Arriving in the United States
| "At
the end of January, with snow and floes of ice drifting in the Hudson,
I saw for the first time the misty silhouette of the skyscrapers of
Manhattan. Ruth Allen [Jay's wife] and Elliot Paul took me from the
boat to Washington Square, where the Allens resided, and I was installed
as a lodger." |
1938
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This
full page photograph appeared in Cue, with the caption reading
"a veteran of Alcatraz," confusing the Alcazar of Toledo with
the famous prison. When Cue's lawyers finally caught up with
my father he was in the Stork Club celebrating his escape from Alcatraz
with Elliot Paul. He didn't, of course, sue. |
From
The Washington Post. It is of my father when he arrived in
New York on January 12, 1938. At the end of December, after his show
at the Museum of Modern Art, he returned to Barcelona. |
1939 -
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The Second Spanish Republic fell on April 1, 1939. On January 11 my father arrived again in New York, this time to begin an exile which lasted 37 years. Several years earlier he had met a young woman from Terre Haute, Indiana, in the American Embassy in Madrid. Jan Speirs was assisting the American ambassador, Claude Bowers, with his research on Washington Irving's tenure as American ambassador to Spain, for a biography Bowers was writing. When my father returned to New York in 1939 he and my mother came together again and were married on February 21. I was born on January 2, 1940. |
Elliot Paul playing Boogie Woogie with Albert Ammons in his Greenwich Village, New York, apartment. My father is on the right with his sketch book. |
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| Kansas City Times, September 23, 1940 |
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| Mother and Son |
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| Elliot Paul (Portrait of Elliot as a Picador) | Jan Speirs in 1929, just before she left for Europe. She is 18 in this photograph. |
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| Father and Son |
The Arrival of the Press
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In America, he tells us, "the dilemma is fatal: either you allow
yourself to be loved or you will commit social suicide." He had
little talent though for this kind of worldly self-promotion and confined
himself to his studio, to work. But when the reporters came he would
offer them a whiskey and a clown-act, even if his subject was serious.
These are scenes from the early forties in the studio at 26 West 8th
Street, in New York, as caught by the cameraman who accompanied the
reporter who can be seen in the bottom left directly above. |
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