Arts and Letters

I'm sorry I haven't written my tribute. I'll just have to speak as Bucky always did.

We were friends. I did a head of him in 1929. I was then twenty-four—he was only seven or eight years older, but at that time it made a lot of difference. A year was a long time. As time goes on, time changes, it becomes faster and faster. Very shortly after doing his head I managed to go to China and Japan, looking for my past. But Bucky was always in search of the future and perhaps for this reason I always thought of him as "America." To me Bucky was America. He believed in the future. His dream was of a better world and he maintained this forward-looking idealism all his life. I thought of him then as somebody like William Blake—a prophet—with a wonderful childlike faith and a love of humanity which seemed so marvelous to me. And I of course, a semi-stranger, felt that he gave me great hope, a sense that the world was going to be better, and it is this kind of hope which motivates young people—this hope that the world is going to get better, that there will be worthwhile things to do and that it will all last a while.

So, Bucky kept his youth because he was in constant communion with the world. In fact he had already started his Chronofile which was a record of his contact with the world, from which he took as he gave, always one step ahead in his imagining of what it might be like if it were better.

I spent two years, from 1927 to 1929, in Paris on a Guggenheim Fellowship where I worked for, or rather, was allowed to work in, Brancusi's studio, trying to find a place for myself in art. Later, when I returned to the United States from China in 1932, in the middle of the Depression, we met again, Bucky and I. From the time of our first meeting we had taken trips together: to give shows at the Arts Club in Chicago and at the Harvard Society of Contemporary Arts in Boston, where I did a head of Lincoln Kirstein. He showed his Dymaxion House. The Dymaxion House was a marvelous idea of a man free from landlords, free in space, no longer rooted in the ground but in a way like a bird. His was a vision of the future to which I subscribed heartily and I went to all his lectures and was his chief listener, I think. So in a way I am a kind of memory repository—I have memories that others do not have of those early days in the Village.

We met at "Romany Marie's"* and he was already prophesizing and I became a part of his audience. In the Depression there was really nothing much to hope for but somehow the future still seemed to offer us something. What was so wonderful about Bucky was his constant belief in the success of the human family through science. But you all know what has happened and I myself have grown older while Bucky became always younger. I have never seen anyone so full of faith as he, yet he was not so one-sided in his life, in his attitude, as it might seem. He did sometimes escape from the treadmill of the future as on his yearly trips to his island in Maine. The last time I saw him I said, "Bucky, where is your favorite place?" and he said, "Bali," and I said, "Well, so long as industrialization doesn't get there," and he looked at me with a certain anguish. You see, in one of his last books he said we have about fifty months to find out whether we will have one world or none.

He was a very human person who loved people and loved the world and the world loved him. Young people worshiped him and they always came to his talks in vast numbers and he was able to give them hope, and that's a great deal.

Thank you.

* “Romany Marie's" was a cafe in Greenwich Village where intellectuals used to gather, named after the owner.