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the mystic. He had long draped figures and a poppy. You were supposed to deduce eternal sleep or something or other. They were lovely things. There was Pablo Picasso there, Pissaro, Paul Cezanne. Even if you went day after day you could never get to the end of that exciting exhibition.

The thing that was astonishing about that show was the effect it had, not only upon painting but upon life in general. I think it was one of the most stirring things that ever happened to New York or in America. It stirred up interest not only in art but in life as it was then and not just the way it read in Homer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, or some other ancient, elegant and previously regarded standard description of life. I think there was a great literary impulse as a result. People who could take pen in hand were stirred by this new view of life. They too looked around and didn't try to write like William Thackeray, but tried to write like themselves, just as the artists were painting as they saw it.

From then onward I was always interested in painting. Quite a few years after that they began having a free show. Anybody could hang his pictures - anybody. They held it somewhere just below the old Waldorf-Astoria, which was where the Empire State Building is. It was just below there in a loft building. That went on for a number of years. Some very