When the Irving Blum Gallery opened just a few doors up from the original Ferus at 811 North La Cienega in January 1968, Blum exhibited Ruscha’s monumental and cheeky painting of the new L.A. County Museum being consumed by flames. The announcement, designed to look like a Western Union telegram, called it “the most controversial painting to be shown in Los Angeles in our time.”
Ed Ruscha, The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, 1965–1968
Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1972, photograph by Lee Stalsworth
Hirshhorn happened to be in Los Angeles and came by the gallery. He was in negotiations to erect his eponymous museum in Washington, D.C., and offered to buy Ruscha’s entire show. This time, Blum added 30 percent when calculating the total. Hirshhorn asked for a bulk discount and he was promptly granted 30 percent off. And that is how one of Ruscha’s most distinctively L.A. paintings came to reside in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum when it opened on the National Mall in 1974.
Shortly after this show, Ruscha and Joe Goode were shown together at the Balboa Pavilion Gallery in Newport Beach, from March 27 to April 21, 1968. Though neither had even a passing acquaintance with a horse, they dressed up as cowboys and were photographed on horseback for the exhibition announcement. Ruscha’s mother, Dorothy, described them in the catalog as “masters of the evasive,” but it did underscore their status as artists of the West.
The year 1968 seemed to be the pinnacle of international curiosity about Los Angeles contemporary art, with The Los Angeles 6 exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery that spring featuring Bell, Irwin, Kauffman, Kienholz, and Davis, who all went to Factors clothing store and got Borsalino fedoras to wear on their trip. The prestigious summer international exhibition Documenta IV in Kassel, Germany, featured Bell, Irwin, Davis, Hockney, and Kienholz. It was Kienholz’s first trip to the country where he would come to live after 1973. It was a time of ubiquitous protests, and a few weeks after the opening, students staged a sit-in and used his Roxy’s installation as a lounge for drinking red wine, an endorsement of its veritable closeness to real life. Meanwhile, in Dusseldorf, Konrad Fischer Gallery showed Bruce Nauman.
The success was made more poignant for them after hearing that Marcel Duchamp, the artist who had been so inspirational, had died at eighty-one on October 2, 1968. A month later, in Artforum, Jasper Johns wrote that Duchamp “moved his work through the retinal boundaries which had been established with Impressionism into a field where language, thought and vision act upon one another … heralding many of the technical, mental and visual details to be found in more recent art.”7
Meanwhile, LACMA had organized three more exhibitions of Ferus artists, beginning with Wallace Berman’s collages, from April 30 to June 2, 1968. Though he refused gallery representation, Berman continued to make art using a Verifax machine, the forerunner of a photocopier, to print a photograph of a hand holding a transistor radio, repeated in the pattern of a grid, each appearing to be transmitting a different image. Some were funny, some erotic, some mystic. Compared to the serial prints of Warhol, Berman’s work was heralded as the link between Beat and Pop, and the show traveled to the Jewish Museum in New York.8
Though Ferus had ceased to exist, the gallery’s role in the city’s history was celebrated further in a November 1968 LACMA exhibition: Late Fifties at Ferus. It featured the abstract painting that most of the artists had rejected in pursuit of their radically streamlined aesthetics. Despite the fact that he was having a show of his own at LACMA, the ever blunt Bengston wrote a critical article for Artforum citing all the works that were missing and those that were included improperly in the show.
Two weeks later, Bengston’s retrospective opened at LACMA with a catalog designed by Ruscha. The sandpaper cover referred to Bengston’s notoriously abrasive personality while Don Bachardy’s drawing of the mustachioed artist graced the frontispiece. Frank Gehry agreed to design the exhibition, and since the museum had very little money for materials, he asked to see what they had lying around in storage. A pile of dirty old plywood was converted into the framing of Bengston’s exhibition—though the museum director Kenneth Donohue later made him paint the wood—and Gehry bought a dummy of a motorcycle rider, dressed him in Bengston’s clothes, and placed him with his motorcycle at the entrance to the show. LACMA curator James Monte organized the show, which traveled to the Corcoran Gallery, where Hopps then reigned.
All of these shows canonized an era that seemed to be slipping away at warp speed, a feeling that had come about, literally, with a bang. On June 3, 1968, just six years after his debut at Ferus, Andy Warhol was talking with friends at the Factory when a radical named Valerie Solanas walked over, pulled a gun out of a paper bag, and shot him in the abdomen. Though she had had few dealings with Warhol, the mentally disturbed author of the SCUM manifesto (Society for Cutting Up Men) claimed that “he had too much control of my life.”9 She also wounded critic Mario Amaya and aimed at a few others before walking calmly into the elevator and leaving the building. Warhol was rushed to New York’s Columbus Hospital and underwent a five-hour surgery to save his life, though he wasn’t entirely certain about that at first. He could hear a television playing and the words “Kennedy” and “assassin.” “I just thought that maybe after you die, they rerun things for you, like President Kennedy’s assassination,” he recalled.10 He couldn’t imagine that, in the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, U.S. senator and aspiring presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy had just been gunned down, clearing the way for Richard Nixon’s election in November.
Solanas turned herself in and was convicted to three years in prison. Thereafter, Warhol remained in a prison of his own, fearful of the sorts of strangers who had visited so freely over the years. “The fear of getting shot again made me think that I’d never again enjoy talking to somebody whose eyes looked weird. But when I thought about that, I got confused, because it included almost everybody I really enjoyed!”11
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The End of the Innocence
Joan Didion opined that the sixties ended with the Charles Manson murders on El Cielo Drive, Beverly Hills, in the summer of 1969. If a frustrated-songwriter-turned-assassin could claim LSD as his inspiration, maybe it was time to reconsider the collective perspective of the sixties. On the other hand, many of the Los Angeles artists thought that they ended with the death of John Altoon. Bengston and his girlfriend Penny Little were with the Altoons at a party when the artist said that he didn’t feel well and asked them to call Dr. Leonard and Betty Asher, the art collectors, whose house was close by. They rushed over and Altoon sat down on the couch, put his head back, and died of a massive heart attack. He was forty-three. Having continued with gestural abstract painting, which lost some popularity in the 1960s, he had not experienced the great career success of his friends. Yet, Altoon’s funny and generous personality marked him as standard bearer of a sort, and his passing was seen as the symbolic end of the era. Babs remembered, “There were a thousand people at his memorial service. At least.”1
Los Angeles had changed and, in keeping with its character, would continue its physical and cultural transformations with a happy disregard for its own history. The Pasadena Art Museum trustees undertook the construction of a large modern structure by Ladd and Kelsey in Carmelita Park that opened in 1969. They were never able to raise sufficient funds to support its operation, and the museum slid into deep debt. In 1974, after years of loaning his collections to various museums and university galleries, Norton Simon bailed out the financially strapped PAM and installed his own collection there, while putting into storage the contemporary art donated by prominent artists including Warhol, Stella, and Oldenburg. A new sign on the building proclaimed its identity: Norton Simon Museum of Art at Pasadena.
By then, Blum, Dwan, Nelson, and Artforum had moved to New York. A major recession gripped the country, stalling the development of new art galleries. By the late 1970s, it looked as though L
os Angeles, like the sixties itself, might not fulfill its promise.
However, the incursion of so many talented Los Angeles artists into the typically closed ranks of galleries and museums of New York, and the volume of attention that they received in the media in the 1960s, challenged any number of assumptions about the making and selling of contemporary art. The biggest assumption, of course, was that you had to be in New York to become an internationally recognized artist.
John Baldessari was among the first to look for critical and financial sustenance from the galleries and museums in Europe, which had begun to demonstrate consistent appreciation for the art and artists of Los Angeles. Other Los Angeles artists, with their pugnacious attitudes, followed suit. By the middle of the 1980s, the hegemony of the New York art establishment began to crumble as artists from Los Angeles as well as artists from Europe, Asia, and Central and South America came to be recognized, exhibited, and sold.
Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight said, “Sixties L.A. was a bellwether. It’s easy to forget that, for most of the last one hundred years, New York was commonly regarded as the only legitimate cultural game in America. Everywhere else was the provinces. But what happened artistically in Los Angeles in the 1960s turned out to be a harbinger of changes to come: In the twenty-first century, serious and informed art production has been thoroughly decentralized around the globe. L.A., the city without a center, became the model.”2 It is telling that the most complete overview of the city’s contemporary art history was organized in 2006 by France’s Centre Pompidou: Los Angeles, 1955–1985: Birth of an Art Capital.
Ironically, it was the demise of the Pasadena Art Museum that inspired collectors anew as Marcia Weisman, by then divorced from Frederick, and Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals judge William Norris and his wife Merry led the charge in the early 1980s to build a Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Los Angeles. It was one of the first museums to include artists on its board—Robert Irwin and Sam Francis—and Frank Gehry agreed to design temporary quarters in a disused city warehouse in Little Tokyo. The Temporary Contemporary proved so successful a venue for large-scale contemporary art that it remained in use though, after a $5 million donation by music mogul David Geffen, it was renamed the Geffen Contemporary. Japanese architect Arata Isozaki designed the permanent building, about half a mile west, on Grand Avenue. Ironically, in a city thought to have had overly cautious, foot-dragging collectors, MOCA wound up with the most highly esteemed contemporary art collection in the country, including a large portion of the collection of Count Panza di Biumo.
As of this writing, the Los Angeles area supports three museums dedicated to contemporary art: MOCA, the Hammer Museum at UCLA, and the Santa Monica Museum of Art, as well as the Broad Contemporary Art Museum and LACMA. In the manner of the self-made tycoons before him, philanthropist Eli Broad has launched plans to open a museum of his own collection adjacent to MOCA in the downtown district. The Pasadena Museum of California Art shows a fair amount of contemporary art. The mandate of the Getty Museum does not embrace contemporary art, but the Getty Research Institute has made it a priority to acquire and catalog archives, images, and documents related to the city’s cultural history and, on occasion, to mount exhibitions, many of which have to do with modern and contemporary art in Los Angeles. Pacific Standard Time, their ambitious initiative to fund and generate exhibitions examining all possible dimensions of modern and contemporary art, architecture, and design in Southern California, will be featured in the museums and galleries of the region for an entire year beginning in October 2011.
The city supports at least one hundred art galleries, fewer than New York, but more than any other city in this country. Though not their original intent, the artists of the sixties who chose to stay in the city and make their stand made it possible for subsequent generations of artists so that, today, the city has one of the largest populations of professional working artists anywhere—in part because of ready employment at the large number of art schools and university art departments. And, of course, the weather.
Some artists miss the sixties in Los Angeles, where art could be made with almost no financial incentive or consequence. On the flip side, as it were, auction records of the past six years demonstrate that the L.A. aesthetic, long ridiculed or ignored outside its home base, has found its audience. Significantly, the highest prices were paid for works completed in Los Angeles in the 1960s: Ruscha’s Burning Gas Station, 1965, sold for $6,985,000, Baldessari’s text painting Quality Material, 1967, for $4,408,000; Hockney’s Beverly Hills Housewife, 1966, for $7,922,500, and his 1966 Portrait of Nick Wilder (in a swimming pool!) for $2,869,500. Nauman’s Henry Moore Bound to Fail, 1967, sold for $9,906,000; Irwin’s untitled two lines of red on tan, 1963, for $1,058,500; Bell’s coated glass box, 1969, for $623,400; and Chicago’s Car Hood, 1964, for $288,000. Kienholz’s 1959 sculpture Walter Hopps, Hopps, Hopps sold in 1989 from the late Ed Janss Jr.’s collection for $176,000. The Hotel Green sign signed in 1963 by Marcel Duchamp and Dennis Hopper sold for $362,500.
Of course, the artists do not receive much financial gain from these sales, but validation from the market marches in tandem with validation from art history these days. The end of innocence marks the beginning of maturity.
Notes
Chapter One. 1963: Andy and Marcel
1. Shirley Neilsen Blum in The Cool School: How L.A. Learned to Love Modern Art, 2008 documentary by Kristine McKenna and Morgan Neville, Tremolo Productions.
2. Warhol did not come to Los Angeles in 1962 but at some point, already honing his publicity skills, he took a photographer and got his picture taken signing the cans. The Associated Press published the photograph in newspapers around the world, establishing his name overnight as the Prince of Pop. To doubters, he said, “I feel I’m very much a part of my times, of my culture, as much a part of it as rockets and television.” Bob Colacello, Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 22.
3. Blum sold the Warhols to the Museum of Modern Art for $15 million in 1996.
4. Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol ’60s (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 35.
5. Dennis Hopper, interview with author, March 20, 2006.
6. Ibid.
7. Craig Kauffman, interview with author, October 24, 2008.
8. Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 35.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ed Ruscha, Leave Any Information at the Signal: Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages, ed. Alexandra Shwartz (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 42.
12. Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 42.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., 40.
15. Naomi Sawelson-Gorse, “Hollywood Conversations: Duchamp and the Arensbergs” in West Coast, Duchamp, ed. Bonnie Clearwater (Miami Beach: Grassfield Press, 1991), 30.
16. Dickran Tashjian, “Nothing Left to Chance: Duchamp’s First Retrospective,” in Clearwater, West Coast, Duchamp, 63.
17. Ibid.
18. Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 43.
19. Ibid.
20. Hopper, interview with author, March 20, 2006.
21. Ibid.
22. Tashjian, “Nothing Left to Chance,” 63.
23. Ibid., 82.
24. Ibid., 63.
25. Ibid., 62.
26. Eve Babitz, interview with author, March 16, 2006.
27. Oral history interview with Eve Babitz, June 14, 2000, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
28. Babitz, interview with author, March 16, 2006.
29. Ibid.
30. Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 45.
31. Jules Langsner, “Los Angeles: America’s Second Art City,” Art in America 5, no. 2 (April 1963): 127–31.
32. Dickran Tashjian to author, May 4, 2008.
Chapter Two. Ferus Gallery
1. Walter Hopps, Kienholz: A Retrospective (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1996), 27.
2. Kristine McKenna, Th
e Ferus Gallery: A Place to Begin (Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, 2009), 201.
3. Even L.A. collectors were starting to buy them. Taft Schreiber, one of the founders of the Music Corporation of America, and his wife Rita bought Pollock’s Number 1 from Leo Castelli, and Mark Rothko’s Yellow and Orange from Marlborough Galleries. Other moguls and actors followed suit.
4. Hopps, Kienholz, 29.
5. Walter Hopps in catalog for The Last Time I Saw Ferus: 1955–1966 (Newport Beach, CA: Newport Harbor Art Museum, 1976).
6. Ibid.
7. Calvin Tomkins, “A Touch for the Now,” New Yorker, July 29, 1991, 43.
8. Shirley Neilsen Blum, interview with author.
9. Hopps organized a show at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1961 of his solarized and symbolic prints.
10. McKenna, Ferus Gallery, 122.
11. Oral history interview with Lawrence Weschler, Los Angeles Art Community: Group Portrait, Ed Kienholz, Oral History Program, University of California, Los Angeles, 1977.
12. Ibid.
13. Hopps, Kienholz, 26.
14. Kienholz, oral history.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Catherine Grenier, ed., Los Angeles 1955–1985: Birth of an Art Capital (Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2006), 62.
19. Mary Lynch Kienholz, interview with author, July 30, 2010.
20. Kienholz, oral history.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Gerald Nordland, Frontier, May 1957, reprinted in Last Time I Saw Ferus.
Chapter Three. Riding the First Wave
1. Kienholz, oral history.
2. Walter Hopps, “L.A. c. 1949: Dark Night-Jazz,” in Wallace Berman: Support the Revolution (Amsterdam: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1992), 11, reprinted in Grenier, Los Angeles, 1955–1985, 63.
3. Kienholz, oral history.
4. Hopper, interview with author, March 20, 2006.
5. Richard Hertz, ed., The Beat and the Buzz: Inside the L.A. Art World (Ojai, CA: Minneola Press, 2009), 156.
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