Tag #138076 - Interview #78465 (Egon Lovith)

During the 1980s, I didn’t have any positions other than teaching, which I had come to really enjoy. At the end of the 1980s, the Institute of Fine Arts was laying its employees off. There was a meeting at which it didn’t seem that they would fire anybody. They suggested that I take over the sculpture department. I’m usually a patient person but I really lost my temper because I had previously heard that the position they suggested me to take wasn’t going to be paid for but was going to have voluntary status. It didn’t affect my salary for teaching but I would have needed to manage the sculpture department for free. The same work that somebody had previously been paid for doing, I was going to have to do for nothing. In the end I took the position even though I didn’t benefit from it at all. I retired from the institute in 1991. I wasn’t even 70 years old and because of this my pension is very low.