My Love Affair with Katharine Kuh
JohnyML

One day Katharine found that a bunch of postal stamps
were missing from her work desk. A solo show by a young
artist, Charles Sebree, was on at that time in her gallery. Finally,
she realised that Sebree was stealing stamps from her desk. He
was selling it together money to buy food. She asked him to
change his ways, but he said that it would be ‘dishonest’ if he
agreed with her suggestion as he was planning to steal more
stamps because he needed to buy food. (This was the condition
of the artists in the US, then. I mentioned it to an artist friend
of mine in Delhi, he said that he, too, had done things like that
in past. He said he did not steal money or stamps but other
interesting souvenirs from friends’ houses. He was forced to
steal them because despite his repeated requests to part with
those souvenirs, they were not listening to him!)
Another incident Katharine describes is quite touching. It
was a time when Jewish migrants were coming to the US from
the Nazi Germany. One day a Jewish lady came to the gallery
with her small boy. A few uniformed officers came in to see the
show at the same time. The moment the boy saw them, he stood
alert and screamed ‘Hail Hitler’. The Jewish woman explained
that the boy was extremely traumatized by the experiences back
in Germany where people had to say ‘Hail Hitler’ the moment
they saw men in uniform. The Jewish community also adopted
this to escape the eagle eyes of the Nazi officers.