1965

January 27-February 1, trip to Santo Domingo, St. Thomas, and Puerto Rico.

February, in Paris. Begins working with the Galerie Maeght on Le Masque, a book planned to accompany ST’s exhibition at the gallery the following year. Makes brief trips to Rome and London.

March, NASA invites him to watch the launch of a Gemini rocket at Cape Kennedy (now Canaveral). “They invited me to inspire me! The frightening thing was the roar of that monster.”

July 12, takes “a tiny dose of LSD” and spends “a day of such happiness that the memory of this possibility existing in me makes everything else unimportant, reduces miseries to their proper scale. It’s something very important that can change the meaning of life.”

October, publication of his fifth compilation of drawings, The New World, originally titled Confessions.

Around this time, meets the Bulgarian-born Christo, then newly arrived in New York with Jeanne-Claude. A lifelong friendship begins. “Christo and I are our own grandfathers in the sense that we made the transition from Eastern to Western men abruptly….I admire Christo as an artist who invented himself…his art…[and] his public.”