Rebels in Paradise (14 page)

Nelson, who had worked for Martha Jackson in New York, came west to run the short-lived Los Angeles branch of James Newman's Dilexi Gallery. A Parsons-trained artist turned dealer, Nelson opened his own gallery on 530 North La Cienega Boulevard a year later. As Blum cast off artists, Nelson welcomed them, including Llyn Foulkes, who performed music on a one-man band of his own invention and painted landscapes based on postcards of his Eagle Rock neighborhood, and George Herms, the assemblagist and filmmaker who had adopted Berman's mantra “Art is Love is God.”
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The Common Objects show turned out to be a big break for the youngest artists, Ruscha, twenty-four, and Goode, twenty-five, who had been introduced to Hopps by Henry Hopkins. Hopkins had defected from a family of Idaho agronomists to study art at the Art Institute of Chicago. He was drafted to serve in the Korean War in 1952. Mustered into the photography department and posted to Europe, he visited museums and became interested in art history. On the G.I. Bill, he enrolled at UCLA to get a master's degree in art history under the revered art historian and artist Frederick S. Wight.

As director of the university art gallery from 1953 to 1972, Wight had shown a number of modern artists, including Arthur Dove, Charles Sheeler, John Marin, Modigliani, Picasso, Matisse, Arp, and even Claes Oldenburg, bold choices in the conservative city. He also showed his own landscape paintings at the Esther Robles Gallery.

It was at UCLA that Hopkins had befriended fellow student Shirley Hopps and her husband Walter. James Demetrion, who became a curator at the Pasadena Art Museum, was a graduate student at that time. Together, they decided it was important to locate the next group of young artists to supplement the core group at Ferus.

Backed by a group of three young lawyers who wanted to start a gallery, in 1961 Hopkins opened Huysman, named after the Symbolist French novelist, at 740 North La Cienega Boulevard with a small group show called War Babies. The show and gallery gained instant notoriety for its controversial poster, a photograph staged and shot by Jerry McMillan, of four artists eating the food of their ethnic stereotype: Jewish Larry Bell with a bagel, Japanese American Ron Miyashiro with chopsticks, African American Ed Bereal with a slice of watermelon, and the Irish American Catholic Joe Goode with a mackerel. An American flag was draped over the table where they sat, and that detail alone caused such an uproar that it contributed to the demise of the gallery. “We were attacked from the left for using clichés. We were attacked from the right, including the John Birch Society, for desecrating the American flag,” Hopkins said. “It was one of the first racially integrated exhibitions in Los Angeles, which we weren't thinking that much about, but it caused a wonderful furor.”
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It also launched McMillan's career as a photographer who documented the L.A. art scene and took some of the most intimate portraits of Ruscha. In his own work, he was an innovator, playing with the boundary between a two-dimensional image and a three-dimensional object using photography processes.

Ed Bereal, Larry Bell, Joe Goode, and Ron Miyashiro at Huysman Gallery, Los Angeles, 1961

Photograph by Jerry McMillan, © Jerry McMillan, courtesy of Craig Krull Gallery, Santa Monica

Hopkins, still a student, thumbed his nose at the conservative political and social forces still in power in Los Angeles. In
Artforum
, he wrote a cogent rebuttal to a 1962 article, “Conformity in the Arts,” written by Lester D. Longman, the art department chair at UCLA, which decried the work of Rauschenberg, Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, and others as evidence of an age of “anxiety and despair, of existential nausea and self pity.”
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Hopkins wrote his dissertation on the modern art of Los Angeles, a topic that did not exist according to his UCLA advisers, though Wight granted permission. Such ambition caught the attention of curator James Elliot at the L.A. County Museum of History, Science, and Art in Exposition Park. With Elliot, Hopkins worked on the exhibition Fifty California Artists, which included Irwin and Kienholz, along with more established artists. The show traveled from UCLA's gallery to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and other museums around the country. The L.A. County Museum hired Hopkins as assistant curator, but his salary for the first year had to be paid by collector Marcia Weisman because the museum had not allocated funds for modern art.

Hopkins wrote the first published (and positive) review of Warhol's soup-can exhibition for
Artforum
. He was also the first to purchase a word painting by Ruscha:
Sweetwater.
It came to a tragic end when a student took it from Hopkins's office and painted over it. (Hopkins frequently told this story to the amusement of many but without much real forgiveness.)

Soaring from the attention that came with Common Objects, the following year Ruscha and Goode decided to hitchhike to New York. They rode with amphetamine-fueled truckers and, when no cars offered rides, they took a bus that was so crowded that Goode slept on the floor. Then they had an experience that could have been lifted from a cheesy porn film. A young woman stopped and, after a brief chat, asked if she should get her friend and show them the sights in the nearby small town. That sounded like a great idea. At her suggestion, they took off their clothes to go swimming in a pond while waiting for her return, which, rather predictably, she never did.

When they finally reached New York, Goode agreed with Ruscha that it would be impossible to make art there. “One of the great things about working [in Los Angeles] was that most artists didn't care about what was happening in New York,” Goode said. “What Irwin stressed is what everybody out here believed. You can do what you want and this idea of having a theory tied around your work, you don't have to do that. That is what I really liked. It always looked stifled to me, New York art, because of the heavy reliance on European art.”
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In New York, Larry Rivers took them to the Five Spot to hear Thelonious Monk. Warhol invited them to lunch, and Ruscha showed him his first book of black-and-white photographs,
Twentysix Gasoline Stations
: Standard stations, Texacos, and so forth, with no essay, in a five-by-seven-inch paperback. Warhol looked through the book with his deadpan serious expression. “Ooh, I love that there are no people in them.”
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Not long after, Ruscha painted
Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas
, a long horizontal canvas roughly five feet tall and ten feet long in flatly commercial shades of red, black, and white. “I think they become more powerful without extraneous elements like people, cars, or anything beyond the story.… I wanted something that had some industrial strength to it.”
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Dennis and Brooke Hopper bought that painting, which made sense in that Hopper had taken an iconic photograph of two Standard signs at a gas station on the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Melrose Avenue as seen through the windshield of his car:
Double Standard
. In the 1960s, gas stations could be slightly exotic. Tom Wolfe described the Union 76 in Beverly Hills as a “Futurama Pagoda” designed by Jim Wong of Pereira and Associates: “What Wong has done here with electric light sculpture—as an artist—goes so far beyond what serious light sculptors like Billy Apple and Dan Flavin (and serious architects, for that matter) have yet attempted; it poses a serious question for art historians.”
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Ruscha knew intuitively that there was something unsettlingly special about his small book of gas station photographs even if Philip Leider, the editor of
Artforum
, wrote that he found himself “irritated and annoyed” by it. Ruscha showed it to his sometime girlfriend Eve Babitz, who went on to write a series of scandalously funny memoirs beginning with
Eve's Hollywood
.

“We were driving down to have dinner at La Esperanza in the Plaza,” she recalled. “We used to get enchiladas rancheras with sour cream, melted cheese, avocado.… So I look at this book and said, ‘Why did you make this book?' He said, ‘Somebody had to do it.'”
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Ruscha became a regular at the unruly but warm Babitz household in Hollywood, where her violinist and musicologist father, Saul Babitz, and artist mother entertained the Igor Stravinskys and other Europeans visiting or relocating to the city. Ruscha became friends with the entire family. “He would come over to our house all the time. And for Thanksgiving. My mother would make these huge meals. Ed's thing was ‘May Babitz sure is good to her boys.' He was my boyfriend for a long time.”
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Babitz's portrait was included in a Ruscha project for the 1970 Design Quarterly called
Five
1965
Girlfriends.
Another girlfriend was the slim and stylish Danna Knego. Ruscha had met her at Hanna-Barbera studio, where she worked as an artist inking the line drawings of animators.

Meanwhile, Goode's marriage had crumbled under the strain of poverty and creative ambition. After divorcing his wife Judy in 1964, Goode dated Eve's sister, Mirandi, who introduced him to the music of the Beatles. Both daughters were regulars at the clubs proliferating on the Sunset Strip. Goode remembered going with Mirandi to hear Donovan perform and seeing John Lennon hop on the stage for an impromptu jam.

Knego, a slender twenty-one-year-old with high cheek bones and clearly set brown eyes, was living at home with her mother. Her father, who had left the family when she was eight, had been an actor, and a close friend of Robert Mitchum. Knego and Ruscha shared a passion for the stories and remnants of old Hollywood and the historic city. “We'd drive around L.A and look at different things and feel the nostalgia even then for the old buildings,” she said.
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Many such buildings could be found in Echo Park on the east side of the city where stucco bungalows nestled on the hills that rose around a large pond with blooming lotus plants. In 1964, Ruscha had moved to a small house on Vestel Avenue. He preferred to live near his circle of Oklahoma friends on the east side of town rather than follow the rest of the Ferus artists as they moved to Venice Beach.

 

CHAPTER SIX

Bell, Box, and Venice

Irving Blum honed his relationship with Leo Castelli in order to exhibit New York–based artists Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, and others who were celebrated for their clean geometric abstractions. In many ways, the work was not unlike that being done by Karl Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson, John McLaughlin, Frederick Hammersley, Helen Lundeberg, and June Harwood, an older and more established group of Los Angeles artists supported critically by Harwood's husband Jules Langsner. But Blum wanted to expand his New York network, and he added no more Los Angeles artists to the gallery apart from Larry Bell.

Bell was born in Chicago in 1939 but raised after 1945 in the sprawling L.A. suburb of the San Fernando Valley. His father sold insurance. His mother helped but was creative and eventually went back to school to study art. Bell was an attractive, wisecracking kid and a mediocre student at Birmingham High School in Van Nuys. “I was a flake of a student,” he said.
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Yet, his ability to draw cartoons got him a PTA scholarship to attend Chouinard during summer school. He enrolled full-time in 1958 with the vague notion of becoming an animator. He rented a room four blocks away from the school in a bright pink boardinghouse, the Shalimar, which once belonged to Charlie Chaplin.

Larry Bell

Photograph by Dennis Hopper, © The Dennis Hopper Trust, courtesy of The Dennis Hopper Trust

Bell was partially deaf, though the condition was not diagnosed correctly until he was forty-six. He felt overwhelmed by the pressure at Chouinard and dropped all of his classes, apart from a watercolor course at night with Robert Irwin, who encouraged his splashy efforts. “He was the first person to take a real interest in what I was doing,” Bell recalled later.
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