“West of Eden,” Art in America, October 2011
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BOOK REVIEWS WEST OF EDEN L.A. might have been provincial, but BY RICHARD KALINA the weather was great, real estate near the beach was cheap, art schools and A passion for self-invention has long teaching gigs abounded, and if you marked the American psyche, and played your cards right, you could get nowhere has it seemed more pro- a shot at the celebrity and glamour nounced than in California and, in that were such tangible presences in particular, Los Angeles. Hunter the city. By the late ’50s, young artists Drohojowska-Philp’s crisp and cogent were moving there and, importantly, account of the L.A. art scene of the staying. They felt happily (although late ’50s and ’60s, Rebels in Paradise, sometimes defensively) estranged from shows us a town where contemporary New York, finding it too cerebral, too artists had the dubious privilege of start- rooted in art history and European ing pretty much from scratch. It was no tastes. They wanted to create some- easy matter to create a viable advanced thing that was legitimately their own, art world in a city so conservative that in not just a regional variant of a preexist- 1963 the trustees of the Los Angeles ing style. Pop art and Minimalism hit County Museum of Art rejected the world in the early ’60s, about the Edward G. Robinson’s first-rate collec- same time that a number of strong tion of Impressionist work because of the Los Angeles artists emerged. These actor’s progressive politics. Less than 10 new approaches seemed to suit the years earlier, the trustees of that same L.A. ethos, and the local artists felt museum allowed the purchase of a small as entitled to explore that terrain as Jackson Pollock painting only if it were to anyone in New York or London. Rebels in Paradise: be kept in the curator’s office and shown One of the advantages of a small art The Los Angeles Art Scene to the public (presumably on rare occa- world, like that of the early Abstract and the 1960s, by Hunter sions) for “educational purposes.” Expressionists on Tenth Street in New Drohojowska-Philp, New York, Henry Holt and Company, 2011; York, is that everyone pretty 288 pages, $32.50 hardback, much knows everyone $16.99 e-book. else. Drohojowska-Philp, who previously wrote a life of Georgia O’Keeffe, teases closely associated with the Ferus group apart the tangled web of but did not show there.) She devotes connections that bound chapters to the dealers Virginia Dwan L.A.’s artists, dealers, cura- and Nicholas Wilder, to the light artists tors and collectors. She Irwin, James Turrell and Doug Wheeler, nicely lays out a shifting and to the conceptually oriented work landscape of discovery, of John Baldessari and Bruce Nauman. cooperation and rivalry, Rebels in Paradise has a light, anchoring her story around almost breezy tone, but Drohojowska- certain key players and Philp delves into thornier social issues institutions. as easily as she conveys the excite- The Ferus Gallery fig- ment of, say, the nearly simultaneous ures prominently, and openings of Andy Warhol’s show at Drohojowska-Philp tells us Ferus and Marcel Duchamp’s retro- much about its early own- spective at the Pasadena Art Museum ers, Walter Hopps and (in 1963, the year that the Robinson Irving Blum, and its core collection was rejected by LACMA). artists, Ed Kienholz (who Using Judy Chicago as an exemplar, founded the gallery in 1957 she shows us the difficult time faced along with Hopps), Billy Al by women in an art world where Bengston, Ken Price, Craig many players doubted their capac- Kauffman, John Altoon, Ed ity to be artists at all (and where a Moses, Robert Irwin, Larry 1964 group show at Ferus, featuring Joe Goode, Jerry McMillan, Bell and Ed Ruscha. (Joe Moses, Irwin, Price and Bengston, Ed Ruscha and Patrick Blackwell in Goode, Ruscha’s friend could be titled “Studs” with no appar- their shared studio, 1959. Photo Joe Goode. from Oklahoma City, was ent irony). Drohojowska-Philp also OCTOBER’11 ART IN AMERICA 47 book flow.indd 47 9/8/11 5:03 PM IN BRIEF CREATING CALIFORNIA STYLE Pacific Standard Time: Los Angeles Art, 1945-1980, edited by Rebecca Peabody, Andrew Perchuk, Glenn Phillips and Rani Singh, with Lucy Bradnock, Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, 2011; 352 pages, $59.95. Illustrated with photos and other rare materials from the Getty Research Institute, Pacific Standard Time seeks to correct the bias of art historians who have long overlooked Southern California in favor of New York, and to demon- strate the widespread influence of the region’s artists on the major art movements of the 20th century. Architecture of the Sun: Los Angeles Modernism 1900-1970, by Thomas S. Hines, New York, Rizzoli International Publications, 2010; 756 pages, $95. Judy Chicago with her sculpture In his revisionist study of 20th-century California building 10 Part Cylinders, 1966. Courtesy design, urban historian Thomas S. Hines provides the Through the Flower Archives. architecture of the period with both regional and interna- tional context. The Modern Moves West: California Artists and Democratic Culture in the Twentieth Century, explores the increasingly uncloseted by Richard Cándida Smith, Philadelphia, gay scene that centered around the University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009; 264 pages, $39.95. English transplants David Hockney and Beginning with the completion of Sam Rodia’s Watts writer Christopher Isherwood, as well Towers in 1921, California’s burgeoning art scene broke away from the art establishment of New York and Paris. As as Isherwood’s partner, the portraitist the West Coast art world grew more inclusive and demo- Don Bachardy. She gives due cover- cratic, Smith explains, tensions arose around the increased age as well to the art that sprang from involvement of minority groups and women. the political ferment of the 1965 Los California Design, 1930-1965: Living in a Modern Way, Angeles riots and the art community’s edited by Wendy Kaplan, Cambridge, Mass., early opposition to the Vietnam War. MIT Press, 2011; 360 pages, $60. While the L.A. artists may have This accompaniment to the LACMA exhibition “Living in a fashioned a workable milieu for them- Modern Way” examines the nationwide influence of midcentury California design. The movement, with its selves out of very little, they did it with accompanying casual lifestyle, affected everything from sufficient flair to attract some young architecture and furniture to fashion and ceramics. The volume hipsters from that crucible of styl- focuses on hybrid indoor and outdoor living, the embrace of materials like fiberglass that were originally developed for mili- ish invention and fantasy, Hollywood. tary use and the influence of Mexican and Asian cultures. Dennis Hopper, who had achieved a measure of fame from his roles in Rebel California Video: Artists and Histories, Without a Cause and Giant, was mar- edited by Glenn Phillips, Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, 2008; 320 pages, $39.95. ried in the ’60s to Brooke Hayward, Tracing the history of California video art since the late the very well-connected daughter of ’60s, California Video captures the medium’s elevation into actress Margaret Sullavan and produc- the realm of fine art through illustrations, essays, recent er Leland Hayward. Hopper became interviews and previously unpublished video transcripts. a part of the art scene and brought Proof: The Rise of Printmaking along friends like Dean Stockwell, in Southern California, Peter Fonda, Russ Tamblyn and Troy edited by Leah Lehmbeck, Norton Simon Museum/ Getty Publications, 2011; 256 pages, $60.00. Donahue. Hopper was a savvy collec- The founding of L.A.’s Tamarind Lithography Workshop in tor, a painter of some skill and, notably, 1960 marked the beginning of a revival of fine art lithog- a talented photographer. His photo- raphy and its significant impact on postwar American art. graphs of the L.A. art world, a number Through essays and illustration, Proof examines the artistic of which are reproduced in the book, and academic climate that gave rise to the midcentury printmaking movement in Southern California. form an important record of the time. The artists, particularly the Ferus group, Julius Shulman’s Los Angeles, were an attractive lot. Tanned and by Christopher James Alexander, Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011; 72 pages, $9.95. fit (often from surfing), with a cote- This diminutive volume’s 60 architectural photographs by rie of pretty girls around them, they Julius Shulman (1910-2009) reflect the visually striking seemed, much like their counterparts development of modern Los Angeles. Panoramic urban vis- in Hollywood, to embody a certain tas and modernist domestic interiors show the city growing and changing through much of the 20th century. relaxed and youthful American glam- our. It was a good life and, contrary 48 ART IN AMERICA OCTOBER’11 book flow.indd 48 9/8/11 5:03 PM BOOK REVIEWS to the moralizing movies of the day, regularly got appointed to managerial THE FERUS ARTISTS WERE AN mostly free of tragic comeuppance. positions.) Impractical in the extreme, ATTRACTIVE LOT. TANNED AND Drohojowska-Philp puts more Hopps was maddeningly elusive: his FIT, WITH A COTERIE OF emphasis on biography and institutional staff at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in history than she does on an analysis Washington, D.C., where he became PRETTY GIRLS AROUND THEM, of the art itself—not an unreason- director in 1970, had buttons printed up THEY SEEMED, LIKE THEIR able focus when the institutions were saying “Walter Hopps will be here in 20 COUNTERPARTS IN HOLLYWOOD, in formation or flux and the people minutes,” and his boss at a later job at TO EMBODY A RELAXED AND were so interesting.