NVCR 2
Page 14

 what is around "us" in New York City or Paris. There should be such a thing as
 Southern art. Maybe not squeezed down to as close a thing as Tennessee art,
 but it could be. I have never been able to feel surrounded by abstractions. Art
 has very little to do with geometrics, if that's what's meant by abstractions. Of
 course, a painting like that [referring to an abstract piece done by Mr. Kershaw],
 which doesn't refer to any familiar object at all, is like a symphony. It's movement
 and conflict and power symbolized, and symbol is the key. If the painting, even if
 it is strictly representational, involves a similarization of attitude, then the fact that
 it is also representational is minor. The portrait of my wife, at the end of the
 room, I don't know whether you can see it or not, it is a Southern painting; you
 would never see that in New York. The veranda overlooking the fields and the
 dogs and so forth.

H: So its those symbols that make it quintessentially Southern, those
 representations that are symbolically laden?

K: Well, like that [painting of a] nude lady sitting [there]. If you examine the painting
 closely, the people in the painting hanging on the wall are discussing her, and
 she is languidly listening for hoofbeats on the lane, for her lover to come, I think.
 Well, this gets to be the atmosphere around select Southern mansions, you see.
 I'm just working on repairing a painting of a "Tennessee Road Gang," which was
 still in existence in the 1930s. If you've got in the Saturday night drunk tank
 [meaning, jail], regardless of whether you were colored, you got given a shovel
 and you were leg-chained and carried out to a road and you dug ditches as a
 gentleman with a sawed-off shotgun standing by to increase your ardor.
 [Laughing.] This applied whether you were white or black. It was a forward-
 looking institution, it was integrated more or less voluntarily. [Laughing.] In that
 you voluntarily got drunk, in other words. After that, there was a little bit of
 shoving and nudging. [Laughing.] You'd be interested in seeing that, that's a
 Southern painting, "Tennessee Road Gang." Of course, the church, religion are
 inextricably interwoven, even tighter than that, genetically bound, into the culture
 of our society. Religious urge and the aesthetic urge are close kin.

H: I understand that one piece of artwork out, off of 1-65, [referring to Mr. Kershaw's
 sculpture of Nathan Bedford Forrest visible off of Interstate 65 south of Nashville]
 particularly got a lot of attention.

K: Yeah, I was accused of being a racist and other things. The liberals, like my
 friend John Seigenthaler [former Nashville Tennessean editor], I'm sure he
 boiled at that sculpture. Forrest is unjustly maligned. How can you make a villain
 out of a man who, as a slave trader, was known for never separating family, and
 his slaves were well taken care of. For one reason, if they had whip marks on
 their back, they brought less money, I'm sure. His personal bodyguards during
 the war were black, I know the descendent of one; his quartermaster, in effect,