EF: Speaking of the history of your collection and its life, I want to return to the Harvard show. I recall opening the catalogue for that show and realizing you were doing something to change art history. The book was organized alphabetically by artist, so that someone like Carole Seborovski, who was not so well known, preceded a major name like Richard Serra. That happens again and again in that book and in other books related to the collection. There in force, along with well-known artists, are women artists and younger artists.
WHK: You know something—and nobody believes me when I say this—but I never consciously collected works by women artists. I collected them. I know I did, but it wasn’t part of the plan, if there was a plan.
EF: What you’re saying is that you simply looked, and you collected what you loved, what grabbed you, and it ended up being a constellation of what you call “namies and newbies.” The Katonah Museum’s exhibition includes seventy-four works by sixty-six artists. Late in the game, you decided to expand the exhibition by adding more works by well-known artists, among them Richard Serra and Eva Hesse. How did that come about?
WHK: It really happened in the middle of the night. I woke up and started thinking about the show, and two things occurred to me. First, I realized that for fifty years I’ve been paying for insurance for all this work. Why pay so much for insurance if you’re never using it? And then I started thinking, it’s really not fair to do a show that lacks big names and expect a museum to be able to draw crowds. We know from experience that people visit exhibitions because they want to see a particular artist’s work, and then they look at all the other artists’ works. To not have a significant number of big-name draws was a problem. That took me until about 5 o’clock in the morning, and the next day I said, “Let’s do this!”
EF: I understand that Rachel [Nackman] is collecting statements from as many of the artists in the exhibition as possible, and she has asked them to comment upon specific works by other artists in the show. I’m wondering if you’ve thought about this project to create dialogues between the artists in your collection in terms of other examples like that, such as Sol LeWitt’s famous letter to Eva Hesse.
WHK: I’ve thought about that letter over the years, certainly, but it’s the availability of the communication medium that we now have that really made this germane. We realized that we could create a virtual catalogue to accompany the Katonah show. It just seemed natural. We wanted short biographies and short texts, and the best text would be by somebody else.
EF: An artist.
WHK: Artists or poets, people with a sense of artistry. Not necessarily a historian, present company excepted.
EF: It makes sense, particularly given the connections between the artists in your collection that have emerged over the years. I want to ask you a question that relates to my memory of the space at 560 Broadway, which had two entrances: one through the gallery and one through a hallway lined with bookshelves, filled with a wonderful collection of books. When it comes to the drawings you’ve collected, are there certain writers that have been particularly important to you?
WHK: I could go into my library and pull out books and say this and that was important at one point or another. But mostly I started reading about something after I had seen something. It doesn’t work for me the other way around. That’s why I hate these [pointing to his glasses].
EF: Having to wear glasses?
WHK: Yes, because no matter what you do when you wear glasses, it changes what you’re looking at. It doesn’t matter if they are the best glasses in the world—I very often end up taking them off. There is something sensuous about paper when you have it in your hand and you’re looking at something that is raw. It’s a pleasure that only collectors get very often and curators not enough. In museums people should look, not at the label, but at the drawing. On several occasions, much to the chagrin of museum curators and directors, I have taken a drawing from my collection off the wall at an exhibition and passed it around so people could look at it close up. I think it’s very important that people are able to get close to something. I don’t know whether I’m going to do that at Katonah when we open that show, but I may well. It establishes the sense of close looking. You see different things; you feel different things. Richard Serra has made drawings with this motion [a big circular gesture]. The sheet is pretty big, so very often he steps into his drawings. You can see the tread marks from his sneakers, but you only see them if you’re really looking. It’s the same thing with a lot of works. If you look closely enough, you get an identification that you get no other way. You get a feeling of the body of the artist that you just can’t get any other way.