Artist, Peter Blume: I realized that what I was doing was having visual experiences of different sorts that made a deep impression on me. And I would store them away, and then suddenly they would fall together.
Narrator: That’s Peter Blume, speaking in 1983.
Peter Blume: I happened to be in New York, away from my studio, and I had no project in mind at all. But I’d go up to The Met and look at the armor. It made a tremendous impression on me. I realized that there was something very fundamentally modern about the armor and how they rendered the human figure.
And then I also went to the docks in Hudson. The passenger liners were all docked up and down the Hudson at that time. They didn’t want people wandering around there, but I said that I was an artist and I wanted to study the upper decks and perhaps do some sketches. The shapes had the same kind of a quality, I noticed, that some of the armor had.
When I started putting the picture together as a sketch, I had everything in it, but the figure holding the armor. Suddenly, I realized that it had to be separated. I decided to have a figure carrying the suit of armor.
So that’s the way it developed. It was the first time that I had learned how to put things together.
Archival audio excerpted from: Oral history interview with Peter Blume, 1983 August 16-1984 May 23. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.