Rebels in Paradise

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

  Though her inheritance gave her the freedom to make provocative choices in the works she chose for her gallery, Dwan had to recognize that her wealth was finite. “We were not wealthy,” she said.24 “There were five different people that started 3M so all of them are inheritors as well. I am just one person who has an inheritance and it is not enormous.” Referring to Michael Heizer’s gigantic Earthwork piece Double Negative, she said, “It cost thirty thousand dollars [$136,000 in today’s currency]. It is written up as though I put billions into it. I find that painful because the emphasis is on money rather than having an eye.”25 She was not discouraged, however. “More and more I was, I suppose, on a spiritual high with this gallery. I felt that what I was showing was not only for my good, but for everyone else’s and that it was a gift to the world.”26

  In May 1962, Dwan opened a larger gallery at 10846 Lindbrook Drive designed by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright and modeled after Wright’s V. C. Morris Gift shop in San Francisco. A broad arch separated the interior from the street “to give a sense of setting aside one’s other rush-rush attitudes.”27 Twice as large as the previous gallery, the main room was fifty by fifty feet. “There is the beginning of a sense of almost sacredness—that the viewer in coming in to look at art should in my mind feel that this was to be approached with a different part of himself than the rest of his day-to-day living.”28

  Dwan met Arman through Klein and gave the French artist the inaugural show at her new gallery. Kienholz took Arman shopping to find old violins and cellos to break up and encase in clear plastic boxes. “Kienholz had the largest pick-up truck. He knew his way around everywhere.… He was ambassador from Los Angeles to these European artists in particular,” Dwan said.29

  Dwan also hired John Weber, who had worked for Martha Jackson in New York and had organized a 1961 proto-Pop show called Environments, Situations, Spaces featuring Jim Dine, Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, and Robert Whitman. His first task as director was to help critic Gerald Nordland with his American Pop-themed show My Country Tis of Thee at the gallery from November 18 to December 15, 1962, around the time of Hopps’s Common Objects show.30 Kienholz joined the Dwan Gallery in 1963.

  Never able to understand why anyone wouldn’t enjoy hunting as he did, Kienholz insisted on driving Dwan, Weber, and Martial Raysse around the dirt roads of the Malibu hills in search of coyotes or cougars, but all they found was a flock of crows. As a joke, Dwan later sent an old jaguar skin to Arman’s wife with a note that it had been bagged during a hunting excursion in the wilds of Malibu.

  After Ellin closed, Dwan showed Jean Tinguely in May 1963, and the artist constructed work for the show after arriving in town. Kienholz took him to a large hardware store near MacArthur Park. Coming from postwar Paris, Tinguely was enthralled by the variety of machine parts available, especially motors. “It’s the motor that counts,” he said.31 He bought motors that were too large for his sculptures but Dwan gave him carte blanche because he loved them. He was “hugging them to him with great fondness,” she said.32 The motors had to be bolted to the floor to keep the sculptures from vibrating around the gallery.

  Kienholz’s next scavenger hunt took him to the downtown district with Saint Phalle, where she found the balloons, paint, glitter, and plastic toys for the work for her January 1964 show. In addition, plastic sacks full of paint were attached to a twenty-foot-long canvas and shot open during her performance in Malibu. Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Henry Geldzahler attended and later wrote about it for Vogue. Jane Fonda and French actress Micheline Presle, who had just appeared with Paul Newman in The Prize, attended as well. The leftover canvas stood outside at the end of Dwan’s pool until it faded into extinction. Chained to the corner was a small cannon that Tinguely had created to lob shots into the ocean.

  “It was a playful period,” Dwan recalled. It wasn’t that people weren’t taking the art seriously but there was an openness to enjoyment and having fun in the process.33 Dwan’s sense of the playful led her to organize a progressive dinner for Tinguely. The artist built a working fountain at the home of each participating collector, and a bus carried champagne-sipping guests from house to house. Later, Tinguely and Saint Phalle cruised down to Mexico with Dwan and Kondratief on their boat. The trip went badly; Dwan had to face the fact that her marriage was coming to an end. “Things were miserable,” she said.34

  Kienholz was also having trouble at home. He and his wife Mary divorced in 1964 and began an ugly custody battle over their two children, Noah, four, and Jenny, three. “He was a miserable bastard,” Mary said later.35 She moved out of the Nash Drive house and went to work for Virginia Dwan’s sister-in-law, Eugenie Kondratief Thompson, who started Cart and Crate, the first Los Angeles company to transport art professionally, a service that dealers and collectors needed increasingly.

  The divorce was savage, and Kienholz channeled all of his grief and anger into his art, which exploded in scale and detail and brought him greater recognition. Dwan sold a large installation to the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. “I never considered anything unsalable,” Dwan said.36

  Claes and Patty Oldenburg rented a pink cement block furnished duplex on Linnie Canal in Venice early in 1963. Claes also rented a nearby studio and they began preparing for shows at Dwan and at Sidney Janis Gallery in New York. Claes designed and Patty sewed the canvas and vinyl soft sculptures that were quickly establishing his reputation as one of the new breed of Pop artists.

  Claes Oldenburg installation at Dwan Gallery, 1963

  Photograph courtesy of Dwan Gallery Archives

  Patty Mucha, as she has been known since her 1970 divorce from Oldenburg, recalled their year in Los Angeles. “Claes began to embellish his art now with fluffy acrylic fake furs (leopard-patterned or polka-dotted), cowhide, or zebra-striped vinyl. In L.A., he found new and exciting fabrics that I would construct into a multitude of soft sculptures.”37

  Oldenburg, born in Sweden, was inspired by the city’s Pop architecture. “After all, its cartoons came to life in the fast food joints that Angelinos stopped at for chili dogs or other comestibles,” Mucha wrote in her memoir Clean Slate.38 The Dwan show in October reflected such affection and included some fuzzy Soft Good Humor Bars. “The zaniness of that little sculpture, created out of totally unrealistic materials—impossibly colored in green tiger and orange leopard ‘flavors’—touched a lot of funny bones,” she added.39

  Oldenburg explained, “I wanted to feel the West and I came back with these enormous simple big forms. A different type of thing—it didn’t look right at all in New York.”40

  The show was popular but there were no sales, according to Dwan, apart from the soft old-fashioned telephone sculpture that she bought for her house in Malibu. “I wasn’t concerned about whether it was going to sell or not. I was more interested just simply in showing it. I enjoyed the whole experience of what they were doing—the iconoclasm of it.” 41

  Dwan did underwrite the costs of Oldenburg’s Happening Autobodys, a West Coast variant of the impromptu performances with his own sculptural props and costumes that he had put on in New York. Allan Kaprow coined the term “Happening” in 1957 for live action events with minimal theatrical guidelines that had contributed to the evolution of the Pop art style of Oldenburg, George Segal and Jim Dine. “We just used everything in the world, you know,” Oldenburg said.42

  The nearly four million cars cruising around greater metropolitan Los Angeles inspired Autobodys on December 9–10, 1963, in the parking lot behind the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics at 7600 Beverly Boulevard. Aided by Ed Kienholz, Dennis Hopper, younger artists Lloyd and Nancy Hamrol, and Judy Gerowitz (later Judy Chicago), Oldenburg auditioned cars and trucks and selected only black and white models. Arranged in a circle around the perimeter of the parking lot, their headlights at night illuminated a staging area where women on roller skates, men on motorcycles, and even a cement truck moved along in an unchoreographed ballet.43 Whistles were blown, sirens sounded; n
oises of the urban environment provided the only soundtrack. The audience included most of the art community, including Pasadena Art Museum curator James Demetrion with artist James Turrell, who had been his student at Pomona College.

  The script consisted of five poems written by Oldenburg with specific directions: “Lloyd drives in from NE / Maneuvers / Stops center facing south / Sits.” As people looked on, milk was spilled from glass bottles, a white concrete mixer whirled, car radios blared music, people walked around the scene, and cars were moved about. Hamrol recalled the excitement: “I loved it, but the whole idea of temporary events just didn’t jibe with what I had learned Art was supposed to be about.”44

  Despite the high spirits surrounding the event, no one could completely shake off the sense of tragedy that accompanied the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. Hopper photographed the funeral as it aired on television, the first time such a tragedy could be seen in millions of homes. Dwan watched the shocking coverage with Ad Reinhardt, whose opening had been scheduled for November 24. Dwan admired the sardonic Reinhardt so much that she had chosen the ceiling height of her new gallery to complement his vertically oriented paintings. When they arrived, however, she learned he had switched to a sixty-inch square format. The penumbral canvases with barely visible crosses appeared to be a memorial.

  In 1964, Dwan began divorce proceedings against Kondratief. He eventually married art dealer Riko Mizuno, who partnered with Eugenia Butler to open Gallery 669 on North La Cienega.45 Though Dwan continued her progressive agenda by showing James Rosenquist, Lucas Samaras, and others—her personal collection was considered worth showing at the UCLA art gallery that year—she started spending much more time in New York, where she opened a gallery on Fifty-seventh Street on November 11, 1965.

  Her Manhattan debut was indebted to a Los Angeles icon: Kienholz’s installation of The Beanery. The artist had re-created a three-dimensional facsimile of his favorite watering hole but added biting elements of insight and satire. When The Beanery opened in New York, it was covered by Life, Time, and Newsweek. Outside the simulated front door, a news rack offered the L.A. Herald Examiner with the headline: “Children Kill Children in Viet Nam Riots.” (Having dodged the draft successfully for many years, Kienholz became one of the sixties’ most trenchant if unpredictable observers of social and political hypocrisy.) The ramshackle interior of the bar was constructed out of the actual bar stools, counter, and other junk Barney discarded when he remodeled his old place. Plaster casts of Dwan, Barney, and other figures sat at the bar or stood by the jukebox, their faces replaced with clocks all set at the same time: ten minutes after ten. The premiere viewing was held in the parking lot of the original Beanery from October 23 to 25, 1965. Barney himself walked through the life-size re-creation bemused though pleased to see himself at the bar and his sister Fern in the kitchen. Dwan sold the piece to stockbroker Burt Kleiner for $25,000. Kienholz got $12,500, which he called “a hellish amount of money for then,” and he bought a house on Magnolia Drive in the Hollywood hills. Two years later, the piece was bought by the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.46

  Ed Kienholz, The Beanery, 1965

  Collection of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Photograph courtesy of Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

  When Duchamp was asked his opinion of Kienholz, he laughed and said, “Marvelously vulgar artist. Marvelously vulgar artist. I like that work.” Hopps told Kienholz of this great compliment. “Well, that’s nice,” Kienholz said. “I like his work too.”47

  John Weber kept Dwan’s Los Angeles gallery open until 1969, but the energy went to her New York operation where she discovered and supported emerging Minimalist and Earthworks artists: Sol LeWitt, Robert Smithson, and Dan Flavin among them. With her artist Mark di Suvero, she became an original backer of Park Place, the cooperative gallery on West Broadway run by Paula Cooper.

  In 1969, Dwan’s Westwood space was taken over by Vancouver dealer Douglas Chrismas, who opened Ace. He restructured the interior as a white cube with white floors, walls, and ceilings without moldings or architectural details of any kind. The environment was perfect for LeWitt, Carl Andre, and the other Minimalists he would exhibit, carrying on Dwan’s legacy, as well as for a new wave of Los Angeles artists working in light and plastic: Doug Wheeler, DeWain Valentine, and Ron Cooper.

  CHAPTER NINE

  A Bit of British Brilliance: David Hockney

  By 1964, at least seven Pop art exhibitions had been shown at museums around the United States. Into this welcoming atmosphere came David Hockney, a taciturn Englishman with a northern accent and shockingly artificial blond hair, who was swept up in the frenzy by his paintings of the manicured green lawns and sparkling blue swimming pools of Los Angeles.

  The city seemed like another planet to the artist born in the mining town of Bradford, England, in 1937, into what he called a “radical working-class family.” His mother was a strict Methodist who did not smoke or drink. His father, a conscientious objector during World War I, had enough creative urge to paint sunsets on the doors of their home. Young Hockney was fascinated by this and by age eleven had decided to be an artist. At the Bradford Grammar School on scholarship, he was interested only in the art classes. When told that he couldn’t take art while concentrating on the more advanced courses of study, such as the classics and languages, he opted to get poor grades so he would be put in the general studies course where art was still offered. He contributed drawings to the school magazine, drew posters, and, at age sixteen in 1953, convinced his parents to enroll him at the School of Art in Bradford. That summer, he earned money for his studies by pitching hay.

  Though he attempted the more pragmatic commercial art course, within a month he had switched to a major in painting for the national diploma in design. For four years, he concentrated on drawing and painting, mostly from life. “I loved it all and I used to spend twelve hours a day in the art school,” he said later.1 He submitted a portrait of his father to a group show in Leeds and it sold for £10, a considerable amount in 1954. He called his father to ask if it was all right to sell it. “Ooh, yes.… You can do another,” he said.2

  Following his father’s example, he spent two years as a conscientious objector in the national service from 1957 to 1959, which he spent working in hospitals in Bradford and Hastings. He completed no paintings during that time but had done a lot of thinking before enrolling as a postgraduate student at London’s Royal College of Art. His classmates included Ron Kitaj, Allen Jones, Derek Boshier, and Peter Phillips.

  The abstract paintings of Alan Davie helped him realize that there were alternatives to the realism he had been practicing in school. American Abstract Expressionism had been shown at the Tate Gallery in 1956, and he saw the 1959 Jackson Pollock retrospective and 1961 Mark Rothko exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery. But it was Picasso who made the biggest impact. After eight visits to the retrospective at the Tate, he realized, “Style is something you can use, and you can be like a magpie, just taking what you want.”3

  Though he excelled at figurative painting, it was seen as antimodern. He began adding words—scraps of poetry or graffiti—to his pictures. Though thousands of miles apart, Ruscha was showing his first word paintings in the Common Objects show as Hockney was making brushy paintings of Typhoo tea boxes, his mother’s preferred brand. He constructed one canvas to simulate a three-dimensional box just as Ruscha had painted the illusion of a flattened box of raisins. The two artists did not know of each other or even draw from the same source material, but both wanted to find a way around the dominance of abstract painting. Both would rise to prominence on their ability to look beyond and even elevate the clichés of the Los Angeles landscape in their art. (Reyner Banham, another British resident of Los Angeles, was able to perform the same feat in his writing.)

  Hockney was among the first generation of English artists to reject Abstract Expressionism. His work was included in the Young Contemporaries Exhibition of 1961, organized
by Lawrence Alloway. Larry Rivers had visited and influenced many of the students. Richard Hamilton, who was teaching in the Royal College of Art’s school of interior design, had constructed proto-Pop collages in the 1950s and was supportive of Hockney and Kitaj. (Allen Jones was kicked out after the first year for failing to follow the traditional course of study.) Hockney recalled, “There was subject matter, and the idea of painting things from ordinary life, and that was when everything was called ‘pop art.’”4

  Word spread about these rebellious young artists, and soon the stodgy Royal College of Art was transformed by attention from the press. Visitors regularly stopped by Hockney’s studio and bought paintings. The topic of homosexual love, in The Fourth Love Painting, 1961, was slightly coded in the number “69” and the poetry of W. H. Auden. It was considered cheeky, but he was eager to tell others about himself through his paintings. “The moment you decide you have to face what you’re like, you get so excited, it’s something off your back,” he said.5 Doll Boy, a painting of a figure, was loosely based on pop singer Cliff Richard. Hockney had photos of him pinned up in his studio as the other students had pinups of starlets.

  The summer of 1961, with the £100 of prize money for his print based on a Cavafy poem, he went to New York City. “I must admit I’d begun to be interested in America from a sexual point of view.”6 He was in search of the matinee idol boys with beautiful bodies featured in American magazines. He dyed his hair platinum blond and went to the few gay bars that were opening in Manhattan. He met Oldenburg, Warhol, and Hopper. That Christmas, Hockney visited the Uffizi in Florence but was unmoved by the seduction of its great Renaissance paintings. “In 1961, the modern world interested me far more, and America specifically,” he explained.7

  Portrait of David Hockney by Don Bachardy