AN INTERVIEW WITH WILMA KEYES

  Excerpt from an interview with Wilma B. Keyes by Roberta Smith, on May 7, 1988

  Miss Keyes lived most of her adult life in Mansfield.   She began teaching at the Connecticut Agricultural College in 1925.   After two years, she became education director of the Art Education Press in New York City.    She returned to Storrs in l938 and taught art at the college for 25 more years.

            She was the author of several publications, including George Freeman, Miniaturist , The Beach Memorial Collection of Art and History of the Society of Connecticut Craftsmen – 1935-55 . She was also the co-author of Styles of Furniture and Furnishings:   European and American .

            Miss Keyes donated her personal collection of modern design to the Yale University Art Gallery, the William Benton Museum of Art, the M. Estelle Sprague Historic Collection, and the Homer Babbidge Library. She was a member of the Connecticut Water Color Society and the Connecticut Historical Society.   She was also an enthusiastic member of the Mansfield Historical Society.   She died in 1993 at the age of 91.

Smith :   Were you a native of Connecticut?     

Keyes:   No, I grew up in Westchester County, New York, in Bedford........After I graduated from high school I went to New York City, and I graduated from   Parsons' (School of Design) at the time that Mr. Parsons was there. He was a real innovator.   It had been at art school where they just taught painting at first, and he was the person who introduced, as a pioneer, design in art.    And it was the beginning of that long period that most people don't remember, of getting better design in the home, getting better design for the person, teaching people to look at art, where before it had only been hung in museums.   People didn't patronize museums much in those days, but it became a popular thing about the time I was growing up..

RS:    Tell me about how you happened to come to Connecticut Agricultural College to teach.

WK:    I had had two years of college teaching out in Ames, Iowa where I taught in the art school.....I came to Connecticut and applied for the job.   I can remember coming up on the train for that interview and taking the bus from the Willimantic Station to this little, small, country college that had less than 500 students in it.   I met the president of the Agricultural College, Charles Beach, and he was kind of a Lincolnian style person, very easy to meet, with a beautiful smile.

     He told me he thought I had the attributes for the job, but he told the dean that he thought I was pretty young.   When we discussed the job, he said, “I'd like to see an Art Department here, but we have no place to put you except in Home Economics.”   .....I accepted, and the classes were   taught in   Holcomb Hall, a new dormitory for women. .......I don't think any young beginner could have been more fortunate than I was in having Charles Beach for the president.   ............It was a very small college with a wonderful spirit of pioneering and everybody giving everyone else the benefit of each other's ideas.   Mr. Beach never wanted to be called President Beach or Dr. Beach.   He was Mr. Beach, and he wanted everyone to do their best and to make the Agricultural College proud.     He had lost his wife before I came, and he was very interested in collecting art in her memory.

RS:   So you left and went back to New York.

WK: I stayed at Storrs for two years....I felt I couldn't give the students much beyond what I had learned when I was in art school.   I've always said that Lindbergh flew over the Atlantic in May that last year I was at the Agricultural College, and we all climbed Horse Barn Hill to see if we could see him.   The idea was that if Lindbergh could do it, I could do it.   I think New York was pulling me.   I wanted to go and make a name for myself in New York City.   So I told the people in the Agricultural College that I'd had a wonderful time, but I was going to go on and do something else.   I didn't know what.

            I explored things around New York and went into the Art Education Press and told them I'd like a job there, and they said, “We work with schools.”   I said, “Well, that's what I would like to do.” I stayed with this company for ten years.   It was owned by Potter Palmer of Chicago, and he was the president of the Chicago Art Institute (and the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago).   He wanted to do something with his wealth to help spread art around the schools of the United States.   In that day art was considered a frill, and Mr. Palmer thought it was high time that it became a part of the schools.   We distributed color prints of famous paintings that were studied in the schools and colleges. We were the first people to bring them out in color...this was a pioneering thing that later turned to color slides.   I thought I'd be there for years until they went though the depression.   I was there from 1927 to 1937, and then the business was sold, and I was sold with the business....and I got out and went back into teaching.

      And Storrs called me back.   I was in Michigan State at the time and Storrs had always been a place I came back to.   In 1938 I had to come late, the 10th of October, but I had a telegram from Mildred French when I had accepted, saying,   “It's all right for you to be late because we've had a hurricane, and all the students have had to go home to help their fathers rebuild their barns.”   So I came in 1938, and we didn't start classes until the 10th of October, and then I stayed 25 years.

RS:   When you came back, Wilma, what changes did you find?

WK:   The college was now called Connecticut State College, and I was being brought on to develop an Art Department, but the funny thing about it, there was that same little room in the basement of Holcomb Hall and the same group of people just as though nothing had happened.   The limitation was 500 students for the college, but we had a new president, Albert Jorgensen, and he was promising a great future for this college.

RS:   Was there a change in the size of your classes?

WK:   When I came back in 1938 it was still women, but the new Home Economics Building opened in 1941 with our own art rooms and art lecture rooms, and the men began to come in.   That wasn't too long before the war began, and then we would have G.I.'s which really crowded things.

This is part 2 of the published interview, in which Miss Keyes has been reminiscing

about her early days at the University, and it is now the mid-1940's.

Smith: And what was the attitude in those early years toward women professors?

Keyes : There was a tendency on the part of the administration to think that we were going to be a great university, and we would all break our necks to introduce courses that were needed to help us do it. But somehow the women of my day were not given the same consideration that the men were, and you would never find a man and wife coming into the university and both teaching……

The administration did everything to get men instead of women as teachers. It seemed to signify to them their chances for getting recognized as a university were better with men rather than women. So this was a struggle for me all the time I was there. But I always felt that the student were with me, and what really matters is if you have the students with you and they know what is going and going on…………. That is a very happy circumstance to live through. I don't think there is anything more satisfying than to be a pioneer in something that you can see growing and where you are given every opportunity to do it in any way you want to. I never in all the years I was there was ever restricted, told what I should teach or interfered with in the slightest way. I think I was lucky in choosing the type of people that came on the staff.

The deans, though, changed every two years the whole time I was there, those 25 years. So it was not very easy to keep the understanding of one dean after the other. But the Art Department rolled on merrily and smoothly, and I just sat back and let it roll.

Smith: Well, your career of 25 years there certainly covered a tremendously interesting and fascinating period of growth.

Keyes: It certainly has. I think the first dean of Fine Arts said something to me about – I had retired at that time when the Fine Arts Department was started – and he said something to me about how I was such a part of the university that it was flowing through my veins. (Chuckles) That's the way he put it, which I thought was pretty cute.

Smith: There were great changes in the physical look of Storrs and the University, too, during those 25 years.

Keyes: Yes, Oh, you mean those 25 years I was there. Now I can add the 25 years that I've been retired, and the changes that have taken place are appalling. And I can hardly believe it. It's gone from a standpoint of being classes that cover teaching to a wealth of professional results……It's climbed up the thermometer pretty high. And the professional attitude of the young people today with the introduction of computers is impressive. Right now there is an exhibit in the Atrium Gallery of art done with a computer, so I don't know where art is going next.

Smith: But it was a very exciting period, that period of tremendous growth .

Keyes: Well, I think I was pretty fortunate.

Smith: Well, shall we go on to your retirement years?

Keyes: Retirement years, I wish there was some way I could make anyone who hasn't retired yet realize what it can mean to you. Twenty-five years of teaching kept me breathless most of the time. There wasn't time to do the things I wanted to do. And all of a sudden everything stopped. I was retired. You have to be honest with yourself about what you're going to do with those retirement years. There's an explosion of things that can happen once you do retire……..But I do think that the happiest thing of it all was to have time to paint. That was something that I had always wished for. I never could do it when we were planning all those courses. And on a lovely spring afternoon to put something to eat in a crockpot and climb in the car and go out somewhere up and down our beautiful Mansfield hills and do a little local watercolor and come back feeling wonderful. It was such a joy to be free to do it. I stuck those things in a folio under my bed until there were two large portfolios that I called my “Helga collection” under the bed. …Then I began to think that I had to begin giving things away. I gave my 20 th century design library to Yale University because their doctorate students are in the decorative arts, and they are the one school that does it. And then there are those paintings. I never have sold paintings, but I gave them away……You know, I have so many people I'm indebted to now that I have been forced with arthritis to say home and not be able to do anything, let alone not be able to pain, I thought this is something I can do for my friends. So I began to venture when these friends came in and brought little homemade goodies or did something for me in the house, well, here's a chance for me to do something to show my appreciation of their friendship. I had the fun of seeing people going through those folios and seeing the kind of pictures they chose and then I would take them to the framer, Donat E. Champagne. And he began to enter into the spirit of it so we had a good time all this past year.

Smith: What were some of your favorite subject for painting, Wilma?

Keyes: Mansfield is the most wonder area to live in. Get in the car and drive around Mansfield…..the spirit of the hills and the ponds and the lovely New England houses and churches and river, you just never can stop it….it's just a painter's paradise.

Smith: Will you comment upon your long time interest in the crafts movement, Wilma?

Keyes: …..The Connecticut Craft Society was in a post-depression period where many people were without jobs. This organized in 1935 as something to keep people who were unemployed busy. It was a wonderful outlet to learn a craft and to make it available for sale. But the Craft Society has grown in a national and international way – and I've been to a number of their conferences around the world to see this…that now the price of crafts are on a level with the price of fine art. I was one of the directors from, I guess, 1940, until I retired in 1963. I wrote a little booklet called A Handbook for Craftsmen , and also wrote a history of the Society of the Connecticut Craft from 1935 to 1955, which is on

Record.

Smith: You've also done some writing during your retirement years.

Keyes: I was fortunate to be in the Mansfield Historical Society from its inception. It was discovered that a very famous miniaturist, who was a farmer's son by the name of George Freeman (born in 1789) was a self taught miniaturist who went to London and lived there for 21 years. I spent ten years doing research on George Freeman. It was a real experience to get George Freeman's letters together and put out a publication.

Smith: You did some other writing, too?

Keyes: Well, I did a small amount of it. When the University of Connecticut celebrated its centennial in 1981, the art museum asked me to write up Charles Beech. That was a real joy to me.

Smith: You have certainly had a very exciting career, Wilma.

Keyes: I have had fun, and I feel very grateful to the people that have given me the opportunity to work with them………But I do want to say that retirement opens a whole new world from the work-a-day world. Having to be responsible for yourself everyday for how you live is something that makes you what you are. ………..When you speak of art, it is something that expresses you, and I have joy working with my material.

Smith: Wilma, I wish to extend a big thank you, to you, for this interview. It's been a great pleasure for me. Thank you so much.

End of interview.