Interview with John Hechinger, Sr. and Pete Hamill

TOOLS AS ART: The Hechinger Collection (Abrams, $ 39.95) by John Hechinger, Sr. and Pete Hamill. TOOLS contains 240 color plates and the work of more than 150 artists.

John Hechinger, of Hechinger's Hardware, began collecting the fabulous 300-piece art collection displayed in this book seventeen years ago.

Pete Hamill, popular writer and best-selling author of A Drinking Life, has written the text.

Interview with John Hechinger, Sr. and Pete Hamill:

BC: So, how did you two get hooked up?

JH: We were introduced by our publisher, Paul Gottlieb.

BC: Tell us something about the book. It really is beautiful.

JH: Well, I remember reading once in Smithsonian Magazine that sex is merely the sublimation of man's desire to browse in hardware stores.

BC: Ha Ha. But really, how did this collection get started?

We had a new corporate office building for Hechinger's Hardware. It was state of the art in every respect. There were miles of corridor, and forty to fifty windowless offices. It was boring! Some of my associates had admired a Jim Dine in our boardroom and the rest is history.

I thought that if we could put these artists on the walls, it would raise the consciousness of the people who were dealing everyday in tens and thousands of the same item. It would raise the level of respect for their own job. It would help them see that their job was one of dignity.

BC: Tell us about some of the artists represented here.

JH: There are artists of international reputation, as well as regional artists who are published here for the first time. Some of the artists included are Jim Dine, Arman, Jean Tinguely, Lucas Samras, Richard Estes, Claes Oldenburg, and Walker Evans.

There are paintings and drawings and prints and photographs, sculpture, and watercolor--Unorthodox materials on orthodox subjects, and vice versa.

BC: Mr. Hamill, what attracted you to this collection?

PH: In this particular book we have what is essentially a private collection, and one of the great ones in the country, made accessible to all of us. When I first looked at it, I was both astonished, and moved to laughter.

I was also drawn to a peculiar kind of nostalgia, because the period that is secretly being paid homage to in this book is a period when many Americans worked with their hands. This was a period when there was a toolbox in every home. Men carried toolboxes to work. When I grew up in New York, it was a blue-collar city and one of my clearest impressions of being ten years old is coming home from school on the subway and smelling this aroma of perspiration that came from men who had worked with their hands, doing the most honorable work you could imagine. They built the city of New York. They raised families with their sweat and their tools. That era is now gone.

BC: You sound so wistful. What do you think is special about this book?

PH: I think if you look at the art in this book, you'll see that these artists take something as banal and ordinary as a hammer or a saw and treat it as if nobody had ever looked at it before. It's quite an amazing thing. It's not a catalog, explaining the mysteries of the drill bit. It is a book about art and the art itself is exceptional. I was honored to be able to contribute to it.

BC: Mr. Hechinger, are you still collecting at a rapid rate?

JH: Actually, accumulation is slowing down. In 1995, we've only acquired four new pieces.

BC: Mr. Hamill, what's your next project?

PH: Piece Work, a collection of journalism, which will be published in January, 1996, by Little, Brown.

BC: Thank you both for your time.

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