Rebels in Paradise

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

  Blum wanted Jasper Johns, but dealer Leo Castelli had a waiting list for Johns’s paintings of flags and targets. Castelli suggested that Blum call Johns directly and visit his studio in New York. While there, Blum spotted a collage on the wall by German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters, and as Johns arranged a selection of his new small sculptures Light Blub, Flashlight, and Ale Cans, Blum said, “Why don’t we do a show in California of your sculpture and include collages by Schwitters?”8 Thanks to Hopps, he knew that expatriate German dealer Galka Scheyer had left her collection of Schwitters to the Pasadena Art Museum. They could borrow some pieces. On that condition, Johns agreed to a September 1960 show.9

  That October, Blum brought in a show by Josef Albers, a Bauhaus Modernist whose paintings he had sold at Knoll. In his series Homage to the Square, Albers had dedicated himself to the study of color by using simple geometric shapes. Up-and-coming collectors Stanley and Elyse Grinstein paid $2,800 for a canvas on the installment plan. “It was the first major thing we ever bought and I still love it,” Elyse said. “We found we could afford this stuff by paying ten dollars a week.”10 That purchase launched them into collecting and, more important, socializing with artists.

  * * *

  Kienholz’s 1959 show at Ferus proved how effective it had been for him to remain in the studio. His critical outlook on society mixed with gallows humor in pieces of freestanding sculpture that incorporated parts of mannequins, such as John Doe, the top half of a nude adult man resting in a baby stroller, his head and chest dripping with blood-colored paint.

  As a guest curator, Hopps arranged a Kienholz show at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1961, the same year that his work was included in the Art of Assemblage, a historical survey organized by William Seitz for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Seitz’s exhibition was unusual in its inclusion of West Coast art by George Herms and Bruce Conner, as well as a mention of the Watts Towers. Kienholz’s larger-than-life personality led producer David Wolper to create an episode about him for: The Story of…, a television biographical series.

  Wolper followed Kienholz around junkyards and flea markets as he found the pieces to complete his first life-sized tableau, Roxy’s.11 He transformed Ferus into a bleak replica of what had been, in 1943, a notorious Las Vegas whorehouse. With pieces scavenged from an old theater on Central Avenue, the open-sided, dimly lit rooms were furnished with worn sofas and chairs and a jukebox. A portrait of General MacArthur hung on the wall. A vanity table was covered in cosmetics. The madam who stands guard had a head made of a bleached deer skull, and an altered mannequin named “Five Dollar Billy” lay on her back on an old sewing machine treadle that could pump her up and down. Other mannequin whores had names such as “Cockeyed Jenny,” and each was fiercely repellent in appearance. To complete the environment, period music played on the Wurlitzer jukebox and the aroma of disinfectant and cherry perfume laced the air. “I went back in memory to Kellogg, Idaho, to whorehouses when I was a kid, and just being sort of appalled by the whole situation—not being able to perform because it was just a really crummy, bad experience, a bunch of old women with sagging breasts that were supposed to turn you on,” Kienholz said.12

  The 1962 opening of Roxy’s at Ferus was a sensation. Collector Monte Factor remembered, “Kienholz stationed a Brink’s guard at the door and wouldn’t let anyone in without a white tie. Kienholz wore a tuxedo. Kenny Price dressed like a Texan in white coat and tails and had a limousine drive him. He came up La Cienega and told the driver to make a U-turn to stop right in front of the gallery. The driver said, ‘I can’t make it.’ Kenny said, ‘I’m paying for this fucking thing. You make a U-turn right here.’ The driver made the U-turn and he sees the Brink’s guard. And the driver says, ‘Ah, shit, we’re busted.’ He thought the guard was a cop. Kenny gets out and tips him and sends him away and walks in, making an entrance. Inside, they were serving boilermakers. Everybody got drunk. Bob Irwin wore a white hat and coat.”13

  Roxy’s established Kienholz as a mature artist of biting insight and wit. In one of the first reviews to be published in the newly launched magazine Artforum, painter Arthur Secunda opined that it was “thematically effective—not always formally satisfying but unreservedly tasteful.” That was the last time that anyone would accuse Kienholz of being “tasteful.”14

  For another sculpture, Kienholz used a cut-out figure from a Bardahl oil sign to make Walter Hopps, Hopps, Hopps. The title referred to his friend’s frenetic pace and old-school surname: Hopps III. Kienholz altered the suit jacket so that it could be opened to reveal miniature replicas of paintings for sale by Pollock, De Kooning, and Kline. Since Hopps was never on time, the watch on his wrist states “LATE.” The sculpture was purchased by Hopps’s dedicated patron and friend, art collector Edwin Janss Jr., who had inherited a sizable fortune from his father, Dr. Edwin Janss, the developer of Westwood, Holmby Hills, and areas of the San Fernando Valley. A handsome, fun-loving renegade, Janss, with his wife and three children, raised cattle and bred thoroughbred horses on his ten-thousand-acre ranch in the Conejo Valley, acreage that he developed as the suburb of Thousand Oaks.

  Janss had just begun collecting art in the early sixties when he flew to New York and bought paintings by Rothko, Pollock, and Sam Francis, which he hung on the walls of his ranch house. Shortly afterward, Sports Illustrated sent a reporter to interview him about plans for a resort to be built at Sun Valley, Idaho, on land the Janss Investment Corporation had purchased from Union Pacific. The reporter could scarcely help but notice the three large abstract paintings and asked Janss who he thought were the best painters in the world at that time. Thinking quickly, Janss replied, “Rothko, Pollock, and Francis.” A few months later, there was a knock at the front door. Janss opened it to a stocky stranger who said, “I want to meet the man who thinks my painting is as good as Pollock’s.” Sam Francis and Janss became immediate friends.15

  Janss went on to build a sizable art collection between 1962 and 1964. Hopps, whom he had met at Ferus, was his primary adviser. Janss made the sixty-mile commute to Los Angeles in his private plane, since there was no freeway to the west hills of the Valley. Both Hopps and Janss came from established families in Southern California, and both had attended Stanford—though Janss had graduated with a degree in medicine—but it was their interest in modern art that cemented their bond.

  These attractive and irrepressible Californians must have made quite an impression in New York. With Hopps in tow, Janss bought major canvases by Rauschenberg, Johns, Warhol, and Ellsworth Kelly: paintings that “assured liquidity,” according to one art dealer. Janss and Hopps flew to the Venice Biennale in 1964, the year that Rauschenberg’s work broke down a long-standing distrust of American art to win the international prize for painting. Yet, despite his comfort with the collecting class and his ability to advise them, Hopps found it difficult to actually sell art. “Walter was a hapless salesman, unable to focus on that part of the business because his interest was in the objects, the art,” observed Janss’s daughter, Dagny Corcoran.16 Monte Factor said, “He connected with objects the way most of us connect with people.”17

  Hopps would spend hours, even days, hanging out with Kienholz and other artists while Blum was all efficiency. “I can remember one time that somebody wanted to go to Chicago for something, and there were no reservations available,” Kienholz recalled. “Irving said, ‘Here.’ He just took the phone and said, ‘This is Colonel Blum. My serial number is blah-blah-blah-blah. And I want a reservation in the name of … and I want it for this flight. You arrange it and call me back in five minutes and confirm it.’ He hung up. And somebody called back, you know. He’d invented the serial number and the whole thing. We all laughed and thought that was funny as hell.”18

  Throughout 1961, Hopps ensured the continued focus on West Coast artists at Ferus, making a sole exception for a show of pale still lifes by the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi. There were shows of hulking ceramic sculptures by John Mason, big paintings of postcards
of the stone formation known as Eagle Rock by Llyn Foulkes, and gestural abstractions by John Altoon.

  Blum was excited about some paintings he had seen in Altoon’s studio. “A dozen paintings, roughly nine feet square that were Miroesque.… I was just trembling with pleasure.”19 Blum brought them to the gallery. The following day, Altoon came in and said, “Irving, what did you do with my paintings?” Blum said they were in storage. Altoon pulled a switchblade knife out of his pocket, aimed it at Blum’s throat, and said, “I want to see those paintings.”

  Blum replied quickly, “John, absolutely no problem.”

  They went down the alley and opened the door to the storage. “As I stood there watching, he ribboned with his knife the dozen pictures I had back there,” Blum recalled. “Ribboned beyond restoration. When he finished, he turned and left, didn’t say a word.”20

  That was not the only time that Altoon nearly cost Blum his life. In 1961 Abstract Impressionist Hassel Smith, who lived in Sebastopol, California, was showing at Ferus and, thanks to Hopps, having a simultaneous show at the Pasadena Art Museum. Blum and Altoon hitched a trailer onto Hopps’s station wagon and drove to Sebastopol to pick up Smith’s oil paintings. After a boozy dinner with the painter, Altoon was driving them back to Los Angeles when he fell asleep at the wheel. The trailer hit a concrete barrier and flipped the car over. Blum broke his hip, jaw, and shoulder and was confined to a hospital in the town of Los Banos.

  The accident made the newspapers in Los Angeles mainly because Altoon was the husband of movie star Fay Spain, who immediately sent an ambulance north to recover the badly injured artist, though not his dealer. “John left me there to rot,” Blum recalled with a sardonic laugh.21 Fortunately, his uncle Albert Waldinger, a well-known diamond setter in Los Angeles, saw the article. Blum had been selling art to his daughter Pearl and her husband Merle Glick, a dentist who wound up treating many of the Los Angeles artists. Waldinger dispatched an ambulance to bring Blum down to Mount Sinai Hospital, now Cedars Sinai Medical Center. Blum spent the next six months recovering. Altoon left Ferus to show with the David Stuart Gallery.

  * * *

  The messy Beat ethos embraced by Altoon, which had been so instrumental in the founding of Ferus, faded rapidly after 1960 and the election of John F. Kennedy. It could be seen in fashion, film, art, and architecture. The very appearance of the city changed as some of the city’s preeminent modernist architects used the latest developments in engineering and technology to forge curved and circular buildings that were termed futuristic. John Lautner completed the Malin residence, called the Chemosphere, a hexagonal, glass-sided residence mounted on a pole in the Hollywood Hills overlooking the Cahuenga Pass. The Los Angeles International Airport gained a circular glass restaurant suspended between a pair of linked arches, a collaborative effort by four of the city’s top architects: William Pereira, Charles Luckman, Welton Becket, and Paul Williams. A serpentine clover leaf of smooth pavement opened to connect the Santa Monica and San Diego freeways.

  Critic Jules Langsner had been thinking about such an aesthetic shift when he mounted Four Abstract Classicists in 1959 at the L.A. County Museum of History, Science, and Art. He coined the term “hard-edge” for painters John McLaughlin, Frederick Hammersley, Lorser Feitelson, and Karl Benjamin, who painted with a notable absence of emotional brushwork. Indebted variously to Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich, and Zen Buddhism, the older hard-edge painters were not exactly a movement, but their uncluttered, geometric abstractions underscored the tectonic shift away from what the younger artists called “messy painting.” As with so many things at Ferus, the shift began with Billy Al Bengston, whose dynamic personality and protean talent led the other artists to see him as their leader.

  Billy Al Bengston, Los Angeles, 1971

  Photograph by Patricia Faure, © The Estate of Patricia Faure

  Bengston was born in 1934 in Dodge City, Kansas, where his father, a tailor, owned a dry-cleaning establishment, and passed on to his son an early interest in sartorial matters. In high school, Bengston wore such brightly colored clothes that he earned the nickname “Rainbow.” His mother was too talented and too ambitious for Dodge City. A trained opera singer, she taught music in the local high school, but every other year she took courses toward a master’s degree at the University of Southern California. As a result, Bengston’s primary education seesawed between Dodge City and Los Angeles until the tenth grade, when the family stayed in California for three consecutive years so that he could graduate from Manual Arts High School, a technical school with a fine-arts program that boasted as alumni Robert Motherwell, Philip Guston, and Jackson Pollock.

  With blue eyes, sun-streaked brown hair, and a mustache, Bengston was equally gifted as a craftsman and an athlete. He received a gymnastics scholarship to USC but spent most of his time surfing. Dropped from the scholarship, he enrolled at L.A. City College, where he studied ceramics with Bernard Kester yet continued to spend so much time surfing that he wound up with a job as a beach attendant. He then transferred to California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland where he furthered his study of ceramics for a year.

  Bengston claimed that he took enough peyote to fool the draft board into giving him a 4-F classification. In 1956, he enrolled at the L.A. County Art Institute to study with Bay Area transplant Peter Voulkos, who had transformed the crafts orientation of ceramics by building massive fired-clay sculptures. Throwing out notions of utility, Voulkos and his followers highjacked craft materials and techniques in the service of their art.

  Within six months, the school administration had threatened Bengston with expulsion for refusing to follow the curriculum. Voulkos interceded and the rebellious twenty-two-year-old settled down to master the difficult medium. “I decided I would be an artist. I think the only contribution I ever made was that I realized that ceramics was art,” he said.22

  Voulkos, in his midthirties, had modeled his hard-drinking, tough-guy behavior after the New York School abstract painters, and he modeled his art after theirs as well. Peter Plagens, author of Sunshine Muse: Art on the West Coast, 1945–1970, wrote, “In four years, Voulkos and his students managed the redoubtable feat of removing the craft of ceramics to the province of sculpture by overcoming a dependence on the potter’s wheel, by slab-building, denting, cracking, and only partially glazing—in short, by creating a Southern California Abstract Expressionist ceramics.”23 Voulkos threw gestural rather than functional works in clay, making art, not craft. He worked big and fast, qualities that were anathema to many in the craft-oriented ceramics community. With his student John Mason, Voulkos rented a studio in Highland Park and built one of the largest walk-in kilns in the country to pursue clay sculpture of architectural proportions. The stocky and quietly dedicated Mason would exhibit four times at Ferus, once covering the entire wall with his blue-glazed ceramic art. Collector and actor Sterling Holloway commissioned from him a pair of doors inset with rough ceramic squares resembling natural rock.

  Peter Voulkos

  Photograph courtesy of Frank Lloyd Gallery, Santa Monica

  “I loved being with Voulkos,” Bengston said. “I learned so much … like how to handle your actual physicality. The strength, the tenacity. Ceramics are wonderful in that you have to comply with the medium.”24

  Bengston was working as a beach attendant at Doheny State Beach when he befriended fellow surfer and aspiring artist Ken Price. Fine-boned and wiry, with an easy smile, Price was a natural on the waves. Price had surfed almost daily for some fifteen years, more often during the two years that his family lived in a trailer on the beach while their house was being built on Chautauqua Boulevard in the Pacific Palisades. Price’s father, an inventor, had come up with the Popsicle and other innovations for the Good Humor Ice Cream Company. His mother was a homemaker. “One of the great parts of growing up there was the opportunity to experience nature in a relaxed aimless kind of way, just walking down a stream or onto the beach or into the mountains, as long as I was h
ome by dinner,” he said.25

  Price, born in 1935 in Los Angeles, was a year younger than Bengston, and his new friend inspired him with his commitment. “He was the only person I had met at the time who was serious about being an artist,” Price said about Bengston.26 “I was confused about a lot of things at that time, but not about being an artist. I knew that’s what I had to be.”27

  While at University High in the Palisades, Price received a scholarship to attend Chouinard Art Institute for summer school, where he took a cartooning class with a teacher named, appropriately enough, Tee Hee. After working with clay in a class at Santa Monica College in 1953, he returned to Chouinard but found the ceramics department there to be “crafts-dogma hell, with lots of rules about ‘form following function,’ ‘truth to materials,’ ‘life and lift,’ and dripping teapot spouts. In those days clay as an art medium was dead and buried.”28 He found a similar atmosphere at USC, from which he graduated in 1956, but not without offending F. Carlton Ball, “another guy from craft hell.”29

  Price broke all the rules for his USC graduate presentation. “I had representational decor on everything, including plates with reclining nudes of Bengston and Voulkos.”30 They were on view in a glass case next to the art and architecture library. “There was a big stink about it. These were cartoons! I found some leaves to paste over the genital areas and the reaction was even worse.”31 Ball tried to evict Price from the education department, where he was getting a minor so that his parents would pay his tuition. “I was saved by the dean … who liked my work.”32

  Price enrolled in the graduate program at L.A. County Art Institute to study with Voulkos. “He worked better and faster than anything we had expected. He worked in large scale with ease. He opened the whole thing up for us.… Voulkos is the man who liberated clay from the crafts hierarchy in America.”33