MARK STRAND: What was the art like in the late sixties and seventies when you were first showing in New York?

WILLIAM BAILEY: Many different things were happening—there was pop art, conceptual art, and minimal art, photo realism had started out, and there was the beginning of some recognition of straight figurative painting—that is, painting that isn’t based on photography, but is based either on direct observation or memory. Around that time, in the late sixties, Gabriel Laderman wrote an article called “Unconventional Realists” in Artforum, and he identified a group, which was really not a group at all, but some painters that he was aware of, who were working figuratively. At the same time, Sidney Tillim had organized a realist show (which I was not in) and had also written some pieces for Artforum, which I thought were very interesting and on the mark. In ’68, I had my first show at Robert Shoelkopf Gallery. I was teaching at Indiana at the time. And I had been away in Paris for a year on a Guggenheim. I’d known Shoelkopf years before, when he was a graduate student at Yale. And I’d seen him a couple of times but hadn’t really thought of his gallery. I was, at the time, with the Stable Gallery, that was showing work which was not at all close to what I was doing. Eleanor Ward, who ran the Stable Gallery, asked me to join the gallery, but