Rebels in Paradise (5 page)

While Wasser took dozens of photographs, the one that became a celebrated poster depicts Babitz seated on a wooden chair and leaning her elbows on the table so that her breasts dangle and her hair hides her face; Duchamp, with a neutral expression, holds a cigar and focuses on the board. For Duchamp, it was completely unplanned and therefore a perfect coda to his retrospective.

*   *   *

The back-to-back receptions in honor of Warhol and Duchamp invigorated the feisty Los Angeles art scene. Warhol said, “For a while there in the early sixties, it looked like a real solid art scene was developing in California. Even Henry Geldzahler felt he had to make a trip out once a year to check on what was happening.”
30
A few months later, one of the city's few progressive critics, Jules Langsner, wrote in
Art in America
, “In the space of a half-dozen years, the state of the Los Angeles art community has changed from the nuts who diet on nutburgers to a living and vital center of increasing importance.”
31

Eve Babitz and Marcel Duchamp play chess at Pasadena Art Museum, 1963

Photograph by Julian Wasser, © Julian Wasser, courtesy of Craig Krull Gallery, Santa Monica

A lively consensus emerged that these shows represented some sort of shift in terms of the city's viability as a contemporary art center. Duchamp scholar Dickran Tashjian said, “The L.A. artists, who were outsiders, saw the success of Duchamp, who was an outsider, and thought, ‘Hey, if this guy can do it, so can we.'”
32

Encouragement from a rising star such as Warhol gave a boost to the artists who believed that their own unique contributions deserved to be recognized in New York and Europe. Most of those artists showed at Ferus, the first gallery in Los Angeles to capture the zeitgeist.

 

CHAPTER TWO

Ferus Gallery

Before Ferus, art galleries owned by Felix Landau, Earl Stendahl, Dalzell Hatfield, Frank Perls, Paul Kantor, David Stuart, and others imported Impressionists, Cubists, Surrealists, and New York School Abstract Expressionists and occasionally showed some L.A. artists with modern leanings. However, this awareness and practice of modern art did not constitute much in the way of a scene. The city's distinctive Modernist enterprise in art, as in architecture and design, attracted spirited individualists. Hopps explained, “Although a quasi-official Los Angeles avant-garde, centered around the post-Cubist painter Rico Lebrun, was visible throughout the city, alternative modern art could be seen in only a few experimental movie houses or the walls of bohemian cafés.”
1

Ferus, founded in 1957 by Hopps and artist Ed Kienholz, represented a group of Los Angeles artists who were friends—who hung out and supported one another in their attempt to create something that departed from the immediate past and embraced the aesthetics of the sixties. Their synergy with one another and with musicians, actors, photographers, fashion designers, and architects would eventually transform Los Angeles. Robert Irwin later said, “The idea of a career wasn't an issue for any of us because if it had been we would've left and gone to New York like all the generations before us, because that's where careers were made. The reason that generation of artists is so seminal to L.A. is because it was the first one that didn't leave and made a commitment to stay in L.A.”
2

The Ferus Gallery gang: John Altoon, Craig Kauffman, Allen Lynch, Ed Kienholz, Ed Moses, Robert Irwin, and Billy Al Bengston, Los Angeles, 1958

Photograph by Patricia Faure, © The Estate of Patricia Faure

Virtually all of the artists who showed at Ferus in the early years were enamored of Abstract Expressionist artists Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, and others. These artists had toiled in poverty and obscurity for decades before finding support from patron Peggy Guggenheim or critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. The Ferus founders and artists admired the stubborn determination of the New York painters to make something original and authentic. For a few years, most of them emulated that gestural abstract style of painting, though it was difficult for them to accept the New Yorkers' soul-searching angst. Also, on the West Coast, they were slightly behind the curve in their understanding of such painting, which they knew initially from black-and-white reproductions in magazines such as
ARTNews
and
Studio International.

In 1956, Pollock killed himself in a car crash. Within two years, his paintings and those of the other Abstract Expressionists started selling for large sums, and the outsiders were suddenly insiders. The Abstract Expressionists were practically establishment in the opinion of young Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, who challenged virtually all of the ideas Rothko, De Kooning, and company held dear. Hopps and Kienholz, neither of whom had been to New York at that point, were not yet aware of such shifts and proudly showed gestural abstract painting from Northern and Southern California. For conservative Los Angeles during the Eisenhower years, such work was viewed as pretty radical.
3

They were quite the odd couple: The square-jawed, sandy-haired Hopps was so often outfitted in a suit and tie, sporting black, square-rimmed glasses, that his friends used to tease him about being in the CIA. In contrast, Kienholz was a cherubic farm boy and aspiring Beat with a receding hairline, a goatee, and an expanding belly. Both were autodidacts who were seemingly incapable of getting along individually in the conventional world. Together, they had a chance. “We couldn't have been more different sorts of people,” Hopps said, “but it was clear to both of us that we had an agenda to further the kind of art that interested us in our own ways.”
4

Hopps insisted that the name of the gallery derived from
Ferus hominus
, which he believed to be an anthropological term for pre–
Homo sapiens
man. “They were described as being very hardy, irascible, dangerous beings and I thought that was an apt description of the artists I was involved with,” he explained.
5

On another occasion, Hopps said the gallery was named in honor of James Ferus, a talented teenager at Eagle Rock High School, Hopps's alma mater, who had committed suicide. “It was two edged, something very involved about what we felt was living art and how it would be named after someone who was no longer alive.”
6

Walter Hopps

Photograph courtesy of Nancy Reddin Kienholz

Irving Blum insisted later that it meant “for us,” a gallery conceived as a support system for artists. In name as in all else, Ferus was many things to many people, and it gained a mythic reputation.

Walter Wain Hopps III, born in 1933, was a fourth-generation Californian raised in comfortable Eagle Rock, a small city to the west of Pasadena. His father was an orthopedic surgeon and his mother trained in Jungian psychology, though she never practiced. Hopps was adept at math and science, and his parents expected him to become a doctor. They suggested Yale, but the lure of jazz clubs and modern art led him to choose Stanford University near progressive San Francisco. With his open-faced friend James Newman, he formed a venture called Concert Hall Workshop that booked jazz gigs at colleges. (Since the age of sixteen, using fake driving licenses, Hopps and Craig Kauffman had seen Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and other jazz musicians performing at the clubs along Central Avenue in Los Angeles as well as in San Francisco.)

After contributing a bawdy submission to a campus magazine, Hopps fell afoul of Stanford authorities. He transferred to the University of California–Los Angeles in 1951. Though he took the appropriate courses for medical school to please his parents, he was consumed by curiosity about modern art and its history.

His inability to conform continued after he was called up to serve in the army in February 1953. At Fort Ord, on Monterrey Bay in Northern California, his attitude was so defiant that he was made to repeat the basic training course until he came close to a nervous breakdown, which later led to his release.

One of Hopps's first and most telling curatorial events was the 1955 Action I, taken from art critic Harold Rosenberg's term “Action Painting.” He was still in boot camp at Fort Ord when he came up with the idea. After he was released from the army, Hopps, Kauffman, and painter Ed Moses drove a car with a trailer up to San Francisco to collect large abstract paintings by Clyfford Still, Richard Diebenkorn, and others. Hopps had zero credentials but unbeatable patter. The artists trusted him completely and lent their work to this unprecedented event. As they sped along a winding road in the San Fernando Valley, the car swerved and the trailer broke loose, veering across the street and tearing up some lawns before staggering to a halt. Against all odds, the good fortune of the enthusiastic amateurs prevailed. After righting the trailer, they managed to get to Santa Monica with the paintings and themselves undamaged. Together, they hung the paintings on a sheet of canvas that they had stretched around the perimeter of a merry-go-round on the pier. The exhibition revolved slowly to the sounds of the calliope, jazz records, and John Cage's score for twelve radios to a vanguard audience of artists, Beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and bewildered passersby.

Hopps's parents were not supportive of these extracurricular art endeavors so he was obliged to work part-time as a university janitor and as an orderly in the psychiatric ward of the university hospital. Around this time, he became involved with a lithe and lovely blonde, Shirley Neilsen, whose parents were doctors and friends with Hopps's parents. The young couple had known each other since childhood.

While Hopps went to UCLA and staged art events, Shirley doggedly completed her undergraduate degree in art history at UCLA and her master's degree in art history at the University of Chicago, specializing in art of the Northern European Renaissance and modern eras. Hopps audited one of Shirley's courses in art history, but he never completed a degree, though he concealed this fact. “Walter appropriated my education,” Shirley said dryly.
7
He told people that he'd attended the same schools as Shirley, implying that he had the same qualifications. “He was so brilliant, he should have advertised the fact that he hadn't even taken classes,” she said.
8