“We didn’t talk the art out,” Kienholz added. “If we sat around in the Beanery, we talked about who was a good fuck and where we were going to get six dollars so we could buy gas for a car to go to the Valley and get drunk.… I don’t know that I’ve ever talked to Bob Irwin about art in my life. I can remember sitting in his studio for half a day, down at the beach, watching him paint brushstrokes all in one direction so if you stood in one place, you saw the reflection of light on the actual stroke, and if you stood in another place, the whole surface was an entirely different color because you saw it differently.”58
Art may not have been the primary discourse at Barney’s, but the camaraderie helped the artists move decisively away from what Kauffman called “messy fifties painting.” Young and reckless, having been to New York and Europe, they decided collectively and individually to break away from prevailing views and practices of mainstream art and criticism. They chose to live in Los Angeles instead of New York precisely because there was a dearth of critical discourse and gallery infrastructure. As a group, they reveled in being pugnacious and anti-intellectual. Unlike the Abstract Expressionist painters who had been their heroes, they took a stand for optimism, humor, and pleasure. Though most came from quite modest backgrounds, they refused to adopt the sorrowful introspection and angst of the New York School artists. As Irwin said of his own upbringing, “We didn’t have nothing to do with all of that—no dark side, none of that struggle—everything was just a flow.”59
This outlook got Irwin into an argument with an Artforum critic from New York about the value of the automobile as an aesthetic influence. The early 1960s was the apotheosis of reverence toward the automobile in Los Angeles; the new Corvette convertible had a role as memorable as any of the stars of the TV series 77 Sunset Strip. Irwin took the critic out to the San Fernando Valley to introduce him to a kid who was working on a 1929 roadster. “Here was a fifteen-year-old kid who wouldn’t know art from schmart, but you couldn’t talk about a more real aesthetic activity than what he was doing.… The critic simply denied it.”60 Irwin tried to explain, but the critic refused to acknowledge the possibility that such activity could be considered a form of art. Finally, an angry Irwin pulled his car over. “I just flat left him there by the road, man, and just drove off. Said, ‘See you later, Max.’ And that was basically the last conversation we two ever had.”61
* * *
Curiosity about contemporary art escalated in the well-to-do neighborhoods of West Los Angeles. In response, Walter and Shirley Hopps teamed up with bespectacled young art historian Henry Hopkins to give slide lectures on modern art in private residences around Beverly Hills, most often in the home of Frederick and Marcia Weisman. Aspiring collectors Donald and Lynn Factor, Leonard and Betty Asher, Stanley and Betty Freeman, Stanley and Elyse Grinstein, Monte and Betty Factor, and others were sufficiently impressed by these talks to drop by Ferus on a regular basis and, eventually, to buy some of this challenging new art. Don Factor, film producer and heir to the Max Factor cosmetics fortune, even began to share his insights by writing reviews for Artforum.62
Shirley recalled, “I did much more teaching than Walter did. But his lectures were memorable. He was showing a Barnett Newman slide and Fred Weisman said, “You got me there, kid,” and walked out of the room. This stuff was Latin to these people. They were interested but it was all uphill.”63
The Weismans were primed to collect art. Marcia Weisman’s brother, Norton Simon, had amassed a stunning collection of Impressionist and Postimpressionist art as well as Old Masters. Frederick Weisman was an executive at his brother-in-law’s Hunt Foods before establishing Mid-Atlantic Toyota Distributors. Within a few years, the Weismans became great collectors of modern and contemporary art. In fact, their purchase of Newman’s Onement VI, a blue vertical canvas with a central green stripe, was considered sufficiently impressive to warrant a full-page color reproduction in Artforum in 1962.
As these collectors expected a certain amount of courting and convincing, Blum’s role in running the gallery expanded. “Walter was enormously sympathetic and enormously farseeing,” Blum said. “He was completely intuitive about the significance of works of art—I’ve never heard the equal of it when he got wound up.… At the same time, he had these lapses. We’d be having a discussion, Walter would get a little heated, he’d say he needed a cup of coffee, he’d walk out of the gallery, and I’d see him ten days later. This happened fairly frequently.”64
Hopps was notorious for his disappearing act. His wife recalled, “Walter had no sense of time. He disappeared in town and I think he usually went to stay with an artist. Walter had the mentality of an artist. There is no more difficult life, nor are there people who have a harder time living within a regular social scheme. I think Walter had a lot of that inability and unwillingness to cope with the real world, and he found solace with artists. He’s always had people who will look after him, no matter what. All of us have a certain amount of time we can do it, and then we can’t do it anymore.”65
Blum, the dutiful Jewish son, was driven; Hopps, the son of WASP privilege, was elusive. By 1962, Blum recognized that Hopps could not run an art gallery. “Walter had extraordinary insight into art. A major flaw … was that he could see every side of every given situation. So much so that he would freeze and be unable to go in any direction. You’d give him a letter to mail and he’d look at it and understand the ramifications of not mailing and, as often as not, you’d find it upstairs under his mattress, which was his way of solving that problem.”66
Blum was not exaggerating. Kauffman said that Hopps had worked with him to produce a small catalog for his Ferus show. After days spent painstakingly printing and binding the edition, Kauffman addressed a hundred envelopes by hand and gave the packages to Hopps to mail. After such an effort, he was surprised that many of his intended recipients had not come to his opening. Months later, he found the entire box of catalogs, ready to be mailed, under Hopps’s bed.67
“Happily … [Hopps] was offered a job as curator at the Pasadena Art Museum,” said Blum. “I doubt that I could have gone on any further with him, and I took over the gallery then.”68 Hopps was working on the Duchamp retrospective for the Pasadena Art Museum when, in 1962, he was hired as curator at a salary of $6,000 a year. After a few months, director Thomas Leavitt, who had hired him, decamped to become director of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. At thirty-one, Hopps was promoted to acting director and then director. The youngest director of an art museum in the country, the square-jawed Hopps was nothing if not ambitious for the tiny institution when he told the Los Angeles Times about his plans for a new pre-Columbian art council and a coming survey of American portraiture from colonial to present times. When Hopps left Ferus, he gave his shares to Shirley so there would be no appearance of conflict of interest.
After Hopps’s departure, Blum proceeded to run Ferus like a business so the artists would be paid for their efforts, but it was unrequited love. The artists never reciprocated with the blind affection they had always given to Hopps. More than most people, the artists sympathized with the irresponsible genius who was on their side no matter what. Few others had Hopps’s devotion to art. For instance, in 1962 Kienholz completed an assemblage sculpture called The Illegal Operation, portraying the filthy conditions of a backroom abortion, a piece so disturbing that he was contemplating how to destroy it. Hearing of his intention, Hopps stole the piece from the gallery storeroom and transported it in the trunk of his Buick to an unknown location, where it remained for six months. When Kienholz confronted him, Hopps said, “You were going to destroy it anyway. What are you going to do? You going to put me in jail?”69 Fifteen years later, Kienholz was grateful for the intervention. “If I ever made a piece of art, The Illegal Operation would be it. It contains the kind of fury that is felt.”70 By that time, it had been sold to ardent Kienholz collectors Monte and Betty Factor.
After the Factors bought a Spanish Colonial Revival home in Santa Monica th
at had belonged to drama critic Kenneth Tynan, the piece went on view in their living room with other works by Kienholz. (In 2008, the L.A. County Museum of Art purchased it from the Factor Collection for reportedly $1 million.) The Factors owned an eponymous men’s clothing store in Beverly Hills designed by Alvin Lustig and regularly traded clothing to the artists in exchange for works of art. Monte Factor paid Ed Ruscha to design his logo. Factor said, “The artists gave us more than we could ever give them.”71
CHAPTER FIVE
Okies: Ed Ruscha, Mason Williams, Joe Goode, and Jerry McMillan
On a sweltering summer day in 1956, Ed Ruscha and his best friend, Mason Williams, waited impatiently to set out for Los Angeles. The two had grown up in the same Oklahoma City neighborhood, had attended the same classes, had double-dated to the high school prom, and had even collaborated on an episodic painted mural about the Oklahoma Land Run. Ruscha looked to be on the cusp of manhood, his face defined by high cheekbones, brown hair, and almond-shaped eyes. Williams, squarely built with dark hair, an upturned nose, and a dimpled chin, retained a boyish appearance. Both were blessed with charming Oklahoma accents, a honeyed meld of southern and western tones. Fittingly, they headed off to college together. Ruscha, nineteen, packed his black 1950 Ford with trunks of clothes, school supplies, and sandwiches made by his mother. The car tended to burn oil so Ruscha had a case on hand and, indeed, the car went through thirteen quarts making the 1,250-mile journey west along Route 66. For them, the fact that they were going to college paled in importance beside the fact that they were getting out of Oklahoma City.
Ed Ruscha
Photograph by Dennis Hopper, © The Dennis Hopper Trust, courtesy of The Dennis Hopper Trust
Edward Joseph Ruscha IV was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1937 and was five years old when his parents moved to Oklahoma City. His father was transferred to Oklahoma to work as an auditor for the Hartford Insurance Company, and he remained for the next twenty-five years. A survivor of the Depression, Ruscha’s father had a singular piece of advice for his son: “Always pay cash.”1 He had paid $7,000 cash for their 1920 brick house on Northwest Seventeenth Street in 1942.
Ruscha’s father remained a devout Catholic despite having been excommunicated in 1922 after divorcing his first wife. For many years, Ruscha and his siblings were not told that they had a step-sister, the daughter of that first marriage. “It weighed heavily upon him,” Ruscha recalled. Ruscha’s repentant father attended mass daily, taking his eldest son with him on Sundays, despite the fact that he was prohibited from taking communion or kneeling during the service. Ruscha’s mother, also Catholic, attended church only on occasional Sundays or holidays, and instead of kneeling, she sat with her husband as a show of loyalty. While Ruscha studied catechism, he could not be an altar boy like his neighbor Joe Goode.
While his father traveled for business, Ruscha grew close to his mother, who was gifted with both a sense of humor and of propriety. Her two sons and daughter sent thank-you notes promptly and addressed their elders as “sir” or “ma’am.” A dedicated reader and correspondent, she kept an open dictionary in the dining room and encouraged her children to look up word definitions.
According to Ruscha, his mother’s literary sympathies extended to the creative efforts of Williams, who called her “a godsend.”2 Williams had spent his earliest years in Rule, Texas, where his family had lived a hardscrabble existence in a shotgun house with no indoor plumbing. “We were like a Walker Evans photograph,” he said later.3 Williams’s father, a tile setter, made a better living after bringing the family to Oklahoma City, but young Williams spent most of his free time at Ruscha’s house. “[My mother] hit it off with Mason, who was always spouting poetry and silly stuff,” Ruscha said. “She encouraged him, almost like a second mother. He’d come over and play guitar, folk songs, or country and western.”4
The Ruschas were the last on their street to get a television; such an indulgence was thought to be a bit “show-offy” so the family listened to radio drama, and Ruscha came to value not just the meanings but the sounds of words.
As teenagers, he and Williams discovered a store in town that carried 45 rpm records by rhythm and blues musicians, what Oklahomans called “race music.” Ruscha’s first purchase was the Clovers single “One Mint Julep” with “Lovey Dovey” on the B side. The slow, rocking rhythm and suggestive lyrics promised darkened rooms, close dancing, romance, and mystery. He bought recordings of Stan Kenton, Count Basie, and Billy Eckstine and missed few concerts at the Municipal Auditorium. In 1949, Spike Jones and the City Slickers found Ruscha hanging around the back of the auditorium trying to sneak in. They gave him some money and told him to go buy some eggs. Thrilled by this brush with celebrity, Ruscha did what he was told. When he returned, they invited him backstage where he watched these grown men throw eggs at one another in front of a live audience. The wild array of instruments they played, the jokes, the nutty clothing—Ruscha knew he was witness to denizens of an exotic netherworld. “Music played such an important role in my development as a kid.” he said. “Enough to visualize how big the world was.”5
Ruscha became friends with Jerry McMillan and Joe Goode when all three joined a Classen High School fraternity that held events with a sorority. Dating was fine, but Ruscha was wary of marriage. “In those years people were trying to emulate their parents. Marrying and settling down was an issue to be approached. It all crashed when the book On the Road came out and we started reading beatnik poetry and took an about-face to that old order of thinking.”6
Ruscha, McMillan, and Goode ruled in the art classes, whether drawing still lifes or designing record album covers. Ruscha found a book about Marcel Duchamp in the library, and art and absurdity became entwined in his thinking. He thought about the Dadaists as Goode and McMillan “were cutting up … making these stupid sculptures and lighting them on fire,” Ruscha said. “It all linked with the idea of having madcap fun.”7
By his own account, Ruscha was a mediocre student, receiving Cs in most classes, and occasionally Ds. “I got a B in history class and I was stunned,” he said.8 In art, however, he got all As. “I was aimless. I didn’t know what I wanted to do until the eleventh grade.”9 Just before graduating from high school in 1956, he was awarded first prize in graphic design from the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce. At that point, he decided to go to art school.
To avoid being drafted for service in the Korean War, Ruscha joined the navy. After boot camp at the Great Lakes Recruit Training Command near Chicago, he had to commit to two weeks a year on a destroyer, but at least he would be able to attend art school and get out of Oklahoma City. “I knew I couldn’t hack the Bible Belt.… And the East, that was just too old world for me,” he said with a shrug.10
An earlier family vacation to Los Angeles had made a great impact. “The patterns of vegetation, the feeling of acceleration, the corner of Sunset and Vine”—all were potent memories. “Another attraction was the hot rods, the custom cars. I knew I wanted to go to California. That was the only place.”11 Ruscha’s father tried in vain to direct him toward a more dependable profession. “He thought [art] was too ivory tower,” Ruscha said.12 So they compromised: Ruscha would study commercial art in order to pursue a career in advertising.
Ruscha had not contacted any schools before making the trip to Los Angeles. He had heard about Art Center in Pasadena, which had a successful commercial art program. When he went there to apply and found that the classes were full, he heaved a sigh of relief. “They had a dress code!” he said indignantly. “No facial hair. No affectations of Bohemianism, no berets, no sandals, no short pants. You couldn’t be a beatnik.”13 So, Ruscha enrolled at Chouinard Art Institute near Lafayette Park on the eastern end of Wilshire Boulevard where “you didn’t have to have a professional appearance.”14
Nonetheless, Chouinard was a professional commercial art school. Founded by artist Nelbert Murphy Chouinard in 1921 in a modest building on Eighth Street, the school was consid
ered a serious environment for art, even though it was not accredited. “The attitude was that a diploma did not matter. You were judged by the product you came up with,” Ruscha said.15 Walt Disney had asked Chouinard to train artists in the skills required to animate the films he was making. At the time, he could not afford to pay her tuition. She believed in what he was doing and told him to pay her when he was able. Animators were produced, films were made, and Disney later paid her the overdue tuition for every student. (In 1970, Disney facilitated the merger of the school with the L.A. Conservatory of Music to become what is now California Institute of the Arts in the suburb of Valencia.)
Ruscha and Williams rented a room in a nearby boardinghouse on Sunset Place. The August smog was so intense that they went to a drugstore for a salve for their burning eyes. “We’d never experienced air pollution before,” Ruscha recalled.16
Their Chouinard instructors Bengston, Altoon, and Irwin were committed to careers as practicing artists despite the dearth of professional opportunities. Bengston once had his students stretch paper around the classroom and draw and paint on it collectively. At the end of the day, he told them, “Tear it down and throw it away.” Ruscha said, “It was the idea of, ‘Just get in and do the work.’”17
Williams had enrolled at L.A. Community College with the idea of majoring in accounting but spent most of his time in jazz clubs and concerts. Deciding to pursue a career in music, he returned to Oklahoma City and took a crash course in piano with a teacher who told him that he would never become a great musician. With the burden of greatness lifted, Williams decided to have fun. In 1958, he bought his first guitar, an old Stella, for thirteen dollars. He began playing and singing with groups in coffeehouses and clubs and eventually got his songs recorded. He remained in touch with Ruscha from a distance until 1961 when, having joined the naval reserves, he was called to serve on the USS Paul Revere with the U.S. Navy in San Diego. Sailor by day, folksinger by night, he performed at clubs in San Diego with weekend stints at the Troubadour on Santa Monica Boulevard.
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