Rebels in Paradise (36 page)

  
4
. Hopper, interview with author, March 20, 2006.

  
5
. Richard Hertz, ed.,
The Beat and the Buzz: Inside the L.A. Art World
(Ojai, CA: Minneola Press, 2009), 156.

  
6
. Ibid.

  
7
. Ed Moses, interview with author, May 5, 2007.

  
8
. Ibid.

  
9
. McKenna,
Ferus Gallery
, 162

10
. Kienholz, oral history.

11
. Ibid.

12
. Ibid.

13
. Ibid.

14
. Ibid.

Chapter Four. Ferus Goes Forth

  
1
. Tomkins, “Touch for the Now,” 44.

  
2
. Irving Blum, interview with author, October 18, 2005.

  
3
. Ibid.

  
4
. Tomkins, “Touch for the Now,” 44.

  
5
. Blum, interview with author, October 18, 2005.

  
6
. Kienholz, oral history.

  
7
.
The Rose
, as it is now titled, is in the collection of New York's Whitney Museum of American Art.

  
8
. Irving Blum, interviewed by Roberta Bernstein, in
Ferus
(New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2002), 34.

  
9
. Blum later sold Johns's
Tennyson
to collector Donald Factor and his
According to What
to collector Edwin Janss Jr.

10
. Elyse Grinstein, interview with author, May 19, 2007.

11
. Kienholz had moved to New York briefly in 1963. He set up a studio in the unheated building where Frank Stella, Arman, Jean Tinguely, and Niki de Saint Phalle worked. He built a separate white room in an unused part of the loft to build
Roxy's.
He said, “Fucking Arman broke the lock and set
Roxy's
out in the main studio and started to use the room because it was small enough that you could put a heater in there and heat it. Pissed me off.” Kienholz, oral history.

12
. Ibid.

13
. Ibid. Monte and Betty Factor were present during the Kienholz oral history and their remarks are part of the interview.

14
. Arthur Secunda,
Artforum
, June 1962, 9.

15
. Dagny Corcoran, interview with author, May 26, 2010.

16
. Ibid.

17
. McKenna,
Ferus Gallery
, 146.

18
. Kienholz, oral history.

19
. Blum, interview with author, October 18, 2005.

20
. Ibid.

21
. Ibid.

22
. Billy Al Bengston, interview with author, March 13, 2007.

23
. Peter Plagens,
Sunshine Muse: Art on the West Coast, 1945–1975
(New York: Praeger Publishers, 1974), 95.

24
. Bengston, interview with author, March 13, 2007.

25
. Ken Price, interview with author, October 4, 2008.

26
. Ibid.

27
. Ken Price, “A Talk with Slides,”
Chinati Foundation Newsletter
, October 2005, 26.

28
. Price, interview with author, October 4, 2008.

29
. Ibid.

30
. Ibid.

31
. Ibid.

32
. Ibid.

33
. Ibid.

34
. Bengston, interview with author, March 13, 2007.

35
. Ibid.

36
. Ibid.

37
. Ibid.

38
. Lawrence Weschler,
Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: Expanded Edition, Over Thirty Years of Conversations with Robert Irwin
(Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2008), 35.

39
. Bengston, interview with author, March 13, 2007.

40
. Ibid.

41
. Ibid.

42
. Tom Wolfe, “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” reprinted in
Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology
, ed. David L. Ulin (New York: Library Classics, 2002), 438.

43
. McKenna,
Ferus Gallery
, 223.

44
. Bengston, interview with author, March 13, 2007.

45
. Kauffman, Oral history interview with Michael Auping, Los Angeles Art Community, Group Portrait Oral History Program, University of California, Los Angeles, January 27, 1977.

46
. Craig Kauffman, interview with author, October 24, 2008.

47
. Ibid.

48
. Irwin, speaking at a memorial service for Craig Kauffman at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, July 21, 2010.

49
. Robert Irwin, interview with author, March 18, 2008.

50
. Weschler,
Seeing Is Forgetting
, 34.

51
. Irwin, speaking at Kauffman memorial, July 21, 2010.

52
. Moses, interview with author, May 25, 2007.

53
. Ibid.

54
. Ibid.

55
. Kienholz, oral history.

56
. Ibid.

57
. Ibid.

58
. Ibid.

59
. Weschler,
Seeing Is Forgetting
, 12.

60
. Lawrence Weschler,
Vermeer in Bosnia: A Reader
(New York: Pantheon Books, 2004), 271–88.

61
. Ibid.

62
. Factor recalled, “L.A. was extremely conservative in those days—there wasn't even a French restaurant. There were two good restaurants in town that were filled with Hollywood people, and you couldn't get in unless they knew who you were.” McKenna,
Ferus Gallery
, 109.

63
. Shirley Blum Neilsen, interview with author, May 22, 2008.

64
. Tomkins, “Touch for the Now,” 45.

65
. Ibid., 46.

66
. Blum, interview with author, April 18, 2006.

67
. In 1962, Hopps organized a Pasadena Art Museum exhibition of paintings by Wayne Thiebaud. The artist had such difficulty getting his work returned that he sent a plaintive card to Hopps with a drawing of himself looking sad and the word “PLEASE!!! Where are the paintings?? The people who loaned them are after me.” McKenna,
Ferus Gallery
, 248.

68
. Blum, interview with author.

69
. Kienholz, oral history.

70
. Ibid.

71
. Monte Factor, interview with author, June 10, 2007.

Chapter Five. Okies: Ed Ruscha, Mason Williams, Joe Goode, and Jerry McMillan

  
1
. Ed Ruscha, interview with author, October 11, 2006.

  
2
. Mason Williams, interview with author, September 10, 2007.

  
3
. Ibid.

  
4
. Ruscha, interview with author, October 11, 2006.

  
5
. Ibid.

  
6
. Ibid.

  
7
. Ibid. Ruscha had been drawing since, at age eight, he befriended the slightly older Bob Bonaparte, who listened to jazz records, drew cartoons, and claimed to be related to the nineteenth-century French general Napoléon. Bonaparte introduced Ruscha to Higgins India ink and Speedball pens and within weeks, Ruscha was drawing his own comic strips. “I'd hear a joke. Some guy would be on the street running, and another guy would say, ‘What are you doing, training for a race?' And he'd say, “No, racing for a train.' So I'd run home, break this down into a little three-part cartoon strip, and make that cartoon.” Ruscha cut out and saved copies of
Dick Tracy
and
Blondie
and soon got his cartoons into the school paper.

  
8
. Ruscha, interview with author, October 11, 2006.

  
9
. Ibid.

10
. Ibid.

11
. Ibid.

12
. Ibid.

13
. Ibid.

14
. Ibid.

15
. Ibid.

16
. Ibid.

17
. Oral history interview with Edward Ruscha, October 29, 1980–October 2, 1981, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

18
. Ibid.

19
. Ibid.

20
. Joe Goode, interview with author, April 10, 2007.

21
. Ibid.

22
. Ibid.

23
. Ibid.

24
. Ibid.

25
. Ibid.

26
. Ibid.

27
. Ruscha, interview with author, October 11, 2006.

28
. Ruscha, oral history.

29
. Ruscha, interview with author, October 11, 2006.

30
. Carolyn Wyman,
Spam: A Biography
(New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1999), cited in
Ed Ruscha: Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings
, vol. 1,
1958–1970
(New York: Gagosian Gallery/Steidl, 2003), 66.

31
. Though Pop was freshly minted, L.A. collectors already owned pieces by the leading artists. Hopps borrowed three Lichtenstein paintings. Melvin and Pauline Hirsch lent
Masterpiece
, 1962, a comic of a woman admiring her boyfriend's artwork; Leonard and Betty Asher lent
Roto Broil
, 1961, an advertisement for an electric cooker; Donald and Lynn Factor lent
Spray
, 1962. (They also owned Johns's
Tennyson
, the first word painting to influence Ruscha.) The only painting purchased by the museum was Robert Dowd's picture of Lincoln on a five-dollar bill,
Part of $5.00
, 1962.

32
. McKenna,
Ferus Gallery
, 148.

33
. Ruscha,
Catalogue Raisonné
, 40.

34
. The following year, Coplans organized Pop Art, USA at the Oakland Museum, including the Common Object artists with Claes Oldenburg and Jess Collins, connecting them to predecessors Gerald Murphy and William Copley. By that time, half a dozen Pop art exhibitions had been arranged at museums in Kansas City, Houston, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and New York. In an essay published in
Artforum
, Coplans noted that unlike the Manhattan-centric movement of Abstract Expressionism, the Pop art movement was “widely dispersed between the two coasts.” He pointed out that artists from Los Angeles and New York used the soup can or the comic strip as “painting devices which derive their force in good measure from the fact that they have virtually no association with a European tradition.” “The New Paintings of Common Objects,”
Artforum,
October 1963, 25–30. In 1963, Coplans's friend Lawrence Alloway, who had organized Six Painters and the Object for the Guggenheim Museum, organized a companion show for the L.A. County Museum called Six More and added the Californians Bengston, Goode, and Ruscha.

35
. Goode, interview with author, April 10, 2007.

36
. McKenna,
Ferus Gallery
, 149.

37
. Goode, interview with author, April 10, 2007.

38
. Hopps did arrange a Foulkes show at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1962. The following year, Foulkes received the first New Talent Purchase Grant from the L.A. County Museum of Art of $1,200 to provide “a year's basic subsistence to artists of outstanding promise.”

39
. Hertz,
Beat and the Buzz
, 88.

40
. Lester Longman, “Conformity in the Arts,”
Artforum
, June 1962, 19.

41
. Goode, interview with author, April 10, 2007.

42
. Ruscha, interview with author, October 10, 2006

43
. Thomas Beller interview with Ed Ruscha, “Ed Ruscha/Thomas Beller,”
Splash
, February 1989. Ruscha would later name his publishing company “Industrial Strength” and paint various canvases of the term.

44
. Tom Wolfe, “Chester Gould Versus Roy Lichtenstein,” in
California: 5 Footnotes to Modern Art History
, ed. Stephanie Barron (Los Angeles: LACMA, 1977), cited in Grenier,
Los Angeles 1955–1985.

45
. Eve Babitz, interview with author, March 6, 2006.

46
. Ibid.

47
. Danna Ruscha, interview with author, September 20, 2007. She continued to work at Hanna-Barbera but to make extra money she joined Ruscha working in the personalization department of Sunset House, a factory for kitsch gift items such as denture holders with the disturbingly cute name of “Ma and Pa Chopper Hoppers.” They were paid ten cents a “hopper,” which was good money because, fast and precise, they could letter enough items in a few months to pay their modest bills for most of the year.

Chapter Six. Bell, Box, and Venice

  
1
. Larry Bell, interview with author, September 15, 2007.

  
2
. Ibid.

  
3
. Weschler,
Seeing Is Forgetting
, 120.

  
4
. Douglas Kent Hall,
Zones of Experience: The Art of Larry Bell
(Albuquerque: Albuquerque Museum, 1997), 22.

  
5
. Bell, interview with author, September 15, 2007.

  
6
. Oral history interview with Larry Bell, May 25–June 30, 1980, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

  
7
. Bell, interview with author, September 15, 2007.

  
8
. Ibid.

  
9
. Bell, oral history.

10
. Bell, interview with author, September 15, 2007.

11
. Calvin Tomkins,
Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1980), 129.