0.27 Robert morris, b. 1933  (Page 3/3)

[As far as artists who were our friends], Lowell [Collins]was the best man at our wedding when we were married in Austin, so he was like a really tight pal. I mean he was my closest confidant, and then I moved away and we just didn’t keep in touch anymore. John Hackney, who’s an architect here, was a very good friend. And the Mears—the Mears were very good friends, very good friends. And Campbell Gisland who wrote for the Houston Post, then he went off to Rochester and worked for magazines and other newspapers. Between them, I guess those were our really closest friends.

Remembering “the mies”

I watched the Mies van der Rohe addition to the Museum of Fine Arts being built. It was a gorgeous, gorgeous space, and it took a long time doing the plaster work on it because Mies was actually there at the final part, sort of pointing out the things that weren’t perfectly smooth. He had a cane—was wearing a suit—and was very much a fussbudget about every little detail in the welding and so forth. So that was interesting to me, and when Lee Malone asked me to design a show there, I said, “Okay I’ll do that.” It was called Corot and His Contemporaries

I think [the Mies addition] got a lot of attention for the Museum, architecturally as well as artistically. I mean, a lot of people came to see it. And I think the space was gorgeous. It was a little difficult to work with because it was so vast, and you had to keep putting up walls and things of that sort. So it was a rather expensive thing to have. But I always loved it and I remember working in there one day and Richard Stout I think was there. I don’t know what it was he had with him—I think a portable radio—and he was playing the Dialogue of the Carmelites

Postscript

My years in Houston were really fabulous from the standpoint of the people that I got to know, that I knew the rest of my life. Donald Barthelme, Jim Love, Jack Boynton, you know. Jack came and visited us [when we moved to] Connecticut. Don moved to New York so I’d see him more—quite a bit more at the time—but he was busy doing his thing and I was busy doing mine. Despite the fact that I wasn’t here long and got sort of itchy and left, and wasn’t enamored with everything about Houston, I still love being here and thinking about those years. I really like the fact that we have so many lovely people here. It was sort of like a pod that opened up and showed me what I could do. It was great training for me because I got other teaching jobs on the basis of what I had done here. And I got attention and it helped me with galleries and I was reasonably happy with that. It was a perfect workout: kind of exhausting, not always a pleasant experience, but absolutely enriched by good friendships.

Robert Morris was interviewed on March 12, 2007. You can listen to the interview here .