Rebels in Paradise (2 page)

The L.A. County Museum exhibits Six Painters and the Object, organized by Lawrence Alloway—who coined the term “Pop Art”—for the Guggenheim Museum. It features Dine, Johns, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, Warhol, and James Rosenquist. The L.A.'s version includes Six More: Bengston, Goode, Hefferton, Ruscha, as well as Thiebaud and Mel Ramos from San Francisco.

Marcel Duchamp retrospective is held at the Pasadena Art Museum organized by Hopps. Hopps named director in August. Hires James Demetrion as curator and Harold (Hal) Glicksman as assistant and preparator.

Pasadena Art Museum shows paintings of John McLaughlin.

The Cinerama Dome Theater, designed by Welton Becket, features a wraparound screen inside a geodesic dome on Sunset Boulevard.

Tom Wolfe publishes his essay “Kustom Kar Kulture in Southern California: The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.”

Lenny Bruce arrested for obscenity at the Unicorn.

Death of Aldous Huxley in Los Angeles.

Ed Moses travels to Europe, 1963–64.

George Herms directs
Moonstone
, with Dean Stockwell.

Wallace Berman makes first Verifax collages.

Andy Warhol films scenes for
Tarzan and Jane Regained … Sort Of.

1964

Kienholz joins the Dwan Gallery. Dwan also shows James Rosenquist and Lucas Samaras.

Ferus shows Studs, with Moses, Irwin, Price, and Bengston, a show that underscores the macho reputations of these artists.

An exhibition of Post-Painterly Abstraction with a catalog written by critic Clement Greenberg opens at the L.A. County Museum of Art in April. Irwin refuses to participate.

David Hockney visits Los Angeles. Paints first swimming pool paintings using acrylics. Meets Christopher Isherwood, Don Bachardy, and Nicholas Wilder.

Founding of Watts Towers Art Center by Noah Purifoy and Sue Welsh.

Douglas Wheeler makes first light paintings.

Frank Gehry builds the Danziger house and studio in Hollywood.

The Beatles' first concert at the Hollywood Bowl.

Roger McGuinn forms the Byrds.

Opening of the Whisky a Go Go on the Sunset Strip.

Death of Rico Lebrun in Los Angeles.

Dorothy Chandler uses her social and political clout as wife of
L.A. Times
publisher to develop downtown performing arts complex the Music Center.

L.A. is second most populous city in the nation. Rapid Transit District is established with little result.

1965

The L.A. County Museum of Art opens in April in a modern building designed by William Pereira on Wilshire Boulevard. One of its first shows is New York School: The First Generation—Paintings of the 1940s and 1950s, organized by LACMA's curator of modern art, Maurice Tuchman.

Nicholas Wilder Gallery opens on North La Cienega Boulevard, giving Bruce Nauman his first solo show. Shows Joe Goode's staircases leading to blank walls. Hockney lives with Wilder as a roommate and paints his portrait in the swimming pool.

The Pasadena Art Museum shows Jasper Johns retrospective.

The Dwan Gallery shows Rauschenberg and Mark di Suvero. Dwan has become such a force in the city that UCLA shows the Virginia Dwan Collection in September.

Dwan opens gallery in New York, where Ed Kienholz presents
The Beanery
.

Ferus shows Richard Pettibone's miniature copies of paintings and sculptures as seen in the homes of L.A. collectors L. M. Asher, Donald Factor, Dennis Hopper, Ed Janss, Robert Rowan, and Frederick Weisman.

Artforum
magazine relocates from San Francisco into offices above Ferus Gallery.

Hopps is curator of the American Pavilion of the 8th São Paulo Biennale, September 4 to November 28, and features Bell, Bengston, Irwin, Donald Judd, Barnett Newman, Frank Stella, and Larry Poons. Ruscha is included in the Guggenheim's exhibition
Word/Image
.

Rolf Nelson Gallery gives first solo show to Judy Gerowitz (Chicago).

Sam Yorty is reelected L.A. mayor; race riots in Watts result in 35 dead, 4,000 arrested, and $40 million in property damage.

Irving Petlin organizes Artist Protest Committee.

Mark di Suvero designs the Artists Peace Tower built by volunteers on the corner of La Cienega and Sunset Boulevards. Vija Celmins's paintings of fighter jet planes shown at David Stuart Gallery.

Larry Bell moves to New York for a year, where the Pace Gallery shows his glass cubes.

1966

A retrospective of Ed Kienholz opens to great controversy at the L.A. County Museum of Art, with the board of supervisors calling the show “revolting and pornographic,” urging its removal.

Robert Irwin and Ken Price are given shows at LACMA with a catalog by Lucy Lippard and Philip Leider. The museum mounts a retrospective of Surrealist Man Ray.

The influential movement of Abstract Expressionist ceramics, including Bengston, Mason, Price, and Voulkos, is surveyed at the UC Irvine art gallery in October, while John Mason is given a solo show at LACMA in November.

Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable, with the Velvet Underground, play to unenthusiastic audience in L.A.

The Doors are banned from the Whisky a Go Go for using the word “fuck” on stage.

Neil Young moves to Los Angeles and helps form Buffalo Springfield.

Ken Kesey and Ken Babbs organize the Watts Acid Test for 600 participants.

LSD declared illegal substance.

John Chamberlain, visiting Malibu, is inspired by squeezing a sponge in the bathtub to produce sculptures of foam rubber bound with a cord that are shown at Dwan Gallery.

Ferus Gallery closes with Warhol's
Silver Clouds
and
Cow Wallpaper.

Hopps is asked to resign from Pasadena Art Museum and moves to Washington, D.C. James Demetrion becomes director of PAM. Hopps returns briefly in 1967 to oversee installation of his Joseph Cornell retrospective.

Shirley Hopps divorces Walter and marries Irving Blum.

Rolf Nelson shows the sculpture of Judy Gerowitz and starts calling her Judy Chicago, the name of her native city. She adopts the new name.

In New York, the Primary Structures show of minimalist sculpture at the Jewish Museum includes Bell and Chicago. In London, Robert Fraser Gallery shows Bell, Berman, Kauffman, Ruscha, Conner, and Hopper.

1967

Ferus/Pace Gallery shows Craig Kauffman with Roy Lichtenstein, and Donald Judd.

LACMA shows American Sculpture of the '60s with 165 works by 80 artists organized by Maurice Tuchman.

An ephemeral environment called
Dry Ice
is created in Century City by Judy Chicago, Lloyd Hamrol, and Eric Orr.

The Pasadena Art Museum, with John Coplans curating, shows Mason Williams's
Bus
, Allan Kaprow's Happening of stacked ice blocks,
Fluids
, and James Turrell's installation of projected light.

The newly formed print workshop Gemini GEL invites Robert Rauschenberg to produce
Booster
, the largest print made up to that time.

1968

Pasadena Art Museum shows light installations by Robert Irwin and Doug Wheeler.

LACMA shows Wallace Berman retrospective.

Molly Barnes Gallery gives John Baldessari his first solo show in L.A.

Blum, who severed business relations with Pace, reopens as the Irving Blum Gallery and shows Ruscha's painting the
Los Angeles County Museum on Fire.

LACMA organizes Late Fifties at Ferus. LACMA also mounts first retrospective of Billy Al Bengston.

Dwan closes L.A. gallery and moves to New York. Douglas Chrismas opens Ace in her former gallery space.

The L.A. artists are seen in many group shows, including The West Coast Now, with 62 artists at the Portland Art Museum; Los Angeles 6 at the Vancouver Art Gallery; and Documenta 4 in Kassel, Germany, including Bell, Davis, Hockney, Irwin, Kienholz, and Nauman.

Andy Warhol shot by Valerie Solanas.

Robert F. Kennedy assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after winning the California Democratic Primary. Jordanian Sirhan Sirhan arrested and later convicted of the crime. Riots and police brutality mark the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where Hubert Humphrey wins nomination. Richard Nixon, promising to end the Vietnam War, elected 37th president by narrowest margin since 1912.

Death of Marcel Duchamp in New York.

1969

Perceptual and Conceptual art addressed in The Appearing/Disappearing Object with John Baldessari, Michael Asher, Allen Ruppersberg, Barry LeVa, and Ron Cooper at the Newport Harbor Art Museum.

Judy Chicago is featured at the Pasadena Art Museum. Lloyd Hamrol shown at Pomona College Art Gallery.

West Coast 1945–1969 organized by John Coplans for the Pasadena Art Museum.

Dennis Hopper's
Easy Rider
released.

John Altoon dies of a heart attack.

Sharon Tate and others murdered by gang led by Charles Manson.

 

Introduction

Lorser Feitelson moved to Los Angeles in 1927, after living in Paris and New York. “Here I found I couldn't sell my work,” he told
Artforum
in 1962. “I had no audience, therefore I painted for my own satisfaction and what a wonderful thing that was!” By that time, the painter of geometric abstractions was an elder statesman whose art lectures were broadcast on television in Los Angeles. Many younger artists had come to the same conclusion: When you've got nothing, you've got nothing to lose.

In 1960, Los Angeles had no modern art museum and few galleries, which was exactly what renegade artists liked about it: Ed Ruscha, David Hockney, Robert Irwin, Ed Kienholz, Larry Bell, Joe Goode, Bruce Nauman, Craig Kauffman, Judy Chicago, Vija Celmins, and John Baldessari among them. Freedom from an established way of seeing, making, and marketing art fueled their creativity, which, in turn, changed the city. Today, Los Angeles has four museums dedicated to contemporary art, hundreds of galleries, and thousands of artists. This book tells the saga of how the scene came into being—how a prevailing permissiveness in Los Angeles in the 1960s brought about countless innovations: Andy Warhol's first show, Marcel Duchamp's first retrospective, Frank Gehry's unique architecture, Rudi Gernreich's topless bathing suit, Dennis Hopper's
Easy Rider
, the Beach Boys, the Byrds, and the Doors. In the 1960s, Los Angeles was the epicenter of cool.

This decade was so dense with activity, much of it overlapping if not actually connected, that a strict chronology proved impossible. The book is organized according to groups of people who knew one another as well as key events. I've included a timeline for clarification.

Since this book is not encyclopedic, I apologize in advance to all of those who feel they should have been included or whose work deserved more attention. I agree with you. So many artists, so little time! Despite that possible failing, please accept this as a love letter to Los Angeles, still a place of perpetual possibility and infinite invention.

 

CHAPTER ONE

1963: Andy and Marcel

The seven-foot Elvis in the Ferus Gallery window was startling, even by Los Angeles standards. In the gallery's back room, paintings of Elizabeth Taylor, with her outsized red lips and slashes of bright blue eye shadow, greeted visitors. Andy Warhol was fixated on celebrities and it wouldn't be long before he would become one himself.

A feeling of excitement charged the balmy evening air outside, and North La Cienega Boulevard traffic slowed as drivers gawked at the scene. Inside, stylishly coifed women in sleeveless dresses mingled with Los Angeles artists, awkward young men outfitted in thrift-store splendor. Warhol entered the filled-to-capacity gallery wearing a carnation in the lapel of his Brooks Brothers blazer.

In 1963 Los Angeles became a mecca for those who rejected the old and embraced the new in art, film, fashion, and music. For many artists, the city's tenuous attachment to history and tradition translated as openness to fresh ideas. Warhol's show contributed to the dawning realization that Los Angeles itself could be the next big thing.

Warhol was nervous as his exhibition opened on the evening of September 30. He had had just two previous exhibitions, the first held the previous summer at Ferus. Though Warhol today is considered the quintessential New York artist, he received his first break in Los Angeles when the suave—some would say fawning—Irving Blum and the perspicacious but flighty Walter Hopps took a chance on the young artist. Warhol's paintings of Campbell's soup cans, thirty-two to be exact, each painstakingly lettered with the appropriate flavor, were arranged on a shelf that girdled the walls, turning the gallery into a grocery store of sorts. Hopps's wife, Shirley, recalled, “It was one of those times when we knew we were onto something.”
1

Not everyone agreed. The show was ridiculed in a
Los Angeles Times
cartoon of two barefoot beatniks in the “Farout Art Gallery” looking at the paintings of soup cans and musing, “Frankly, the cream of asparagus does nothing for me, but the terrifying intensity of the chicken noodle gives me a real Zen feeling.” Nearby, David Stuart mocked Ferus by arranging a pyramid of Campbell's soup in the window of his gallery with a sign: “Get the real thing for only 29 cents a can.”
2

Blum convinced some collectors to purchase Warhol's soup-can paintings for $100 apiece. After a chat with art critic John Coplans, one of the first to recognize the importance of serial imagery, Blum agreed that Warhol's everyday Pop art signaled the end of the individual masterpiece; he was determined that the pictures remain together as a set. He persuaded collectors to return the half-dozen soup-can paintings that he had managed to sell. Then he asked Warhol if he could buy all of them on a layaway plan: $1,000 for the entire set to be paid over the next year.
3