MS. RICHARDS: So the welded pieces that you showed at Spoleto—how did your work evolve from there?

MS. PEPPER: I was working in U.S. Steel. And I was making a sculpture for someplace in Tennessee. I now had become very involved with factories. And the Steel & Iron Institute or something like that sponsored me. They gave me very thick steel, but there was no way to cut it. So I decided to try to cut them by overheating the welding. And therefore I had these very rough edges. And actually Fontana, Lucio Fontana, for my first show at the Marlborough, Rome [wanted] to buy one of [my] works. And I said [to the gallery director] "well, tell Fontana that I'd rather trade with him." And to my horror, he said, "No, he wants to buy it." And I thought, I just want to trade. Then he laughed and said, "And then he'll trade with you." I only realized afterwards—because I was so ignorant—what Fontana was interested in was what I was doing something he was doing with holes and things like that. And he was very interested in how to do this. The truth is, to be able to have done that, A, you had to have that kind of steel; but you needed industrial equipment to do that. And that was only because I was at U.S. Steel at the time. But they were wonderful.

MS. RICHARDS: What about the use of color on those works?

MS. PEPPER: Well, I was now working in America, and it was at the beginning of Pop. And I'm not impervious to what goes on around me. And I assume that—there were problems. There weren't a lot of burnt areas on the inside. And it was very difficult to clean them. And also, the burns looked very interesting. I tried to figure out how to keep them and I decided to put color in them.

I also, I must tell you, that I'm the first person—the first artist in America—to use Cor-Ten. And that I did in 1964. Because U.S. Steel said to me, because, you know, they liked me. I was this good-looking kid. "Beverly, why don't you try this new material we have. It's Cor-Ten." Now, Corten is a brand name, which you get—Bethlehem Steel had different numbers, etc. By calling it Cor-Ten, U.S. Steel really had the market because it was a name. And they gave me these pieces of corten. And I made a work that actually Charles Cowles's mother bought it. She's given it to some museum now—she's now quite old.

When Barnett Newman was working the obelisk that he did, he asked [about the patina.] I went with him to, I guess it was Teitel Geitz where he was working. They didn't know how to get the patinas. So Barney and I went there and showed them how I did the patinas. And why did I know how to do the patinas? Because I was working in U.S. Steel with the people who invented it.

And from then they became fairly geometrical. And that's because I— That all started at U.S. Steel while I was making the sculpture for this place in Tennessee. And so I became acquainted with stainless steel at that time. When I built my first boxlike structure, the grain is [inaudible] of the stainless. Either I ground it—people don't understand. David Smith's bronze sculptures, he never—there's no design he did. That's the way when you grind a sculpture, you want to get off the welding, that's what happens. You decide whether you want to have that welding, those circular things, etc. If you want to have them, then you look like you're doing a David Smith because that was his— But you had no choice. Once you welded a seam, you grind it off, you immediately have that pattern. And I was very concerned about being accused of taking David Smith's patina. Though people have always associated me with David Smith, my work really—I loved his work, I must say. He influenced me in many ways, but not in terms of taking his work. I kept trying to work against it. And one of the reasons for polishing them was that I tried to figure out what to do with the seams without grinding them.

And that was once again very serendipitous because by then I had already done the Cor-Ten piece that had been painted and the other flame-cuts that were painted. So when I ground— When I did these and we polished them, I realized that something extraordinary—this is once again the divine accident— When it was [inaudible], it absorbed completely the landscape. That led me to saying, why don't I just use the landscape rather than have it as an image? So that led me to using grass instead of having absorbed that, you see.

I have a very bad back, you know. I'm going to be 87 years of age, and I've been working with those heavy materials for a long time. So that I have certain things I can't do. But that's fine because it leads me to do something else. Makes me invent another wheel, you see. Which is the interesting thing about it.

MS. RICHARDS: After the works, the stainless, there was a period of work, I think it was the late sixties, where you really felt it was a breakthrough using the stainless. That's the period you're talking about? And then I think that led to a touring show, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in 1969?

MS. PEPPER: Yes. Well, that was my first Marlborough show. And they were all big stainless steel—very big things. And most all those works were sold to museums.

MS. RICHARDS: Right, 1969. I see. [Was the Albright Knox your] first major museum exhibition of sculpture in the U.S.?

MS. PEPPER: Douglas [MacAgy], he organized this show called "Plus by Minus," for the Albright-Knox Museum. And he had seen a work of mine in Italy. And I got a call from the gallery in New York saying that he chose that work for the "Plus by Minus" show. That was my first really big recognition kind of thing because the Albright-Knox bought two things from that show. But what's very important about this stainless steel is how it led directly to the work that most people aren't aware of because where I use the land, I do so much land work.

MS. RICHARDS: Yes. So in the early '70s and 1970—the image is the stainless steel?

MS. PEPPER: That was how I broke with Clem Greenberg, among the things. And the way I broke with Clem Greenberg is that Clem Greenberg, who wanted to be a big supporter of mine and loved my work, said to me once that women can't be great sculptors, but you may break the mold. I made a sculpture which now is at the Albany Mall [Compound, Albany Mall, Albany, NY] that went like this, and then down. Clem wanted me to take away the things that went along the ground. And I said, "I can't." Now his relationship to almost every artist he supported was that he was their editor. He went in— I mean he'd go in to Helen's [Frankenthaler] place, and she'd put her things, and he'd figure out where they're going to cut it. He told all the artists except he didn't get away with that with Sonny Carroll. But certainly with Ken Nolan, all of them. And I was very distressed because I knew I was about to cut the cord. But I said I couldn't possibly take that off. That was the whole—it was a very important thing; it was a continuity that started at the floor, it went up, around, came back down into the floor. In fact I was right because that led me to putting things under the ground and into the ground. Had I not done that piece, I wouldn't have gone into the ground for a long time. But there are seminal pieces in your life, and that was a seminal piece.