In 1965, British artist John Jones left the UK with his young family to live in the USA. There they settled in Greenwich Village, New York, and spent several months on a road trip west, seeking out artists and interviewing as many as they could. All revealed something unique about their work and practice. Many spoke of the times they were living in – 1960s America, a political and cultural crucible. Some (Claes Oldenburg and Yoko Ono, for instance) became Jones’s personal friends.

Published here for the first time, this book presents a fascinating selection of Jones’s conversations with those artists, as chosen by his daughter, Nicolette. This is the story of art presented not through the filter of art critics, but from the mouths of the practitioners. Featuring an array of wellknown voices, including Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Louise Bourgeois, Lee Krasner, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, The American Art Tapes offers an intimate portrait of the American art scene in the mid 1960s – a pivotal moment in twentieth-century art – and the thinking that gave rise to one of the most fertile creative periods in our recent history.

John Jones (1926–2010) was a painter trained at the Slade School of Art, a filmmaker, and Senior Lecturer at Leeds University. Thanks to his personal interaction with the artists in this book, and many more besides, and his knowledge of their work, Jones became the foremost expert in the art of this period in the United States.

Nicolette Jones is a writer and journalist, Royal Literary Fund Fellow and former Henry Fellow at Yale University, whose books include The Illustrators: Raymond Briggs, and a Radio 4 Book of the Week, The Plimsoll Sensation: The Great Campaign to Save Lives at Sea. In 2018 she presented BBC Radio 4’s Archive on 4 documentary The American Art Tapes.