sometimes or in most instances, it is the bull. But there are a few instances when it's the toreador.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I wanted to say, and perhaps, this is a very frequently asked question, why is art necessary? Because everybody could have artistic experiences by looking at a beautiful sunshine. Everybody could express himself or herself. Why is this extra luxury?

So my answer is that this is not true that way. The average person could express himself or herself, but not her experiences. You come back from a vacation, wherever you go to, Bermuda, or Florida, or to the Ligurian Sea coast in Italy, which, of course, each of us do. And you say, well, I was standing on a lonely hilltop. And then suddenly, there was a sunset. And I don't know, the top of the horizon or whatever show the beautiful purple, and this was reflected in the sea, which had the wine red turned into a green.

Well, you tell your experiences to people and they politely say, I know what you mean. Of course, nobody knows. It is the artist who could show these things in color, not even the color photography is going to do the trick, but it is the artist who, without talking too much, would say, OK, this is what I'm talking about.

And a successful picture exhibition should contain a tremendous amount of communication, which could not be communicated in any other way and which are nevertheless important for us. Imagine living in a world where everything would be painted gray. There wouldn't be any sunshine. There would be a kind of artificial light. And there would not be any color. And there wouldn't be any shadow and any light, just a uniform gray. I'm very really curious, how long our sanity would survive anything like that.

- Isn't there also, in addition to what you suggested, this whole matter of levels of expression, quality of expression? If we don't have any artistic models that are really good, how do we measure, even as weakened artists, where we are?

- Art is, to a great extent, a traditional occupation. So every traditional occupation have their traditional standards. So if somebody is, let's put it this way, perhaps, a portrait painter, he is automatically facing the challenge of portrait renderings, starting from Nefertiti ending up with Modigliani, and everybody who is in between.

So there are certain kind of standards which are not so much as people would think. It is not so much lifelike because the photography is very lifelike. Your passport picture or your driver's license picture is supposed to be very lifelike.

- One would hope not.

- Yes, it's very interesting. See how objective the camera is, and everybody hates the passport pictures and the driver's license pictures. I don't know, but it's supposed to be scientifically objective. So it shows how far objectivity goes.

The work of great artists are always, somehow, not so much lifelike, because Modigliani is not lifelike. There is no human being who is created the same way as Modigliani creates their beings, but they are vital. They have a life of their own. They emanate a life. They pulsate. This is where the so-called photorealists miss the boat. They think that lifelike is automatically vital.

What we call vital in art is something entirely different. That means that the artist is setting up his own means. And within these means, these things, these colors form and whatnot, they interact in a manner which constantly keep our attention in a joyful manner alive. This is not happening always with photography.

So I think good art is in the same kind of category as a beautiful day or a beautiful woman. If, I don't know, Gina Lollobrigida or name any of the stars, walks into a room, nobody has any second thoughts. People don't say, well, gee, I am not a gynecologist. I am not an anatomist. I don't have to consult books whether decide this girl is beautiful or not, but you just look at the person and says, Jesus, that's just incredible.

So art should-- good art is really in the same kind of category. You see late work of Degas, for example, with those glowing colors and the kind of simplicity, how he grabs these complex forms. And it's immediate. It punches you in the nose, but there is no blood there, but joy.

So somehow, art still emanates a certain kind of magic, and people react to it. They don't have to know too much about art history. And somehow, bad art leaves us cold. It says, well, one is standing in front of it, rather puzzled, and says, well, that's perhaps, the most what one could say it's interesting, but it is not really giving off this kind of peculiar type of charge.

- Well, you tell me that bad art leaves you cold. And you mean you generally, I know. But all kinds of people are going up to the Target store and spending $39.98 for a piece of, I have to say, a junk.

- Yeah. Yes. Yes.

- And is that problem-- people need-- I mean, even if we're only talking about wall decorations, people need something around them in their own environment to enhance it and enrich it. And if they don't know what's good, they will buy that $39.98 piece of junk. How do we teach them that what's good is available and might not even cost that much?

- Yeah. First of all, we have to teach the function of art, what art is doing. It is basically a little bit of an existential philosophical proposition. It is really setting up a kind of order which is digestible to everybody and creating, out of chaos, some kind of an order.

Now, this kind of series basement deals, they have all the outwardly charms of art without their sense of it, such as they have a pleasing color harmony, not really too complex, though, I know this is beyond that, which goes well with the couch, which breaks down the monotony of an unbroken flat surface like the wall. So this is really one function of art decoration, but this is about the lowest function.

What happens in this so-called "art appreciation," quote unquote, could be compared to the first approaches of an adolescent man toward the other sex, where any girl who has the right measurements and a blonde or a red hair and uses heavy lipstick, and walks in a rather inviting manner is automatically associated with the very profound sense of beautiful femininity. It takes about 20 years for a man, or even more, to realize that a prostitute, who is having all these kind of outwardly charms and walks down on Hennepin Avenue or wherever, is not the peak of femininity in any sense.

So what happens, the same way as a young guy falls for this kind of femininity, the uneducated and the visually immature person is falling to the same kind of, German name for it is kitsch, for the same kind of corny stuff. It takes a long period of life experience and maturity to realize that these things are basically phony.

How do you tell to a 16-year-old boy that the centerfold of the Playboy is not really what femininity is about? The same way you have a great deal of difficulty with the 40-year-old housewife, who is looking for something green to match the couch, and trying to tell her that, look, art is not about greenness, it's about something else. Perhaps, she will never see the light. And she will be delighted in her rather childish simplicity, the same way as you see a rich old lechers chasing after girls of my description.

Not every human being lives on the same level of human existence. And boy, it is coming out in art. This fact is just-- it could be beautifully measured where we stand.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

- You come out of a European tradition. All of your education and your training and your art appreciation came from deep roots of culture. What happens to kids in the United States whose art education, particularly, in the last few years, since we've been talking about everything being artistically acceptable, whose art education has no standards?

- Yeah. See, art doesn't start with the museum. As a matter of fact, it almost ends in the museum. By the time you are really genuinely interested in great sculpture or painting and you go to a museum, this presupposes a long road already behind you.

Art starts with ordinary, healthy visual experiences, such as nice building around you. And under nice building, I don't mean ornate facades, but I mean good proportions, a kind of environment which is somehow harmonious.

If you grow up in Minneapolis, you see the IDS Tower and next to it and nothing, a vacant parking lot, then a small shack, then again, a skyscraper, then a used car lot. It's a horrible jolt to the senses. It is biologically already detrimental, let alone the ghettos.

So compare this kid growing up in Florence, for example, or some Italian city like San Gimignano or even in Sicily, everything is fitted and on its right spot. So if this is missing, somehow, we are starting out on the wrong foot. These are the big basic things which have to lay, at an early age, the foundations. And then later, you could be an awful sophisticated connoisseur.

So if our environments are not aesthetically pleasing, I think we are starting out-- we have two strikes right at the beginning against us. And it doesn't make any difference to, at the tender age of 19 or 22, to get one wretched little art appreciation course in the college, if you grew up surrounded by ugliness.

- As a teacher, you find yourself, several times a year, looking out at young faces which expect you to give them something, if it's only instant appreciation. How do you contend with that?

- Well, first of all, I am spoofing. I'm not stuffy, I'm spoofing some of the impossibilities and trying to point out some of the absurdities in our environment. It's very interesting to compare, for example, I don't know, of any kind of great city architectural environment to a perfect architecture, "perfect," quote unquote, environments, such as the Piazza Campidoglio, which was designed by Michelangelo. And he was carefully placing these three palaces and really arranging space to make it a real pleasure to be in. And then I just call their attention, look out through the window, what do you see?

So people start realizing that not everything is all right in their surroundings. And then they perhaps, start developing eye for harmony and a proportion of what is fitting and what is not fitting. This is one of the big issues. I think an art appreciation course, no matter how good it is, it is not going to "save them," quote unquote. But at least, it makes them a little bit uncomfortable.

And perhaps, after 20 years, these people might sit on boards of directors of big corporations and having lots of money. And then if somebody says, all right, now, here in the middle of nowhere, we have to have a skyscraper and destroy three or four mountains and plug up this lake, and they would say, now, wait a minute, 20 years ago in the college, I have heard that the Greeks placed their temples on points which were really harmonious with nature. They were working with nature and not against nature. Now, couldn't we introduce some principles like this? And then they say, well, it's very costly. All right, then it's very costly, but we have to pay something for something. So perhaps, a few of these things might rub in.

- How about the idea of young people who have-- or people of any age, really, who have never known an artist coming in contact with an artist, coming in contact with you or some other artist who's recognized as doing good work in a given geographical area? Is that an important thing?

- Well, I think there are very, very few people on the Earth, in our culture, who at one point or another, did not come into some kind of a contact with any kind of artist. And the artists, I mean, even Sunday painters. And the problem is that each of us has a set of aesthetic principles.

Now, I'm just questioning the quality of those things, because when I was in Chicago, about 10, 15 years ago, there was an Andrew Wyeth exhibition. And people were standing in the line in front of the Art Institute, the same way as they are standing in the line to see the Christian Radich inside. So there has to be something which is very appealing in Andrew Wyeth. And perhaps, he is expressing what the broadest public regards as beautiful.

So those people who have seen this show, they have their golden means. They say, this is almost as good as an Andrew Wyeth or it is not even approaching it and it's automatically bad. So the problem is that it's very hard to draw these people out to see a landscape in a different manner than Andrew Wyeth sees. For example, Andrew Wyeth is working with very few colors, a bunch of olive greens and browns and blacks and grays hill.

Now, what do we do when we look at the work of Kokoschka or Derain or even my work at this Duluth show, and suddenly, there are no browns, there are no blacks, everything is in color? So this is a real problem.

And perhaps, these people are insisting on their very well defined and very narrow kind of view in art. And this might give them a tremendous base security from which they cannot be shaken off and out. On the other hand, as far as I'm concerned, they live a horribly impoverished life.

- How do you shake people? How do you shake them out of a perception, oh, I have always liked Andrew Wyeth to the exclusion of every other American painter?

- Well, I think very gradually, one could show that, all right. And first of all, do not deny the greatness of Andrew Wyeth. Say, wow, that's beautiful. Look at those browns. That's very nice. And I appreciate your point of view. But now, how about looking at reproduction or even an original of another painter like Rembrandt, who was using a much larger variety of these golden browns?

And then if the person says, yeah, well, this is quite nice, I could accept this. Then one could go over and say, well, now, look at, for example, Frans Hals. He is using some other colors too. And then gradually build him up till we end up with the Fauvists, where they use the wildest yellows and violets next to each other.

Plus one should point-- one should work always with nature too, and say, now look, you love a sunset. And you see these wild purples and oranges and violets on top of each other in the sky. You don't see all these kind of olive greens and browns, and still, this thing is beautiful. Don't you think that there is a justification of a painting which is going that way? And well, if somebody is reasonable, one could say that-- or at least, he would give a chance.

Of course, personal preferences are deeply rooted psychological things. I think if somebody is insisting on those few olive greens and browns, it ultimately boils down to a very simple or almost simplistic type of life, where I work, I have my job, I have my room and board and a square meal, and that's about it. And these are the basics. And that's the most important thing in life. And everything else is just a kind of fancy.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

- Throughout this whole conversation, there's one thing we haven't articulated, and that is, you've come close to it in your last remarks, and that is that people really have to talk about art. It's got to be something that is significant to enrich people's lives, but also for art to become what it really needs to be in our daily lives.

- I see what people should do is talk about their visual experiences in whatever form it occurs. If you get a charge out of your secretary dressing up differently in the morning than yesterday, and you automatically feel that this dress is somehow much better, then let's figure out right away why is this much better, because perhaps, she is dressed in orange, and this is the color which gives a additional touch of vitality to an otherwise drab office space. People do not praise these things, they just feel good about things.

But if they would recognize the richness of their visual experience and the qualities of their visual experience, this would create a tremendous open door for artistic experience. Because art is talking about, to a great deal, about these kind of things. All the kind of experiences which could be experienced by the senses, not intellectually, it is a kind of direct.

Art is sensual. Of course, this word is really badly abused. You think about sexy movies, that's sensual, all these buxom centerfold in the Playboy or whatever, that's sensual.

- And that's hardly sensual at all.

- But the real world of-- the real meaning of sensuality is much higher and much more universal. Actually, what happens, these centerfolds, if I talk about this, they are neither artistic, not really sensual because, see, real sensual experiences, they have a little bit of an intellectual component too.

In sculpture or in painting, to which these centerfolds would belong, if they would be art, there would be a difference between raw meat, which is hanging down there, hanging out there, whatever, and between form. See, form events through already the mill of the mind. And it is something higher, it is something essential, and reveals not only itself but something beyond it.

So if you look at a great nude of Michelangelo, you don't get meat, you get form. If you look at the centerfold, you get meat. So actually, this Playboy centerfolds or whatever, they do not belong to art. They belong to trade journals such as meat cutters weekly. There is very little sensual experience as we use the word as artists that takes place there.

So as a matter of fact, form is an enhancement of three dimensionality. Meat, what you get there, shapeless things, is a degradation of it.

- There's an adage that says, what you ought to do is leave them wanting more. And so I think we ought to close this interview and pick it up another time because we certainly have touched on some interesting possibilities. I'd like people to--

- React.

- --sit quietly and think about it and indeed, react. Call us up if you want to know more. I'll write down the questions. And in my next conversation with Bela Petheo, we'll take up some of your questions.

Thank you very much.

- Thank you.

[END PLAYBACK]

- Bela Petheo, artist in residence and chairman of the Department of Art at Saint John's University in Collegeville, whose paintings are as colorful as his conversation, I assure you. Tape cassettes of this program are available at a nominal charge. And we've asked for letters and calls on this particular program and others of the Saturday show, too. Reactions, pro and con, topics you'd like to hear more about, comments on WSCD and MPR generally. We really do mean it.

The finished program of two weeks ago elicited quite a response, a number of cassette orders, and this letter from Dr. Roger Mattson of Duluth.

"This letter is in reply to your fine program-- some of my best friends are Finnish-- and to thank you and Scandinavian Designs Unlimited for your efforts. My wife and I are both 3 and 1/2 generation Finnish Americans, making our children 4 and 1/2 generations pure. I agree that your program helped to teach them their roots and that self-reliance, work, and sisu-- guts, and performance-- in the long run, are important. I would have missed the program were it not mentioned in the Saturday Morning News Tribune. So thanks for the extra publicity. Karen and I both sang in the Finnish bicentennial choir. Sincerely, Roger Mattson, M.D."

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Let us hear from you too. No medium of communication should operate with only a one-way switch. We've planned to take time on this program to read and reply to letters, so all we need now is your response. Next week, opera is on our calendar, with the Duluth production of The Elixir of Love coming up on the 17th and 18th of this month. And a conversation with poet Michael Dennis Brown. So be with us then, Saturday at 10:00 for the Saturday Show.

This program was made possible with the financial assistance of a group of Duluth art patrons, purchasers of the Petheo collection for Tweed Museum. I'm Claudia Hampston. Technical direction is by Janet Carter.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

This is WSCD Duluth, broadcasting from the campus of the College of Saint Scholastica.

[MUSIC PLAYING]