Tyler had been a technical director at the Tamarind Institute, a teaching facility founded in Los Angeles in 1960 by artist June Wayne. Funded by the Ford Foundation, Taramind was a nonprofit center to train printers in lithography, which had all but died as an art form in the United States. Kay Tyler, Ken’s wife, served as curator. The Tylers left Tamarind to execute projects by individual artists, but their new company, Gemini Ltd., was struggling. Tyler agreed to become a master printer for Felsen and Grinstein, and their joint venture was renamed Gemini GEL, or Graphic Editions Limited.
Grinstein and Felsen each put in $10,000 (about $70,000 today) to start the business. In those early years, Gemini was a family operation. Rosamund worked as shipping clerk, carefully packing each print to be mailed, but soon became the de facto registrar, keeping track of the quantity and quality of the prints. They felt that the key to profitability was in selecting well-known artists whose prints could be sold through their galleries in New York and elsewhere. After being put off by such heavyweights as Rothko and De Kooning, they were able to land Josef Albers, as Tyler had worked with him on a previous project and the Grinsteins owned one of his paintings.
Albers, seventy-eight, was teaching at Yale and didn’t want to travel but designed an edition of eight colored squares bordered by white lines. He mailed Tyler one-half of a cardboard with each color and retained the other half. Tyler matched the colors in the prints and flew with them back and forth to Connecticut several times to get the artist’s approval. Half a year later, Gemini published their first edition. Felsen went over to the La Cienega offices of Artforum and handed the design for their first full-page ad to “a kid,” who was the art director: Ed Ruscha. When the magazine came out that fall, Gemini was overwhelmed by some three hundred requests. The prints were offered at $125 or the prepublication price of $100. “We sold a lot,” recalled Felsen.3
In 1966, the L.A. County Museum of Art held Dadaist Man Ray’s first American retrospective, which was organized by Jules Langsner. (The show had a profound effect on Bruce Nauman.) Ray, born Emmanuel Radnitsky in Philadelphia, had moved to Paris in 1921. Displaced in 1940 by World War II, Ray relocated to Los Angeles for eleven years. He met dancer and artist’s model Juliet Browner shortly after he arrived, and they were married in 1946 in a double wedding with Surrealists Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning. The Rays had moved back to Montparnasse in 1951 and were excited to be back in Los Angeles for the exhibition. They stayed at the Grinsteins’ house, and parties were held in their honor. In exchange, Ray executed three lithographs for Gemini featuring photographs of his hands in tones of black and gray to resemble his so-called Rayograms. These photograms that he named after himself were made by placing any object, including his hand, on a piece of photographic paper and exposing it to light in the darkroom to create pictures of shapes without using a camera. Of the three lithographs, one was printed on Plexiglas. Once again, they were advertised in Artforum and sold briskly.
Encouraged, Grinstein and Felsen approached Sam Francis, the successful abstract painter who had moved to Santa Monica in 1961. He enjoyed playing the role of godfather to younger artists; Ruscha worked as his assistant for a time and recalled that when it came time to get paid, Francis would peel off a few of the thick roll of hundred-dollar bills that he carried in his pocket. Part of this largesse extended to Single Wing Turquoise Bird, a collective that included Fluxus artist Jeffrey Perkins. Francis funded the group’s psychedelic light shows for rock bands playing at clubs around Los Angeles. Francis also supported the fledgling Gemini by creating a lithograph of primary colored splashes and drips. Again, it sold well.
However, the artist who effectively propelled their operation to profitability was Robert Rauschenberg. He was known for the prints that he had made for Tatyana Grosman’s Universal Limited Art Editions press on Long Island. Rauschenberg had been coming to Los Angeles since 1962 to show with the Dwan Gallery and had created sets for and performed with Merce Cunningham’s dance troupe on tour there. Through Douglas Chrismas, who showed his work at his Ace Gallery in Vancouver, Rauschenberg met Ken Tyler. In 1967, he agreed to create something unique for Gemini.
Rosamund recalled, “Bob, of course, is always interested in doing something new and innovative, and anybody who would present him with an idea of something he had never done before, that was the most interesting thing.”4 And the very premise of Gemini, she continued, was that “whatever the artist wanted to do, no matter how difficult it seemed, Gemini would do it.… We were very adventurous.”5
Rauschenberg told Felsen that he wanted to make a portrait of his inner self and asked if he knew anyone who could X-ray his entire body. As it happened, another of Felsen’s fraternity brothers, Jack Waltman, was a physician who offered to take a series of X-rays to depict the entire torso. (There was no machine on the West Coast that could take an X-ray more than six feet in length.) Rauschenberg stacked the X-rays vertically and added various other details, including a drawing that he found on a curb of a child carrying a rocket booster that led to its title: Booster. The largest fine-art print ever made at that time, it was a groundbreaking achievement for the nascent publisher. Individual works by Rauschenberg had become relatively expensive so Gemini offered the print at $1,000. Again, it sold briskly. (Since, it has sold at auction for $250,000.)
Rauschenberg, handsome and extroverted, became great friends with the Felsens and the Grinsteins. He spread word of the publishing venture among all of his cronies in New York. After that, it was fairly easy to convince the top echelon of Pop and hard-edge abstract artists to come out to Los Angeles, all expenses paid, to make prints. “We’re a support system, not a co-creator,” said Felsen. “Each artist is the captain of the ship while he or she is here.”6
Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg’s former lover, went there to produce the Color Numeral Series. Stella, Oldenburg, and Ellsworth Kelly all made prints over the next few years. “Very important artists had gotten very famous very quickly, and there was a lot of excitement about beginning to collect, and many people were not able to buy paintings and sculpture by these particular artists, so prints, being multiples, enabled them to be able to afford to get works by these artists,” said Rosamund.7
The Gemini founders, priding themselves on their relationships with the Los Angeles artists, also published prints by Altoon, Ruscha, and Goode in 1967. As Gemini grew more successful, Kienholz, Hockney, Nauman, Berman, and Davis were invited to make prints. In 1976 Frank Gehry designed an edgy building of plywood and aluminum for the publisher on Melrose Avenue.
Bicoastal friendships were forged at the Brentwood parties where the Grinsteins served an informal buffet of cheeses, sausages, and breads with a full bar, which meant that guests occasionally wound up in the pool. “We had the New York artists of Gemini like Rauschenberg or Oldenburg and it was a kind of interaction with the local artists,” Elyse said. “Richard Serra, Bob Morris, and Jasper would be sitting around the table talking. We made a point of not taking photographs. It kept everything flowing open and easy.”8
One evening the New York Minimalist Carl Andre, who was wearing his trademark overalls, was becoming a little obstreperous with Larry Bell about the sort of art made in Los Angeles. The disarming and dapper Bell simply slipped his fingers under Andre’s suspenders and said, “Carl, I’d really like to fuck you.”9
Stanley recalled, “There was a thing out here that you didn’t live in New York and if you went back there, you were a traitor. It was a badge of honor of that older group that you didn’t kowtow to the New York artist. We didn’t know we were so totally insulated. Richard Serra said, ‘I know the difference between California artists and New York artists.’ I said, ‘Really? What is it?’ He said, “When New York artists make a work of art, they think how is it going to fit into the continuum, who is going to write about it, who is going to publish it and how many pictures. When L.A. artists make art, they just make art about how they feel.’”10
While the remark was clear
ly meant to be insulting, Stanley was unfazed. “I thought, you know, that is true. Artists here were out of that continuum of what happened after Matisse, Cézanne, Picasso. But you think about Billy Al taking pieces of tin and banging them up, or the Light and Space artists. These things were independently thought up out of the continuum and I think that is pretty interesting.”11
John Coplans had moved to Los Angeles around the inception of Gemini and observed the influences firsthand, saying it was “enormously important.”
“For the first time, the so-called mythical figures of the East became ordinary figures in the West,” he explained.12 On the other hand, excitement over the East Coast artists often eclipsed the cachet of the Ferus group. Irving Blum recalled, “Did that make for bad feeling? Yes. Did that make for resentment? Yes. Did that make for hostility? Yes. Yes. Yes.”13
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Between Form and Function: Frank Gehry
In 1964, architect Frank Gehry walked out of the Danziger Studio that he had designed and saw a tall, muscular character wearing dark glasses and staring intently at the gray concrete structure. Though the architect had met Ed Moses before, he greeted him with surprise. The artist had come to pay compliments to Gehry for the radical elegance of the graphic design studio, which stood like a grace note of Modernism along a stretch of Melrose Avenue crowded with old Spanish buildings and low-rise stucco shops.
The building was a breakthrough for Gehry, completed just two years after he had started his own firm. Off and on in the 1950s and early 1960s, he worked for Gruen and Associates. Gehry described Victor Gruen, who designed many of the postwar shopping centers in Southern California, as “a Viennese guy who trained me to be perfect.”1
Frank Gehry
Photograph courtesy of Frank Gehry
Born in 1929, as Frank Goldberg, in Toronto, Canada, he moved with his Polish Jewish parents to Los Angeles in 1947 because of his father’s poor health. Gehry drove a truck part-time to pay for his classes at L.A. City College and then at USC, where he took a course in ceramics. The instructor, Glen Lukens, suggested he enter the school of architecture. He got an A in his first course but a teacher said, “This isn’t for you.” Gehry recalled, “I was devastated but I didn’t give up.”2
Gehry was trained by the reigning Modernists who dominated the architecture department and was duly influenced by the city’s exceptional residential architecture by Frank Lloyd Wright, Rudolf Schindler, Richard Neutra, Pierre Koenig, John Lautner, and others. Many had built homes under the impetus of the Case Study House Program devised by John Entenza for Art and Architecture magazine between 1945 and 1966.
For the first decade of his career, Gehry toed the Modernist line but, at age thirty-five, he found himself in the throes of a fundamental shift. In 1964, he divorced his wife of twelve years, Anita Snyder. It had been her suggestion that he change his name from Goldberg to Gehry to avoid confronting the anti-Semitism that was rumored to percolate through the ranks of the Los Angeles establishment. Having been married since the age of twenty-two, he was ready for a new chapter. “I was let out of the cage,” he said.3
The 1964 Danziger Studio was commissioned by designer Lou Danziger and his wife Dorothy. Danziger, who had studied with Alvin Lustig at Art Center School, as it was then called, in Pasadena, had built his considerable reputation by applying the principles of Modernism to graphics. Gehry designed a pair of two-story buildings, for living and for work, that faced each other and were protected from the street by a high wall. The three elements were covered in blue-gray stucco that appeared industrial yet elegant. Inside, Gehry left wood framing and ventilation ducts exposed for the first time in his career.
The building earned little praise from fellow architects but seized the attention of the Ferus artists, who became his new friends. “I was in awe of what they were doing,” he said.4 Like them, he decided to embrace the creative possibilities unique to Southern California. “California was about freedom because it wasn’t burdened with history. The economy was booming because of the aircraft industry and movie business, and things were going up quickly. Everybody could make whatever they wanted.… That’s what democracy is about. Democracy didn’t say everybody has to have taste.”5
Learning of Gehry’s anxiety over his pending divorce, Ed Moses introduced him to the famed psychoanalyst Milton Wexler. Wexler was renowned in Hollywood for treating actors John Cassavetes, Ben Gazzara, and Peter Falk, as well as artists such as Moses himself and John Altoon. He had prescribed a medication for Altoon that stabilized his bipolar condition to the point where he had remarried and was painting regularly. Wexler’s approach to group therapy was so successful that many of his patients became friends with one another. Producer and director Sidney Pollack, who befriended Gehry at Wexler’s, made the 2005 documentary Sketches of Frank Gehry. According to Gehry, Wexler helped him complete his divorce. “She wanted out of it as much as I did but neither of us knew how to. You’re in limbo.… Milton taught me how to do it, how to split.”6
Gehry left his wife and two daughters and moved into a building that he owned on Highland Avenue in Ocean Park near many of the artists. He began visiting them in their studios and incorporating some of their ideas in his architecture. While designing the Joseph Magnin store in Costa Mesa, he started experimenting with light and the use of glass around a central skylight-atrium. “Larry [Bell] helped me with how to hang it so it wouldn’t break, how to film it, how to light it. We were on the same wavelength.”7
Other influences came from Bengston. “Billy Al would change his studio, it seemed like, every other week,” Gehry said. “He moved the bedroom somewhere and built desks and chairs. Bell was doing some of that and Irwin.… It wasn’t something they would sit down and design. It was just stream of consciousness and I loved that. I was looking at how to express that immediacy in architecture.”8
Bell had not covered the plumbing pipes in his bathroom with plaster but with glass. Moses had applied a similar solution to the dining room of art collector Laura Stearns by extending the glass of a window over the exposed studs in a wall. These examples led Gehry to leave the studs exposed in his work and to start using chain-link fence as a building material.
Through the art world, he met collector Ed Janss Jr., who commissioned the first house that Gehry designed on his own. Not unlike the Danziger Studio, high-ceiling rooms opened onto a courtyard and garden at the back. Gehry honored Janss’s two great passions by maximizing kitchen space for cooking and major walls for paintings.
The artists became Gehry’s new family. Lonely during the first months after his divorce, he would have dinner on Thursday nights at the Hollywood home of John Altoon and his second wife, Babs. Billy Al Bengston and Penny Little would join them and afterward, they would go to Barney’s to meet the other artists.
Gehry was not new to Barney’s. Gehry’s uncle Willy had worked for the gangster Mickey Cohen, who was a regular. When Gehry had moved to Los Angeles as a young man, Willy had brought him to Barney’s to drink. One memorable night, Willy got into a fight with Lawrence Tierney, the actor who played the title character in the 1945 movie Dillinger. (Willy also took Gehry to his first brothel when still a virgin.)
Babs Altoon was a good cook and loved to entertain crowds of hungry friends. When the Altoons rented a disused Laundromat on the boardwalk in Venice, Gehry renovated the interior but could not remove the concrete median where the machines had been installed, so he transformed it. “We used it as a stage,” he said. “Ben Gazzara came over and read the cookbook as though he were doing Othello. We had phenomenal times.”9
Not averse to the occasional joint, Gehry joined Bell, Altoon, and Moses in an impromptu rock band, Five Bags of Shit. The fifth artist might be Ken Price or Sam Francis. James Turrell hung out but did not play. Gehry said, “My instrument was bicycle handlebars that had a ringy-ding bell, then I graduated to a toilet plunger in a pail.”10
Gehry was short, with a wild array of curly black hai
r. His obvious intelligence was modified by a self-deprecating sense of humor and a generous nature. He soon became the newly available bachelor in town and went out a few times with Ann Marshall. Then he fell hard for the striking blonde Donna O’Neill, who was married to Richard O’Neill, scion of an established Southern California family and owner of a vast land-grant property south of Los Angeles. “I was madly in love with her,” Gehry admitted.11
The O’Neills kept an apartment in Hollywood behind the Blarney Castle, a bar and restaurant that they owned. During a party there, “everybody got drunk as skunks.” Gehry recalled. “Donna was dressed in black like Carmen from the opera.”12 The group decided to have dinner at Martoni’s, a short drive west on Cahuenga Boulevard. Donna chased after Gehry and asked, “Can I ride with you?”13 Her husband drove on in his own car.
At the restaurant, as everyone started to sit down, Donna said she felt sick. She asked Gehry to drive her home. “I was innocent. I looked around and thought her husband should drive her home. She said, no, she wanted me to drive her,” he explained.14 When they got back to the apartment, she told Gehry, “I don’t feel good. You better carry me in.” Once inside, according to Gehry, she pulled him down on the bed and started kissing him. As they wrestled on the bed, Gehry was thinking that any minute her husband would be walking in the door. He carried on with no regrets. “It was one of those life-changing experiences and I got out of there before he got home,” he said. “I was freaked out the next day because we were going to go down to their ranch and look at a site. They wanted me to do something.” Gehry called Moses at dawn and told him the story. The artist laughed and told him not to worry about Richard O’Neill: “They do that, those guys,” Moses chuckled knowingly.15
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