Open a magazine from the 1930s and '40s and look at the illustrations in it. There's nobody alive that could touch the way they could draw back then.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I think that certainly the artists of the '40s, '50s and '60s were fighting a very conformist society, which didn't give them enough space to live or create, and they were bucking all kinds of spoken and unspoken rules.
I'd experienced the '40s and '50s by looking at my grandparents' old clothes, books, and magazines.
I'm sure we don't read old paintings the way they were intended.
People of my generation who became photographers in the late fifties, early sixties, there were no rewards in photography. There were no museum shows. Maybe MOMA would show something, or Chicago. There were no galleries. Nobody bought photographs.
There is nothing in my life where I view myself as a 1920s person.
So I went to Chicago in 1940, I think, '41, and the photographs that I made there, aside from fashion, were things that I was trying to express in a social conscious way.
I never studied art, but taught myself to draw by imitating the New Yorker cartoonists of that day, instead of doing my homework.
The most wonderful time to be in the art world was in the sixties, because it wasn't a business - there was no business of doing art.
It was the winter of war, in 1939. It felt completely pointless to try to create pictures... I suddenly felt an urge to write down something that was to begin with 'Once upon a time.'
Well, I didn't know how to draw very well back then, in the '40s and '50s.