Rebels in Paradise (11 page)

With that, Irwin saw all the weaknesses of his work and decided then and there to change. He recognized that the younger artists from across the street were onto something, and his art evolved quickly and dramatically. “My friendship with them was crucial in the sense that there was nobody really around who was interested in what we did.… We had no proof but we believed that we were special, that we were doing it. We basically supported ourselves in that relationship and gave ourselves the kind of milieu that allows you to operate as a free-flowing person without doubting yourself.”
49

Irwin's family had moved to the working-class neighborhood of Leimert Park in Los Angeles during the Depression after his father lost his Colorado construction business. From the age of seven, Irwin made money by selling
Liberty
magazine and working in movie theaters, coffee shops, and as a lifeguard at Lake Arrowhead or Catalina Island. Like Bengston, he was athletic. He taught himself to dance the Lindy and earned more than $100 a week from dance contests held at the Jungle Club in Inglewood or the Dollhouse in the San Fernando Valley, making quite an impression when arriving in the '39 Ford that he had personally perfected with twenty coats of ruby-maroon paint applied to the dash. At Dorsey High School in the 1940s, Irwin succeeded at football and art classes but flunked his only two requirements: algebra and Latin. At nearby Hollywood Park, he learned to bet on horse races and within a few years, he supported himself as a handicapper.

In 1946, Irwin joined the army and was posted in Germany. When he returned to Los Angeles the following year, he enrolled at L.A. County Art Institute a decade ahead of Bengston and Price. A naturally gifted draftsman, he had vague notions of becoming an artist, but he didn't feel he was learning much there. In 1950, during the Korean War, he was recalled into the army and served his time at Camp Roberts in central California. After his discharge, he enrolled at the Jepson Art Institute, where he studied with the charismatic Rico Lebrun, who worked in a popular Cubist-Surrealist style. After three months of lectures on philosophy and Marxism, Irwin left to attend Chouinard. “By the time I got out of art school, having gone to three places, I was still very naïve.”
50

Artists sharpen their skills on the whetstones of their colleagues. Irwin hit his stride when he started to compete with younger painters such as Kauffman and Bengston. At one point, Irwin and Kauffman shared a studio. Irwin recalled, “My painting was full of sound and fury. Craig had a little porcelain dish with a little red and blue. He wore a smock! He would make a mark and then go to the opposite side of the room and sit there. I thought, ‘What's happening here?' I got the lesson. It's about paying attention.”
51

The Ferus artists' clubhouse was Barney's Beanery, several blocks north of the gallery on Holloway Drive. Similar to the Cedar Street Tavern near the artists' studios in New York, Barney's was inexpensive, worn down, and hospitable. Onetime boxing manager Barney Anthony opened the white and green clapboard structure in 1927 to serve motorists arriving on what was then Route 66. Barney's sister turned out chili burgers and onion soup in the tiny kitchen, but after Prohibition ended in 1933, the main business was drinking. It was a hangout for Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, and Bette Davis. When Barney opened the so-called Crown Room in 1960, it was rumored that Princess Margaret donated a portrait of herself to add to the decor.

After openings at Ferus or at lunch or virtually any other time that a quorum could be mustered, Kienholz, Irwin, Altoon, Moses, Kauffman, Price, and Bengston would sit in one or more booths and talk about cars or girls. Since no one was making much money selling art, almost everyone had a part-time job. If someone was down on his luck, Barney would extend a line of credit of up to twenty dollars. At times, artist-cum-bartender Dane Dixon would slip his friends an extra drink. In this dimly lit joint, with a sign on the wall announcing “No Fagots [
sic
] Allowed” and a calendar that was many years out of date, these artists honed their individual ideas while supporting one another. There were ongoing antics.

Each artist took turns holding court. Kienholz told Ed Moses that he had bought a suit in a thrift store for two dollars and, with Dixon, gone into various Cadillac dealerships pretending to be a promising customer. “Ed would intimidate them into taking a car for a test drive. As soon as he got around the corner, Dane was waiting for him and they'd steal the rear tire, the mats—anything they could get—and then he'd take it back.”
52

“At Barney's, everyone would stand around and drink and tell lies,” remembered Moses. “[They would] try to pick up on the girls that were there.”
53
Moses went to Barney's on his first date with an attractive brunette from Virginia, an aspiring writer named Avilda Peters. When he brought her home, she said, “I want you to do me a favor. Never call me again.”
54
A few months later, they were married and moved back to New York, then to San Francisco, and then to Spain with their little boy.

“We had good disagreements of ideas,” Kienholz said, about the group at Barney's.
55
As Ferus gained popularity, other galleries opened on North La Cienega, which gave rise to Monday night art walks when all the galleries would stay open late and serve wine. On one such occasion, Ferus was between shows and therefore empty. Kienholz suggested to Blum that he put up a selection of work, but Blum was racing off to San Francisco and didn't have time. “We were sitting in Barney's, and we were about half-drunk,” Kienholz recalled. “Craig Kauffman and I and maybe Allen Lynch and Dane sat there grumbling about, you know, ‘Fuck Irving, goddamn him.'”
56
They went out to the parking lot and found a pile of weathered boards with nails sticking out of them and some old service station pumps. They gathered them together with whatever else was around and stacked them in the gallery. “We sat there, and all the people came by and said, ‘Oh, my, isn't this interesting.' We just left it there, and when Irving came back, there was his gallery full of junk … and he was not too pleased.”
57

“We didn't talk the art out,” Kienholz added. “If we sat around in the Beanery, we talked about who was a good fuck and where we were going to get six dollars so we could buy gas for a car to go to the Valley and get drunk.… I don't know that I've ever talked to Bob Irwin about art in my life. I can remember sitting in his studio for half a day, down at the beach, watching him paint brushstrokes all in one direction so if you stood in one place, you saw the reflection of light on the actual stroke, and if you stood in another place, the whole surface was an entirely different color because you saw it differently.”
58

Art may not have been the primary discourse at Barney's, but the camaraderie helped the artists move decisively away from what Kauffman called “messy fifties painting.” Young and reckless, having been to New York and Europe, they decided collectively and individually to break away from prevailing views and practices of mainstream art and criticism. They chose to live in Los Angeles instead of New York precisely because there was a dearth of critical discourse and gallery infrastructure. As a group, they reveled in being pugnacious and anti-intellectual. Unlike the Abstract Expressionist painters who had been their heroes, they took a stand for optimism, humor, and pleasure. Though most came from quite modest backgrounds, they refused to adopt the sorrowful introspection and angst of the New York School artists. As Irwin said of his own upbringing, “We didn't have nothing to do with all of that—no dark side, none of that struggle—everything was just a flow.”
59

This outlook got Irwin into an argument with an
Artforum
critic from New York about the value of the automobile as an aesthetic influence. The early 1960s was the apotheosis of reverence toward the automobile in Los Angeles; the new Corvette convertible had a role as memorable as any of the stars of the TV series
77 Sunset Strip.
Irwin took the critic out to the San Fernando Valley to introduce him to a kid who was working on a 1929 roadster. “Here was a fifteen-year-old kid who wouldn't know art from schmart, but you couldn't talk about a more real aesthetic activity than what he was doing.… The critic simply denied it.”
60
Irwin tried to explain, but the critic refused to acknowledge the possibility that such activity could be considered a form of art. Finally, an angry Irwin pulled his car over. “I just flat left him there by the road, man, and just drove off. Said, ‘See you later, Max.' And that was basically the last conversation we two ever had.”
61

*   *   *

Curiosity about contemporary art escalated in the well-to-do neighborhoods of West Los Angeles. In response, Walter and Shirley Hopps teamed up with bespectacled young art historian Henry Hopkins to give slide lectures on modern art in private residences around Beverly Hills, most often in the home of Frederick and Marcia Weisman. Aspiring collectors Donald and Lynn Factor, Leonard and Betty Asher, Stanley and Betty Freeman, Stanley and Elyse Grinstein, Monte and Betty Factor, and others were sufficiently impressed by these talks to drop by Ferus on a regular basis and, eventually, to buy some of this challenging new art. Don Factor, film producer and heir to the Max Factor cosmetics fortune, even began to share his insights by writing reviews for
Artforum
.
62

Shirley recalled, “I did much more teaching than Walter did. But his lectures were memorable. He was showing a Barnett Newman slide and Fred Weisman said, “You got me there, kid,” and walked out of the room. This stuff was Latin to these people. They were interested but it was all uphill.”
63

The Weismans were primed to collect art. Marcia Weisman's brother, Norton Simon, had amassed a stunning collection of Impressionist and Postimpressionist art as well as Old Masters. Frederick Weisman was an executive at his brother-in-law's Hunt Foods before establishing Mid-Atlantic Toyota Distributors. Within a few years, the Weismans became great collectors of modern and contemporary art. In fact, their purchase of Newman's
Onement VI
, a blue vertical canvas with a central green stripe, was considered sufficiently impressive to warrant a full-page color reproduction in
Artforum
in 1962.

As these collectors expected a certain amount of courting and convincing, Blum's role in running the gallery expanded. “Walter was enormously sympathetic and enormously farseeing,” Blum said. “He was completely intuitive about the significance of works of art—I've never heard the equal of it when he got wound up.… At the same time, he had these lapses. We'd be having a discussion, Walter would get a little heated, he'd say he needed a cup of coffee, he'd walk out of the gallery, and I'd see him ten days later. This happened fairly frequently.”
64

Hopps was notorious for his disappearing act. His wife recalled, “Walter had no sense of time. He disappeared in town and I think he usually went to stay with an artist. Walter had the mentality of an artist. There is no more difficult life, nor are there people who have a harder time living within a regular social scheme. I think Walter had a lot of that inability and unwillingness to cope with the real world, and he found solace with artists. He's always had people who will look after him, no matter what. All of us have a certain amount of time we can do it, and then we can't do it anymore.”
65

Blum, the dutiful Jewish son, was driven; Hopps, the son of WASP privilege, was elusive. By 1962, Blum recognized that Hopps could not run an art gallery. “Walter had extraordinary insight into art. A major flaw … was that he could see every side of every given situation. So much so that he would freeze and be unable to go in any direction. You'd give him a letter to mail and he'd look at it and understand the ramifications of not mailing and, as often as not, you'd find it upstairs under his mattress, which was his way of solving that problem.”
66

Blum was not exaggerating. Kauffman said that Hopps had worked with him to produce a small catalog for his Ferus show. After days spent painstakingly printing and binding the edition, Kauffman addressed a hundred envelopes by hand and gave the packages to Hopps to mail. After such an effort, he was surprised that many of his intended recipients had not come to his opening. Months later, he found the entire box of catalogs, ready to be mailed, under Hopps's bed.
67

“Happily … [Hopps] was offered a job as curator at the Pasadena Art Museum,” said Blum. “I doubt that I could have gone on any further with him, and I took over the gallery then.”
68
Hopps was working on the Duchamp retrospective for the Pasadena Art Museum when, in 1962, he was hired as curator at a salary of $6,000 a year. After a few months, director Thomas Leavitt, who had hired him, decamped to become director of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. At thirty-one, Hopps was promoted to acting director and then director. The youngest director of an art museum in the country, the square-jawed Hopps was nothing if not ambitious for the tiny institution when he told the
Los Angeles Times
about his plans for a new pre-Columbian art council and a coming survey of American portraiture from colonial to present times. When Hopps left Ferus, he gave his shares to Shirley so there would be no appearance of conflict of interest.

After Hopps's departure, Blum proceeded to run Ferus like a business so the artists would be paid for their efforts, but it was unrequited love. The artists never reciprocated with the blind affection they had always given to Hopps. More than most people, the artists sympathized with the irresponsible genius who was on their side no matter what. Few others had Hopps's devotion to art. For instance, in 1962 Kienholz completed an assemblage sculpture called
The Illegal Operation
, portraying the filthy conditions of a backroom abortion, a piece so disturbing that he was contemplating how to destroy it. Hearing of his intention, Hopps stole the piece from the gallery storeroom and transported it in the trunk of his Buick to an unknown location, where it remained for six months. When Kienholz confronted him, Hopps said, “You were going to destroy it anyway. What are you going to do? You going to put me in jail?”
69
Fifteen years later, Kienholz was grateful for the intervention. “If I ever made a piece of art,
The Illegal Operation
would be it. It contains the kind of fury that is felt.”
70
By that time, it had been sold to ardent Kienholz collectors Monte and Betty Factor.