Ezra Maas: An Oral History

Part Two

Artists, writers, journalists, photographers, critics, friends, and others, who were around Maas during the years 1956 to 1996, give their impressions of the artist. Interviews by Daniel James.

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Suzy Sternwood, New York-based multidisciplinary artist, who collaborated with Maas from 1978 to the present.

SS: His was the art of survival, especially in his later years. For a man whose every move was watched, discussed and analysed, art provided Ezra with a unique means to express his individual experience in a private mode.

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Randall Mosley and Jacob Thompson, fellow students with a young Ezra Maas at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art from 1957-62.

RM: Ezra Maas? He always gave me the creeps. I never saw people’s fascination with him. It was only because he was so young if you ask me. A savant? Hardly! I didn’t think he was anything special.

JT: Ah, don’t listen to Randall. He’s just jealous.

RM: I’m not, you never–

JT: Randall could never get over the fact that they admitted Ezra to the school at such a young age, but the truth is he deserved his place. Professor [Edgar] Wind, the art historian, was giving guest lectures at the time and he was one of many senior staff who took Ezra under their wing. Wind was an expert in iconography and pagan mythology and Ezra was an apt pupil, always listening and asking questions, absorbing everything he could. Personally, I agreed with Wind and the others. Ezra was a prodigy in our midst and it didn’t surprise me in the slightest when I began to see him appearing in the international press just a few years later.

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Perrine Sallis, curator of The Green Gallery in Paris, France.

PS: Encore aujourd’hui, bien des années après sa disparition, Maas continue de hanter la psychogéographie de la ville. C’est l’artiste des artistes, peut-être oublié par une grande partie du public mais toujours cité par ceux qui s’y connaissent vraiment dans les meilleures galeries d’art de Paris, influençant encore et toujours la nouvelle génération d’artistes d’avant garde.168

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Jean Highsmith, daughter of Dr Alexander Bion who allegedly assessed Ezra Maas in the 1950s following the death of his parents and brother.

JH: How did you find me?

DJ: A schoolteacher I interviewed in Oxford told me that Maas had been treated by a psychiatrist named Bowlby when he was a child. He remembered the name because Bowlby went on to become quite famous a few years later. Your grandfather’s name is referenced briefly in Bowlby’s authorised biography, alongside Dr Alexander Bion and the case of an unnamed child. It was the child’s circumstances that caught my eye. Namely their similarity to stories I’ve uncovered about Ezra Maas’s childhood.

JH: Here.

DJ: What’s this?

JH: My grandfather’s notes – the cases and medical histories he just couldn’t let go – take them. He told me, before he died, that one day someone would come looking for his files. He didn’t say which of them, but when I read the files for myself, it was obvious. I always wondered why he didn’t ask me to destroy them…probably the same reason he kept the files himself all those years…Guilt…I suppose they were his punishment to bear, his mistakes…I want you to know that my grandfather was a kind and caring man, and a lovely grandfather to me, but there was always sadness in his eyes and I didn’t understand why, until I read those files. They haunted him for almost half a century. I’m glad to be finally rid of them.

DJ: What are these codes for?

JH: The numbers? I didn’t understand them either. Not at first. But once you read the file you’ll see…

DJ: See what?

JH: What my grandfather couldn’t forget.

END OF PART TWO

Notes

168. Translates as: ‘To this day, years after his disappearance, Maas haunts the psycho-geography of the city. He is the artist's artist, forgotten by sections of the public perhaps, but still referenced by the truly knowledgeable in Paris's finest galleries and studios, still influencing the next generation of avant-garde artists.’ – Anonymous