Rebels in Paradise

by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

  Valentiner laid the groundwork for a museum where visitors would not have to walk around T. rex to see the Renaissance paintings, but before he could start in earnest, he left to become director of the first J. Paul Getty Museum, still in the tycoon’s house, but with the goal of building an appropriate structure for collections of antiquities and decorative arts. Valentiner’s successor was Richard Fargo Brown, grandson of William George Fargo, who had cofounded Wells, Fargo and Company. With a doctorate in art history from Harvard University, Brown pursued the plan to build a separate art museum. He appealed to the L.A. County Board of Supervisors and wealthy individuals. In 1961, after Brown was made museum director, the county donated seven acres of land along the Miracle Mile, a wide stretch of Wilshire Boulevard lined with department stores such as Ohrbach’s and the May Company. Alas, the parcel also harbored the infamous La Brea tar pits. Before construction could begin, archaeologists had to inspect the excavation for fossils and bones. Engineers then covered the tar with a three-foot-thick, two-hundred-foot-long floating slab of concrete that led Time to refer to the new museum as the “temple on the tar pits.”

  In the late 1950s, the feeling that Los Angeles was a city that had finally come of age and required cultural institutions to enhance her new stature was felt among its most prominent citizens, most significantly Dorothy Buffum Chandler, wife of Norman Chandler, publisher of the Los Angeles Times. (Their son Otis Chandler also became publisher.) She undertook an intensive campaign of raising funds to build a permanent hall for the L.A. Philharmonic. Thanks to her $19 million, land donated by the county, and $13.7 million in bonds guaranteed by the county, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion became the crown jewel of the downtown Music Center, a cultural shopping mall designed by Welton Becket with pavilions dedicated to dance, theater, and orchestral events. It opened in 1964 largely due to her ability to raise funds from friends in her own circle of the established wealthy living around Pasadena and Hancock Park, yet she also tapped the new-money people from Hollywood and the Jewish community on the west side.

  A similar strategy was required for LACMA. As an outsider, Brown was finding it difficult to raise funds from the city’s established communities, and he appealed to those who had new wealth and social aspirations. Norton Simon had spent millions earned by his Hunt Foods conglomerate to compile a diverse art collection ranging from Tiepolo to Degas; Edward W. Carter helmed the Broadway-Hale department stores and collected quality seventeenth-century Dutch still lifes and landscape paintings. Though neither collector had been educated in the realm of fine art, they had proved dedicated in their connoisseurship and had built exceptional collections. Their involvement in the capital campaign proved successful. When the museum opened, Peter Bart hailed it in the New York Times as “an alliance of California’s ‘old families’ with the ‘new tycoons’ of the post war boom.”2

  Choosing an architect was the first battle of the titans. Brown suggested the brilliant Modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Howard Ahmanson, who had commissioned artist Millard Sheets to design forty of his Home Savings and Loan buildings and create mosaic murals for their facades, suggested that Sheets should design the museum. Brown was outraged but, as Ahmanson’s donation was major, his opinion had to be considered. As a compromise, Los Angeles architect William L. Pereira was given the job. Simon was a key vote, and two years before, he had commissioned Pereira to build a library and art gallery for the city of Fullerton, where Hunt Foods and Industries was located.

  Pereira was known for the neoclassical gloss he used to lighten the rigors of late modern architecture, such as his design for CBS’s Television City. He came up with a plan similar to that of the Music Center in Los Angeles or, for that matter, Lincoln Center in New York. Built for $11.5 million, three separate pavilions appeared to float on a plaza with reflecting pools and fountains. (According to Pereira’s widow, Bronya Galef, the architect installed the water element to emphasize a separation between the pavilions and their donors, who were arguing constantly with one another.) Each pavilion bore the name of a primary donor: Howard Ahmanson; Leo S. Bing, the late husband of donor Anna Bing; and Barton Lytton, a brusque personality who had built a savings and loan empire. When his banks collapsed in 1965, Lytton could not fulfill his pledge and his name was replaced by that of oil magnate Armand Hammer and his wife Frances. (Lytton opened his own gallery called Lytton Center of Visual Arts in the lobby of one of his bank buildings on Sunset Boulevard at Crescent Heights, across from Schwabs. Director Josine Ianco-Starrels, daughter of Dadaist Marcel Ianco, showed the work of a great number of contemporary artists. In 1977, Lytton’s daughter, Timothea Stewart, opened a gallery of her own at 669 North La Cienega Boulevard, where the Nelson and Mizuno galleries had been located.)

  Only a small plaque at LACMA acknowledged Norton Simon, whose collection of one hundred paintings of extraordinarily high quality, many acquired when he bought the entire inventory of the late art dealer Lord Joseph Duveen, was on loan to the galleries in the Ahmanson Building. Simon disapproved of the self-promotional nature of these “naming opportunities” and, desirous of control, was frustrated by the attitudes of his fellow trustees. In 1971, he resigned from the board and began looking for a new home for his collection.

  From the outset, these rich, opinionated, self-made men sought to run LACMA as if it were one of their companies. Brown, frustrated by the erosion of his own role, resigned before the building was completed to accept a position as director of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. Brown’s mild-mannered deputy director, Kenneth Donohue, was promoted into the job, and LACMA began consolidating its reputation as a museum with an inexperienced but meddlesome board of trustees.

  Before Brown’s departure, however, he made the commitment of hiring a curator of modern art. Maurice Tuchman, a student of the brilliant art historian Meyer Schapiro and curator at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, had never been to California before flying in for his interview with Simon and another trustee, Taft Schreiber, then vice president of the Music Corporation of America. Tuchman was shocked by the rudeness of both men who, he said, “interrogated” him at Simon’s home. He was even more shocked to be offered the job, which he accepted and dominated for the next thirty years.

  For many living in postwar Los Angeles, where dozens of screenwriters and others in the arts were blacklisted because of the work of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee, modern art was associated with Communism, a notion kept alive by an active John Birch Society. William Brice’s painting of a mortar and pestle shown at the 1948 annual exhibition was said to symbolize a grinding device for the seeds of Communism. As late as 1954, when County Museum curator James Byrnes was offered a small Jackson Pollock painting for the collection at $500, trustees tried to block the purchase. They finally relented on the condition that he keep the painting in his office to be exhibited to the public only for educational purposes.3

  LACMA’s first important modern art collection came as a gift in 1967 with the bequest from trustee David Bright of twenty-three major paintings by Picasso, Fernand Léger, Joan Miró, and others. The new LACMA, a general museum with collections of Asian and pre-Columbian art, as well as European and American painting, would embrace modern art but not without numerous challenges.

  Like most transplants from New York, Tuchman felt a responsibility to alleviate what he considered a provincial attitude by exhibiting art from Manhattan. His debut exhibition, New York School: The First Generation, Paintings of the 1940s and 1950s, was a critical and popular success. At the same time, Tuchman could scarcely avoid the simmering feelings of neglect among the younger Los Angeles artists. He responded with a number of shows: Peter Voulkos, the ceramic sculptor who had mentored Bengston, Mason, Price, di Suvero, and a host of others, had his work shown there in spring of 1965. Then the paintings of Irwin and the ceramics of Price were shown together. Others would follow; one of the most memorable was the retrospective of Ed Kienholz’s sculptures.r />
  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Bringing in the Trash: Ed Kienholz’s Revenge

  Little more than a decade after Kienholz had arrived in Los Angeles with a dream of becoming an artist, he was being celebrated by the city’s first official art museum. Grateful? Not really. Ever the hustler, Kienholz insisted on being paid a percentage of the tickets bought to his show. Not even Warhol had thought of that. The artist raked in quite a sum thanks to the headline-grabbing drama surrounding his 1964 sculpture, Back Seat Dodge ’38.

  Increasingly, Kienholz’s sculptures were based on his own memories and experiences, as evidenced by Roxy’s and The Beanery. As he went through the difficult divorce from his wife Mary, he recalled a teenage sexual escapade in his Dodge. “It was an old car that my father had when I was a kid. I borrowed it one night and went over the hill to dance. This girl was out there, and I enticed her into the car. We got some beer and pulled off in the tules someplace and did some intimate and erotic things. We sat there and drank beer and had a nice time. And I couldn’t remember her name later. It just seemed wrong to me in a way. Like what a miserable first experience of sex most kids go through. I mean, the back seats of cars.”1

  With Kienholz’s single-mindedness, he scoured the city until, in Santa Monica, he found the model of a 1938 Dodge owned by his father. A young man about to go into military service wanted thirty-five dollars for it and offered to bring it over for a test-drive. He was flabbergasted when Kienholz said it was not necessary as he planned to cut the car into pieces to make a sculpture. His assistant, Fran Balzar, brought Kienholz to pick up the car but on the way to the body shop, her new Ford broke down. “So this poor old Dodge, on its way to the graveyard of art, is pushing this new Ford down the freeway,” Kienholz recalled.2

  In an automotive garage, Kienholz rebuilt the car and, in the backseat, installed a cast model of Fran’s partly clothed body along with a chicken-wire male model with an obvious erection. They were joined by a single head because they were locked in “a single-minded objective, called mutual orgasm.”3 Kienholz liked to create stories in his tableaux so he had a watch engraved “To Our Son Harold” for the male figure and a gold pin with the name “Mildred.” For him, they became characters with identities. “It worked just as I thought it would, because you see the reflection of you in the car, and there was Harold and Mildred in there, and it was all finished and all flocked, and it was all beautiful. I really almost felt like crying because Harold and Mildred had become real in the process of making them—real enough that I felt like I’d betrayed them by making them subject to the will of anybody that wanted to take the handle and open the door.”4

  Opening the handle of the car door is exactly what every visitor to LACMA had in mind. Theatrically lit with music playing from the radio and empty beer bottles littering the floor, the young couple grappled in sexual union oblivious to the voyeuristic thrills elicited among the museum-going public.

  As Roxy’s was also on display, it wasn’t long before the L.A. County Board of Supervisors decided to use Kienholz’s sculptures to rack up political points with conservatives. County supervisor Warren Dorn led the censorship charge. The artists and supporters fought back with bumper stickers: “Help Stamp Out Dornography” and “Dorn Is a Four-Letter Word.” Kienholz himself held a press conference in the LACMA boardroom that won over most of the media. To the surprise of many, museum director Donohue and the trustees stood behind Kienholz and their new curator Tuchman, and the sculpture remained in the show.

  The board of supervisors accepted a stilted compromise whereby docents were posted to open the car door and reveal the scene to consenting adults and to shut it firmly against the curious eyes of anyone under the age of eighteen. An enlarged platform was placed under “Five Dollar Billy” in Roxy’s to keep viewers a respectable distance from the reclining whore. As a result of all the publicity, the exhibition drew record attendance.

  Kienholz’s social commentaries embedded in tableaux were a perfect fit for the overheated political sensibilities of the late sixties. Farsighted Pontus Hultén, director of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, purchased for the museum The State Hospital, Kienholz’s 1966 sculpture portraying institutionalized mental patients handcuffed to stacked bare cots.5

  The State Hospital was the first piece completed with the aid of Kienholz’s fourth wife, Lyn Kienholz, a slim, fine-boned blonde who had been introduced to him back in 1961 while working as a receptionist at Ferus. They met again five years later, after both had divorced their previous spouses, and went on a date at Edna Ferber’s Fog Cutter restaurant with Tuchman and his wife Blossom. Many dates later, Kienholz took her to Hope, Idaho, to meet his parents, who approved of her down-to-earth personality. Driving back to Los Angeles, Lyn recalled, “Shortly before the border of Washington, he said, ‘You have until we get to Spokane to decide whether you want to marry me.’”6 They were married for seven years. Lyn assisted him in his studio and helped raise his two young children. After a year, she suggested she might return to her previous career in theater. Kienholz snapped, “When you marry me, I become your career.”7

  They went fishing and hunting in Idaho and California, but their adventures were not confined to the wilds. In 1968, they made a trip to the East Coast to see friends. In a shop, they purchased a Tiffany glass lamp and had it wrapped carefully to carry in the cabin of their TWA flight back to Los Angeles. Airline officials refused to let them bring it into the cabin but promised it would be handled carefully by the baggage handlers. It was smashed to pieces.

  A furious Kienholz demanded compensation, but TWA refused to take responsibility. After a few days, Kienholz returned to the airport and carefully took the measurements of a desk in the TWA lost-and-found department. He went home, wrote a statement of his lamp’s worth, and returned to TWA with a large fire ax. Kienholz was a beefy, imposing presence. After warning everyone to stand back, he chopped the lost-and-found desk into pieces. He had estimated that the desk, and the hassle of getting it replaced, was worth about the same amount as his lamp. Far from covert, he had a photographer with him who documented the flying wood chips, the people screaming and running, and the flustered attendants. Police were called but TWA did not have him arrested, out of a well-placed fear that the publicity would worsen matters and probably make Kienholz a folk hero to all who had had their baggage mishandled or lost by an airline. Kienholz felt vindicated. As Hopps put it, “I’ve never seen anyone work so hard for retribution when he felt he was wronged.”8

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Gemini GEL

  With an art magazine, a museum, and some seventy midtown galleries in Los Angeles, collectors started to feel a proper art scene was coming together, and no one was more energetic in their support than the Grinsteins, a couple who were small in stature but large in their enthusiasm. Stanley Grinstein shared his zest for modern art with Sidney Felsen, his friend and Zeta Beta Tau fraternity brother at the University of Southern California. After graduating, they continued to be friends in part due to their mutual interest in art. Grinstein took over his father’s downtown surplus company and transformed it into one that sold, leased, and serviced forklift trucks. Felsen went into accounting. Both men were geared for such conventional careers but yearned for more creative endeavors.

  In 1952, Grinstein married Elyse Schlanger, who had been a student with him at USC. Felsen was their best man. As a young couple, the Grinsteins joined the Westside Jewish Center board and its art committee. Elyse got to know artists personally as she picked up work that they donated for holiday charity sales. Stanley was a member of the men’s support group at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where the art committee was led by painter Ed Biberman. (He was the uncle of Jeremy Strick, who would later become director of the Museum of Contemporary Art.) They made modest purchases of modern art from dealer Bud Holland, who came annually from Chicago to sell to the Los Angeles collectors. In 1962, Elyse and Stanley joined the L.A. County Museum of Science, History, and Art’s
newly formed contemporary art council.

  After moving from midtown Carthay Circle into a sprawling Spanish-style house in Brentwood in 1965, the Grinsteins started hosting legendary parties. “The house shaped our life,” recalled Elyse. “If we hadn’t had it, we couldn’t have had all these great parties and we couldn’t have had all the great houseguests: Man Ray, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Rauschenberg, Frank Stella.”1

  Over the course of the same decade, 1955 to 1965, Sidney Felsen, a fastidious man with a sartorial sophistication exceptional at that time in Los Angeles, worked as a CPA for a small firm and then for the giant company Arthur Young. He spent weekday evenings and weekends taking painting classes. After taking a ceramics course at the art center in Barnsdall Park, he found that to be a better fit for his interests and carried on with it at Chouinard in the early 1960s. At times, Grinstein would come along to watch his friend and chat with the other artists. By then, Felsen had left Arthur Young and assumed the business of another accountant. He was not terribly excited about his work but in 1960, at a party at the Grinsteins, he had met a recently divorced beauty with three young children. He married Rosamund Faibish later that year, and in 1961 they had a daughter, Suzanne.2 They bought a house on Fifth Street and La Jolla Avenue in the same, largely Jewish, neighborhood where he was raised. Felsen had a family and meant to honor his obligations.

  Then, after attending a workshop given by a European print publisher in 1965, he suggested to Grinstein that they consider publishing contemporary art prints. The Grinsteins invited to their annual Christmas party printer Ken Tyler, who had opened a lithography studio behind the Art Services framing shop founded by Manny Silverman and Jerry Solomon.