1977

February, spends two weeks in Paris.

April 28, leaves for Paris en route to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, where he and his niece, Daniela Roman, will visit a cousin who emigrated to Israel.

May 4, returns to Paris to prepare his exhibition at the Galerie Maeght, which opens on May 16. The show travels through December to the Galerie Maeght, Zurich, and the Galería Trece, Barcelona. Unlike previous Maeght exhibitions, which focused on recent work, this show is retrospective, with works dating as early as 1943. Italo Calvino writes the catalogue introduction, which ST likes “because largely made up of quotations: Galileo, Michelangelo etc….The main thing is that I’m not praised directly.”

Retrospectives, however, continue to make him anxious. The Maeght show “has upset me and made me conscious—self conscious—as though I were not working for myself anymore but for a government, a ministry.”

The Whitney Museum has approached him about a retrospective. “The thought disturbs me. I’m afraid that these damned flatterers and confounded old men will win. But they’re all younger than I—more and more I find myself to be the most venerable.”

June, receives honorary doctorate from the Philadelphia College of Art.

July 2, death of Vladimir Nabokov, whom ST had known since the early 1960s.

By July, despite his anxieties, he has agreed to a Whitney Museum retrospective and spends the next few months preparing art and catalogue material. He is distressed about the catalogue, which is becoming “an Art Book, which I’ve been trying to avoid for many years, a heavy, expensive, vulgar book, which is the stuff on which museums feed.” But “I’m resigned to the worst (because the clandestine nature of my work is the opposite of this big public affair).”

Autumn, second series of “conversations” with Aldo Buzzi in Amagansett that will eventually be published as Reflections and Shadows.