Rebels in Paradise

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

  Bengston and Price spent entire days and nights at the “pot shop,” unless they could surf. “If it was a hot day and there was enough money for gas, we were at the ‘bu,’ Malibu,” Bengston said. “I was driving a 1937 Pontiac Phaeton with a blown clutch and no starter. I couldn’t afford a battery so I parked on a hill. It didn’t have a top. The upholstery was tuck and torn. But it was wheels.”34

  Though Bengston was praised for his ceramics, he switched suddenly to painting. “Voulkos, who I beyond admired, was always trying to be Picasso and I figured if Picasso was a painter first, you might as well try and get into that field,” Bengston said.35 But he refused to follow the traditional methods of instructor Herbert Jepson, a painter of such repute that he had helmed his own school, Jepson Art Institute, from 1947 to 1953. “I didn’t graduate,” Bengston said. “I was finished. I was thrown out of every [art] school I ever went to.”36

  The director of L.A. County Arts Institute, artist Millard Sheets, expected his students to work as his apprentices by applying tiny pieces of glass tile to the mosaic murals that he designed for the facades of Home Savings and Loan buildings. Price thought this was ludicrous and left the school. After spending six months in the army reserves, he transferred to the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University to develop low-fire brightly colored glazes. He graduated with a master’s degree in 1958.

  Voulkos’s strong personality clashed with the director, and Sheets fired him shortly before an exhibition of his work opened at the Pasadena Art Museum in January 1959. Sheets looked rather foolish after his talented instructor moved back to the Bay Area and was promptly hired by the University of California–Berkeley and given a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1960.

  Bengston continued painting in a West Hollywood studio he shared with Robert Irwin and Dane Dixon, who happened to tend bar at Barney’s Beanery. (Dixon later moved to New York to work for Willem de Kooning.) That year, Bengston and Irwin traveled around Great Britain, Denmark, Germany, Italy, and France for six months in an MGB that Irwin bought while there. Both had been to Europe before and neither felt compelled to visit museums. “I only liked a couple things, Vermeer, Tintoretto portraits,” Bengston said.37 Irwin felt the same about art museums. “After a while my whole relationship to the history of art got cleared out to a matter of trusting my own eye.… I realized I was in the twentieth century, and I wasn’t at all interested in historical forms,” Irwin said.38

  After returning from Europe, broke, Bengston paid ten dollars a month for a spare room in Walter and Shirley Hopps’s West Hollywood apartment, where he completed his 1960 show of Valentine and Dracula motifs, renditions of hearts or irises located in the center of each composition. Disturbed by what he felt was a pomposity in abstract artist Lorser Feitelson’s television lectures on Renaissance painting, Bengston decided to simplify his compositions by incorporating the main principle of ceramics. “European allegorical painting just doesn’t do it for me at all, it’s like commercial art,” he said. “They’re selling Jesus in the top left and Moses in the bottom right and who cares?… What I do know is that you center it, it’s fine. So I started doing central image paintings. Anytime somebody says you can’t do something is the time to do it.… You just have to do things with authority.”39

  According to Bengston, Hopps spent very little time in the apartment. “The bill collectors were always coming so he attached a rope to my balcony,” Bengston recalled. “The bill collector would be in front trying to catch him and he would go out the back down the rope. He was great. One of his cronies went off somewhere and left him a macaw. He gave it to me and it ate all the woodwork off the room in the apartment.”40

  Bengston, who could live on thirty dollars a week, learned that he could make forty dollars for winning a motorcycle race. He drove his BSA Gold Star at record speeds around the track at Ascot Park, a snooty moniker hardly in keeping with its location at 178th Street and Vermont Avenue. “It was a nasty scene,” Bengston said. “It was a half-mile track with a barrier around it that was as hard if not harder than concrete. There was no soft landing. Brakes were nonexistent. You just went to the corner and turned left, again and again. You’d run into each other. It was a nice aggressive thing. Coming from fields that were subjective about the aesthetics, gymnastics or surfing … I wanted to do something where I knew what the result was. At the end of the day, if you won, you won.”41

  He combined his two passions in paintings of the BSA logo or of motorcycles in the center of orange backgrounds. The announcement of his November 1961 show featured an oval frame around a photograph of him jumping his motorcycle though the air. His own motorcycle was placed in the gallery. The prices of the paintings were low, yet almost nothing sold. Nonetheless, the art school rebel was hired shortly thereafter as a teacher at Chouinard.

  * * *

  The early sixties were peak years for Kustom Kars, the elaborately airbrushed and altered creations by Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, George Barris, and Kenny “Von Dutch” Howard that inspired Tom Wolfe to observe, “These customized cars are art objects, at least if you use the standards applied in a civilized society.”42

  Bengston had been working in a motorcycle shop and learned about customizing motorcycles and specifically Von Dutch’s method of using an airbrush to spray clean or soft lines of intense lacquer colors. With enviable skill, Bengston took an airbrush to the tank of his own motorcycle. He then turned this technology to his art, abandoning the signature tool of expressionist painting, the paintbrush, to use a spray gun and compressor on Masonite. He was flying home from seeing Jasper Johns’s work in the Venice Biennale with Irwin, who was talking philosophically about one thing after another, when he got the idea for his breakthrough series: chevron stripes. He would stack sergeant’s stripes in the center of radiant fields of airbrushed enamel paint sprayed onto Masonite panels.

  After Price returned to Los Angeles from New York, he reconnected with Bengston. He had learned to use an airbrush while in the service and he, too, started using it, spraying high-gloss enamel on egg-shaped ceramics with odd, erotic extrusions in unnaturally, brilliant colors. For his first show, at Ferus in October 1961, the gallery announcement featured a photograph of him surfing an open wave with his hands spread wide over his head. Price recalled, “That was my idea but everybody thought it was weird.… It was as if they thought maybe the work wasn’t serious because the poster was kidding around.”43 The following year, he continued his study of ceramics in Japan. When he returned, he lived in the beach town of Ventura.

  Ken Price surfing announcement

  Photograph by Pat Beer

  * * *

  Bengston and Price, with their tough yet lovely shows, signaled a shift at Ferus—the beginning of comfort with an aesthetic that was informed by technological innovation as well as popular culture. Irving Blum marketed these artists as unapologetically free from the sober introspection associated with the Abstract Expressionists. They were having fun and Blum was promoting it with the same vigor of record promoters hawking the sounds of the Beach Boys. It didn’t hurt that “Surfin’ USA” could be heard streaming out of cars and transistor radios throughout the country.

  Hopps brought the prominent New York dealer Martha Jackson to Bengston’s studio, and she immediately offered to show the chevrons. Thinking the New York reviews would be murderous, Bengston balked but Hopps pushed. The deal was sealed when Jackson offered Bengston $1,000 a week to finish the work for the show. “And that was an enormous amount of money then,” he recalled.44

  At his May 1, 1962, opening in New York, Bengston met Frank Stella and Andy Warhol, both of whom applauded the radiant, brightly colored ovals containing the symbolic stripes in the center. Warhol was doubly thrilled when actor Roddy McDowall made an appearance at the opening, prompted by a mutual friendship with Dennis Hopper. Sculptor John Chamberlain befriended Bengston and, shortly after, moved to a neighboring studio in Ocean Park where Bengston introduced him to the airbrush
technique.

  Craig Kauffman and his wife Vivian were moving back from Europe, and they stopped in New York. Kauffman saw the new spray-painted works of his old friend at the Martha Jackson Gallery. They looked so fresh, so free of any European influence, that Kauffman said to himself, “That is what I need to be doing.”45

  With his fine, sandy hair, chinos, and polo shirts, Kauffman looked more conservative than his friends, but even the competitive Bengston saw him as a great talent. Initially interested in architecture, he had shown his early Paul Klee–inspired paintings at the Felix Landau Gallery while just a freshman at the University of Southern California where he met future architect Frank Gehry. Encouraged by the response to the Felix Landau show, Kauffman transferred to UCLA, where he got a degree in fine arts in 1956. He found inspiration in the American Vanguard Art exhibition in Paris featuring work by Pollock and De Kooning that came to the L.A. County Museum of History, Science, and Art in Exposition Park. “I was bowled over by that show. At first I didn’t like the stuff. I thought it was awful. Then I went back and the second day and third day.”46 Like Moses and Altoon, he moved to New York for a few months, where he befriended abstract painter Franz Kline. Also, like the others, he missed the West Coast and soon moved to San Francisco where Hopps’s friend James Newman introduced him to Vivian Chinn, a slender young acting student of Chinese and British extraction with long black hair. They eventually married.

  It was Kauffman’s second marriage, and their 1960 wedding was emblematic of the dawning informality of the era. Newman, their best man, was supposed to drive them to Reno, but his car broke down twenty miles outside the city limits. The trio then hitchhiked into town to spend the night. The next morning, after a justice of the peace performed the ceremony, Newman announced that he had to get back to San Francisco right away. He decided to gamble their remaining cash to win enough money to buy plane tickets. He lost. They had to hitchhike to Sacramento where they had just enough money left to buy bus tickets back to San Francisco.

  A few months after this rather inauspicious start, the Kauffmans moved to Europe where, over the course of two years, they lived in Paris, Copenhagen, and Ibiza, Spain, looking at art and developing relationships with other artists. Kauffman was the most cosmopolitan of the Ferus group yet when he saw Bengston’s paintings in New York in 1962, he recognized the significance of shiny lacquer on a hard surface. He shared a studio with Ed Moses and Robert Irwin on Santa Monica Boulevard near Sawtelle Avenue and began drawings of voluptuous forms on the pages of a Frederick’s of Hollywood catalog. “A lot of those early catalogs were terrific,” he said. “They had blow-up bras and images of girls blowing up their boobs and giant padded butts.”47 He transferred those figures with other images to flat sheets of plastic.

  Under Bengston’s tutelage and inspired by Duchamp’s Large Glass, Kauffman began spraying paint on glass and then on plastic panels. One morning he stopped in Jan’s coffee shop on Beverly Boulevard to get a cup of coffee and noticed a sign shaped like molded plastic fruit and started wondering about how it was made. He drove over to a small industrial plant in the suburb of Paramount called Planet Plastics, where he learned about molds and vacuum-form machinery. In 1964, he amplified and simplified shapes into low-relief wall pieces he called “erotic thermometers.” He sprayed the reverse side of the clear plastic with acrylic paint in the intense colors of Jell-O. Kauffman realized the significance of this discovery and took out an advertisement in a 1964 issue of Art International with a photograph of his first molded plastic wall relief to officially document his formal ingenuity. His name became associated with vacuum-formed plastic as surely as Dan Flavin’s was connected to the fluorescent tube. The following year, his work was shown at Ferus and, in 1965, at Pace Gallery in New York.

  Bengston, Kauffman, and Moses, who had moved back to Los Angeles, befriended Robert Irwin, who was tall and lean, had short-cropped blond hair and blue eyes, and drove an Austin-Healey. Ruscha described him as a “Herculean Californian: sunshine, energy, surfing. He had a definite aura.” His paintings of sailboats were being shown at the Felix Landau Gallery when his new friends from Ferus walked across the street to his opening. Kauffman took one look around and in his strange, squeaky voice, drawled, “You’ve got to be kidding!”48

  With that, Irwin saw all the weaknesses of his work and decided then and there to change. He recognized that the younger artists from across the street were onto something, and his art evolved quickly and dramatically. “My friendship with them was crucial in the sense that there was nobody really around who was interested in what we did.… We had no proof but we believed that we were special, that we were doing it. We basically supported ourselves in that relationship and gave ourselves the kind of milieu that allows you to operate as a free-flowing person without doubting yourself.”49

  Irwin’s family had moved to the working-class neighborhood of Leimert Park in Los Angeles during the Depression after his father lost his Colorado construction business. From the age of seven, Irwin made money by selling Liberty magazine and working in movie theaters, coffee shops, and as a lifeguard at Lake Arrowhead or Catalina Island. Like Bengston, he was athletic. He taught himself to dance the Lindy and earned more than $100 a week from dance contests held at the Jungle Club in Inglewood or the Dollhouse in the San Fernando Valley, making quite an impression when arriving in the ’39 Ford that he had personally perfected with twenty coats of ruby-maroon paint applied to the dash. At Dorsey High School in the 1940s, Irwin succeeded at football and art classes but flunked his only two requirements: algebra and Latin. At nearby Hollywood Park, he learned to bet on horse races and within a few years, he supported himself as a handicapper.

  In 1946, Irwin joined the army and was posted in Germany. When he returned to Los Angeles the following year, he enrolled at L.A. County Art Institute a decade ahead of Bengston and Price. A naturally gifted draftsman, he had vague notions of becoming an artist, but he didn’t feel he was learning much there. In 1950, during the Korean War, he was recalled into the army and served his time at Camp Roberts in central California. After his discharge, he enrolled at the Jepson Art Institute, where he studied with the charismatic Rico Lebrun, who worked in a popular Cubist-Surrealist style. After three months of lectures on philosophy and Marxism, Irwin left to attend Chouinard. “By the time I got out of art school, having gone to three places, I was still very naïve.”50

  Artists sharpen their skills on the whetstones of their colleagues. Irwin hit his stride when he started to compete with younger painters such as Kauffman and Bengston. At one point, Irwin and Kauffman shared a studio. Irwin recalled, “My painting was full of sound and fury. Craig had a little porcelain dish with a little red and blue. He wore a smock! He would make a mark and then go to the opposite side of the room and sit there. I thought, ‘What’s happening here?’ I got the lesson. It’s about paying attention.”51

  The Ferus artists’ clubhouse was Barney’s Beanery, several blocks north of the gallery on Holloway Drive. Similar to the Cedar Street Tavern near the artists’ studios in New York, Barney’s was inexpensive, worn down, and hospitable. Onetime boxing manager Barney Anthony opened the white and green clapboard structure in 1927 to serve motorists arriving on what was then Route 66. Barney’s sister turned out chili burgers and onion soup in the tiny kitchen, but after Prohibition ended in 1933, the main business was drinking. It was a hangout for Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, and Bette Davis. When Barney opened the so-called Crown Room in 1960, it was rumored that Princess Margaret donated a portrait of herself to add to the decor.

  After openings at Ferus or at lunch or virtually any other time that a quorum could be mustered, Kienholz, Irwin, Altoon, Moses, Kauffman, Price, and Bengston would sit in one or more booths and talk about cars or girls. Since no one was making much money selling art, almost everyone had a part-time job. If someone was down on his luck, Barney would extend a line of credit of up to twenty dollars. At times, artist-cum-bartender Dane Dixon would slip
his friends an extra drink. In this dimly lit joint, with a sign on the wall announcing “No Fagots [sic] Allowed” and a calendar that was many years out of date, these artists honed their individual ideas while supporting one another. There were ongoing antics.

  Each artist took turns holding court. Kienholz told Ed Moses that he had bought a suit in a thrift store for two dollars and, with Dixon, gone into various Cadillac dealerships pretending to be a promising customer. “Ed would intimidate them into taking a car for a test drive. As soon as he got around the corner, Dane was waiting for him and they’d steal the rear tire, the mats—anything they could get—and then he’d take it back.”52

  “At Barney’s, everyone would stand around and drink and tell lies,” remembered Moses. “[They would] try to pick up on the girls that were there.”53 Moses went to Barney’s on his first date with an attractive brunette from Virginia, an aspiring writer named Avilda Peters. When he brought her home, she said, “I want you to do me a favor. Never call me again.”54 A few months later, they were married and moved back to New York, then to San Francisco, and then to Spain with their little boy.

  “We had good disagreements of ideas,” Kienholz said, about the group at Barney’s.55 As Ferus gained popularity, other galleries opened on North La Cienega, which gave rise to Monday night art walks when all the galleries would stay open late and serve wine. On one such occasion, Ferus was between shows and therefore empty. Kienholz suggested to Blum that he put up a selection of work, but Blum was racing off to San Francisco and didn’t have time. “We were sitting in Barney’s, and we were about half-drunk,” Kienholz recalled. “Craig Kauffman and I and maybe Allen Lynch and Dane sat there grumbling about, you know, ‘Fuck Irving, goddamn him.’”56 They went out to the parking lot and found a pile of weathered boards with nails sticking out of them and some old service station pumps. They gathered them together with whatever else was around and stacked them in the gallery. “We sat there, and all the people came by and said, ‘Oh, my, isn’t this interesting.’ We just left it there, and when Irving came back, there was his gallery full of junk … and he was not too pleased.”57