Rebels in Paradise

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

Ferus Gallery yacht with Irving Blum and Peggy Moffitt on the right

  Photography by William Claxton, courtesy of Demont Photo Management, LLC

  Thanks to Moffitt, Gernreich invited Ferus artists to parties at his house behind a Moroccan wall on Laurel Canyon where he lived with Oreste Pucciani, chairman of the UCLA French department and authority on Jean-Paul Sartre. The house featured Gernreich-designed floors of burnished leather squares, with furniture by Marcel Breuer and Le Corbusier and art by Ruscha, Bell, and Rauschenberg. “Rudi loved to have artists around,” Bell said. “He had great parties with fancy people. We’d clown around and he was happy to have an entourage of crazy people as well as fashion people.”16 It was at one such party that Craig Kauffman met fashion-model-turned-photographer Patricia Faure, who took pictures of the Ferus artists in a number of antic poses.

  Gernreich was the first fashion designer since Christian Dior to become a household name, thanks to the debut of his topless bathing suit as well as unisex clothing. Born in Vienna in 1922, he and his mother came to Los Angeles with other Jewish refugees in 1938. His father had committed suicide in 1930. He attended L.A. City College and initially hoped to be a dancer, studying with choreographer Lester Horton, who was considered the West Coast Martha Graham. While dancing, he worked part-time designing fabrics and then clothes for various small firms in New York, ultimately returning to Los Angeles feeling discouraged by the French couturiers’ monopoly on taste.

  His bra-free jersey swimsuits, knit tube dresses, mini-dresses, and other clothes were carried by Jax, Jack Hanson’s cutting-edge Beverly Hills boutique. Hanson, retired shortstop for the Los Angeles Angels, had designed the fitted and tapered Jax slacks, with the zipper up the back instead of on the side, favored by Jackie Kennedy and the period’s curvy movie stars Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor. On any given afternoon, he could be found driving around Beverly Hills High School in his 1934 white Rolls-Royce and inviting the cutest girls to work in his store. His wife Sally Hanson became his chief designer, and as profits soared, they opened a “brutally private” nightspot for their exclusive clientele in Beverly Hills called the Daisy.17 Hairstylists Vidal Sassoon and Gene Shacove, whose lively love life inspired the movie Shampoo, socialized at the Daisy with their celebrity clientele: fashion models, actresses and actors, socialites, movie moguls, and international jet setters.

  Hanson and Gernreich eventually parted company. Not everyone could accept his increasingly controversial designs. After Gernreich received the Coty American Fashion Critics’ Award in June 1963, Norman Norell, known for his sequined gowns, returned his own Coty award in protest. The following year, Gernreich launched his topless bathing suit. Gernreich said, “Baring these breasts seemed logical in a period of freer attitudes, freer minds, the emancipation of women.”18 With Moffitt modeling, Claxton took photographs that emphasized the modern, graphic quality of the swimsuit. Gernreich initially did not intend to produce the suit but Diana Vreeland at Vogue convinced him otherwise.

  Gernreich headquarters at 8460 Santa Monica Boulevard was a khaki-colored square stucco building with twelve-foot panel doors with his name in chrome letters. Three walls and the floor of the showroom were white, one wall was khaki burlap. The room was furnished with black leather Breuer chairs and sofa. Artist Don Bachardy, the partner of author Christopher Isherwood, created sketches for Gernreich’s dresses.

  In 1965, Moffitt went to New York where, in the studio of photographer Richard Avedon, she met Vidal Sassoon, who had revolutionized hairstyling in London. When Sassoon came to Los Angeles a few months later, Moffitt introduced him to Gernreich. Sassoon created architectural haircuts that perfectly complemented Gernreich’s graphic, structured fashions. A mutual admiration society was born, and that was the beginning of the end for teased, bouffant hair.19

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Dawn of Dwan

  Around the time that Blum took the helm of Ferus, new contemporary art galleries were popping up all along La Cienega. Everett Ellin’s gallery showed work by Stella, Johns, and Oldenburg—who created an elaborate plaster cake for Ellin’s wedding—before Ellin was recruited by art dealer Frank Lloyd in 1963 to be the first director of twentieth-century art for Marlborough Galleries in New York.

  Art dealer Rolf Nelson, who would marry Frank Gehry’s sister, Doreen Goldberg, in 1966, added Philip Hefferton and Ed Bereal to his roster. David Stuart showed Dennis Hopper and Tony Berlant as well as pre-Columbian art. Esther Robles handled established Modernists Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Karl Benjamin, and Claire Falkenstein. Ceeje Gallery, a joint effort by Cecil Hedrick and Jerry Jerome, showed expressive figurative art by Charles Garabedian and Les Biller. Paul Kantor handled De Kooning and top Abstract Expressionists. The Viennese Felix Landau, who had been Pete Seeger’s manager in the late 1940s, was considered the archdeacon and showed European moderns Egon Schiele and Francis Bacon as well as Californians John McLaughlin, Peter Voulkos, and Tony DeLap.

  Virginia Dwan, 1969

  Photograph by Roger Prigent, courtesy of Dwan Gallery Archives

  The most serious alternative to Ferus, however, stood several miles west of La Cienega in Westwood: Dwan Gallery. Operating during the same years as Ferus and offering a parallel universe of abstract and Pop artists from New York and Europe, Dwan imported fresh stimulus to the city. Blum said, “It was the gallery that was the most competition.”1

  From the outset, Virginia Dwan had a singular advantage: She was heir to a portion of the 3M fortune. A native of Minneapolis, she first learned about modern art at the esteemed Walker Art Center. To avoid the bitter Minnesota winters, her parents rented houses in Los Angeles between 1939 and 1945. After her older sister, June, married and moved to Los Angeles, Dwan followed her west and enrolled in the art department at UCLA. Abstract painter Ed Moses was a student then, and he was the first to bring the pretty, slender brunette to Ferus to meet the other artists.

  Dwan was an artist by temperament but felt she did not have the requisite personal drive. She left school to marry social psychiatrist Paul Fischer and soon had a daughter, Candace. (Candace Dwan is now a photography dealer in New York.) While her husband worked, Dwan visited local galleries and one day asked modern art dealer Frank Perls about opening a gallery of her own. “Well, tell me how much money you would like to lose?” he quipped.2 Noticing her crestfallen expression, Perls hired her to sit at the front desk in his gallery on Saturdays. She was there for exhibitions of work by Jean Dubuffet, Pablo Picasso, and the popular UCLA teacher William Brice, the son of vaudevillian Fanny Brice and convicted swindler Nicky Arnstein.

  Intelligent and restless in her housewife role, Dwan divorced her first husband and later married Vadim Kondratief, a French medical student at UCLA, who also became a psychiatrist. He encouraged her to open a gallery in 1959 and helped her find the storefront space in a Spanish-style building on Broxton Avenue. “I had no experience,” she said. “I was totally naive.”3

  The couple lived in a Malibu Colony shake-shingle beach house that had once belonged to movie star Warner Baxter. There were two guesthouses, one of which was converted into a studio where visiting artists could work. Dwan also kept a second house on Malibu Road where artists could stay. Though she entertained collectors and a few Hollywood types such as the Hoppers, Dean Stockwell, Tony Curtis, and screenwriter George Axelrod, she preferred the company of artists. Dwan said, “I found early on that artists don’t just paint or make sculpture; they’re also fascinating thinkers and have a different connection with the world and what’s happening than the average person.”4

  The first two years, Dwan exhibited a range of abstract painters, including Matsumi Kanemitsu and Friedel Dzubas, while traveling to New York often to meet other artists. Larry Rivers agreed to a show at Dwan in February 1961. She also connected with Franz Kline and Philip Guston and convinced them to show with her that April. Being an outsider, she didn’t realize that the two artists were not on speaking terms. “It was kind of nice. In my innoc
ence, I was able to bring people together occasionally for a common cause—in this case, their joint show.”5

  Dwan spent part of each summer at a house in the south of France with her husband. On one trip to Paris, she grew familiar with the French Pop Nouveaux Réalistes and decided to show five of them: Arman, Martial Raysse, Jean Tinguely, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Yves Klein.

  Dwan had seen Klein’s monochrome canvases, all painted identically in his own concoction of International Klein Blue, in the windows of the Iris Clert Gallery in Paris. Klein’s Los Angeles debut on May 29, 1961, included the blue monochromes and large canvases covered in natural sponges and painted blue, hot pink, or gold. During the opening, Klein showed a film of his infamous Paris performance dragging nude women covered in blue paint, “living brushes,” across a roll of white paper while tuxedoed musicians played his 1949 composition Monotone Symphony, a single note held for twenty minutes followed by twenty minutes of silence. (John Cage, then living in Los Angeles, had not yet written his version, 4'33”)

  “It caused a furor in L.A.,” Dwan recalled. “L.A. artists were jealous and bitter over the attention to Klein. There was anger.”6 John Baldessari remembered, “Klein came out and gave a talk in the gallery. The artists hated him and someone, I think it was John Altoon, starting saying ‘Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Louder and louder.’”7 Altoon marched out in a huff. Baldessari was intrigued. “It made an impression on me because it just defied everything I knew about art. Blue monochrome paintings, all the same size. I said, ‘This can’t be art.’ It snapped something.”8

  Dwan was mesmerized. Collectors Melvin and Pauline Hirsch gave a party for Klein in their modern architectural home and had a cake made with IKB-colored frosting. “Yves loved it,” Dwan recalled.9 He was, however, the last to arrive at his party after spending the day with Kienholz and Dwan shark hunting on her boat.

  Klein and his wife Rotraut Uecker stayed in one of the guesthouses of Dwan’s Malibu home. Dwan remembered “staying up late discussing life and death and whether the soul goes on.”10 Klein, a mystic temperament who had spent time in Japan pursuing a black belt in judo and Zen, loved California. He was less pleased with New York after Leo Castelli failed to sell any of his paintings. While staying at the Chelsea Hotel, he wrote a manifesto about the “mutual incomprehension” provoked by his exhibition.

  He had a much more pleasant experience with Los Angeles collectors Michael and Dorothy Blankfort. Michael was a successful novelist and screenwriter while Dorothy was a literary agent. They had bought work by De Kooning, Bengston, and Kienholz, but it was a great leap when they contacted Klein asking if they could buy an “immaterial.”

  Calling the purchase an “adventure of unreason,” Blankfort explained, “This ‘work of art’ was exactly what the word meant; in short, it didn’t exist except as an experience which had no material substance.”11 Klein told him to buy 160 grams of gold in sixteen small ingots and meet him near the Pont Neuf in Paris. On the morning of February 2, 1962, the Blankforts, Dwan, and others gathered for the event, which Dwan remembered as “a really beautiful moment.”12 Klein examined the gold, then looked at Michael and said in a low voice, “Now, throw the gold pieces in the river.”13 Michael hesitated and then watched, astonished, as his own hand tossed the gold away, glittering before splashing into the water. “I felt a wave of exaltation … a sensation of being outside my body, not completely myself; a paradox of taking in more than I gave out,” he wrote later.14 Klein handed Michael a bill of sale but instead of keeping it, he fumbled in his pocket for a match. Klein had one ready and lit the corner of the paper, which quickly turned to ash. Michael Blankfort was a proprietor of an experience, the owner of The Zone of Immaterial Pictorial Sensitivity, as Klein titled the incident.

  The Blankforts were feeling quite pure until they discovered that the entire performance had been documented by Klein’s photographer, pictures that now constitute unique evidence of this work of art. At first, the Blankforts were disturbed to have the intimacy of the act sullied but as those photographs became a part of Klein’s touring retrospective, Michael admitted, “Vanity came to the surface to appease me.”15 It was destined to be more memorable than expected. Four months later, on June 6, 1962, Klein died of a heart attack at the age of thirty-four.

  Another unique art adventure began for the Blankforts two years before, in 1960, when Ed Kienholz asked Michael if he thought he would “make it” as an artist. When Michael responded in the affirmative, Kienholz proposed one of his dubious deals. He asked Blankfort to confirm his faith by buying a work that he would not be able to look at for a decade. The deal was for a down payment with the balance paid at the end of that term. “If you open it during that time,” Kienholz added, “you pay it all and I keep the piece.” Blankfort agreed and kept the wrapped box in storage until he opened the piece as scheduled on April Fool’s Day, 1970. By then, Kienholz’s career was firmly established, and he offered to buy the piece back. Blankfort refused and the artist removed the wrapping to reveal the gaping, hollow neck of a preserved deer still covered with its soft brown fur, surrounded by a coil of ochre-colored rubber hose in a painted wooden box. It was terrifying and Michael thought the horrors of war had inspired the title, The American Way II. Dorothy asked the meaning of the title: “It’s obvious,” said Kienholz. “The way you bought it is the American way. On the installment plan.”16

  * * *

  Dwan held half a dozen shows by abstract painters, including Ad Reinhardt, before her 1962 coup: the first West Coast showing of Robert Rauschenberg’s “combines,” a word coined by Johns for what he described as “painting playing the game of sculpture.”

  Tinguely and Saint Phalle were showing with Everett Ellin while Blum was presenting Kienholz’s Roxy’s. To promote this trifecta of assemblagists, the three dealers discussed renting a billboard on the Sunset Strip and asking the artists to collaborate in making an ongoing, changing public art piece. Since all were working with found materials and had become friends, it seemed a very Pop idea, though it was abandoned after a cost analysis.

  Ellin sponsored a performance by Saint Phalle, then Tinguely’s girlfriend and later his wife, that garnered plenty of attention. Kienholz, Bengston, Price, Ruscha, Goode, and Hopkins were among the 150 in the audience on March 8, 1962, in the parking lot behind Club Renaissance on the Sunset Strip. Niki de Saint Phalle, pretty and petite, sporting a Joan of Arc hairstyle, had spent days constructing a twenty-foot-tall fortress out of ladders, dummies, and bicycle wheels. Dressed in a fitted white jumpsuit with Kienholz and Tinguely supplying cartridges for her rifle, Saint Phalle shot balloons filled with paint and beer that exploded over the surface of a canvas to create an “action” painting. Her exhilarated audience then filed over to Ellin’s La Cienega gallery to see Tinguely’s hopping, waving, jittering machine sculptures.

  The Rauschenberg show at Dwan included First Landing Jump, a canvas topped with a rusted license plate, an enamel light reflector, a black tarpaulin, and a street barrier that impaled a tire resting on the floor in front of the work, evidence of Rauschenberg’s view of the world as one gigantic painting. For the next year and a half, Dwan tried to sell the daring piece to dubious Los Angeles collectors for $5,800. Finally, she had to ship it back to Leo Castelli who immediately sold it to architect Philip Johnson, who later gave it to the Museum of Modern Art. Castelli was patient, however, and continued to work with Dwan on future exhibitions. “Leo was a revolutionary at the time in his attitudes about consigning exhibitions,” she recalled.17 Dwan said that Castelli lent art on favorable terms hoping to develop a West Coast clientele that would buy from him in New York—a strategy that ultimately paid off.

  For his part, Castelli was thrilled to have access to Dwan and Blum. He ran into Lorser Feitelson at the Guggenheim and told him, “Oh, Los Angeles is wonderful. We’ve got to have more collaboration,” adding that he was exhibiting his artists there.

  Feitelson asked, “Does that mean that you
are exhibiting Californians in your place here?”

  “Oh, no,” he said. “They are not ready for that yet.”18

  Dwan’s private income reduced the pressure to sell, and she enjoyed showing work “which was so far in the avant-garde that by definition anyone logical would have to say, ‘It can’t sell yet, maybe later on,’” she recalled. “I really enjoyed the challenge of putting out there into the world things which were rather stunning and surprising and to me very challenging and exciting, and then just sort of seeing what happened.19

  “We were all trying to convince the world that Los Angeles was a viable art world in itself,” she added.20 “Irving would come and visit and discuss what was happening in the so-called art world in Los Angeles because really the collectors were not that open to the things that I was showing. We sort of gave each other strength and commiserated with each other and joked with each other about the whole thing.”21

  “I remember Irving coming into the gallery and saying, ‘I’ve just come back from New York and I was telling them what a great art market we have out here.’ The gallery was empty, nothing was happening. But at that time, Irving was taking shows on consignment from Leo and Sidney Janis, and so was I. So we couldn’t very well indicate that nothing was happening in L.A. because they would question why they would want to send anything out there. So it was a pact between us that I’ve always enjoyed. It was a myth that became real.”22

  Dwan gave artists stipends and formal contracts and then sold the work. This gave her first choice of the finished work, and she took one-half of the sale price. She sold to the key Los Angeles collectors, but unlike Blum, Dwan did not relish courting them. “My relationships were always with the artists I was showing more than the collectors,” she said. “I remember having a party for Merce Cunningham and John Cage and the dance troupe at my house in Malibu and I didn’t invite any collectors. Just David Tudor, Sven Lukens, and myself.”23