Rebels in Paradise (18 page)

The couple lived in a Malibu Colony shake-shingle beach house that had once belonged to movie star Warner Baxter. There were two guesthouses, one of which was converted into a studio where visiting artists could work. Dwan also kept a second house on Malibu Road where artists could stay. Though she entertained collectors and a few Hollywood types such as the Hoppers, Dean Stockwell, Tony Curtis, and screenwriter George Axelrod, she preferred the company of artists. Dwan said, “I found early on that artists don't just paint or make sculpture; they're also fascinating thinkers and have a different connection with the world and what's happening than the average person.”
4

The first two years, Dwan exhibited a range of abstract painters, including Matsumi Kanemitsu and Friedel Dzubas, while traveling to New York often to meet other artists. Larry Rivers agreed to a show at Dwan in February 1961. She also connected with Franz Kline and Philip Guston and convinced them to show with her that April. Being an outsider, she didn't realize that the two artists were not on speaking terms. “It was kind of nice. In my innocence, I was able to bring people together occasionally for a common cause—in this case, their joint show.”
5

Dwan spent part of each summer at a house in the south of France with her husband. On one trip to Paris, she grew familiar with the French Pop Nouveaux Réalistes and decided to show five of them: Arman, Martial Raysse, Jean Tinguely, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Yves Klein.

Dwan had seen Klein's monochrome canvases, all painted identically in his own concoction of International Klein Blue, in the windows of the Iris Clert Gallery in Paris. Klein's Los Angeles debut on May 29, 1961, included the blue monochromes and large canvases covered in natural sponges and painted blue, hot pink, or gold. During the opening, Klein showed a film of his infamous Paris performance dragging nude women covered in blue paint, “living brushes,” across a roll of white paper while tuxedoed musicians played his 1949 composition
Monotone Symphony
, a single note held for twenty minutes followed by twenty minutes of silence. (John Cage, then living in Los Angeles, had not yet written his version,
4'33
”)

“It caused a furor in L.A.,” Dwan recalled. “L.A. artists were jealous and bitter over the attention to Klein. There was anger.”
6
John Baldessari remembered, “Klein came out and gave a talk in the gallery. The artists hated him and someone, I think it was John Altoon, starting saying ‘Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Louder and louder.'”
7
Altoon marched out in a huff. Baldessari was intrigued. “It made an impression on me because it just defied everything I knew about art. Blue monochrome paintings, all the same size. I said, ‘This can't be art.' It snapped something.”
8

Dwan was mesmerized. Collectors Melvin and Pauline Hirsch gave a party for Klein in their modern architectural home and had a cake made with IKB-colored frosting. “Yves loved it,” Dwan recalled.
9
He was, however, the last to arrive at his party after spending the day with Kienholz and Dwan shark hunting on her boat.

Klein and his wife Rotraut Uecker stayed in one of the guesthouses of Dwan's Malibu home. Dwan remembered “staying up late discussing life and death and whether the soul goes on.”
10
Klein, a mystic temperament who had spent time in Japan pursuing a black belt in judo and Zen, loved California. He was less pleased with New York after Leo Castelli failed to sell any of his paintings. While staying at the Chelsea Hotel, he wrote a manifesto about the “mutual incomprehension” provoked by his exhibition.

He had a much more pleasant experience with Los Angeles collectors Michael and Dorothy Blankfort. Michael was a successful novelist and screenwriter while Dorothy was a literary agent. They had bought work by De Kooning, Bengston, and Kienholz, but it was a great leap when they contacted Klein asking if they could buy an “immaterial.”

Calling the purchase an “adventure of unreason,” Blankfort explained, “This ‘work of art' was exactly what the word meant; in short, it didn't exist except as an experience which had no material substance.”
11
Klein told him to buy 160 grams of gold in sixteen small ingots and meet him near the Pont Neuf in Paris. On the morning of February 2, 1962, the Blankforts, Dwan, and others gathered for the event, which Dwan remembered as “a really beautiful moment.”
12
Klein examined the gold, then looked at Michael and said in a low voice, “Now, throw the gold pieces in the river.”
13
Michael hesitated and then watched, astonished, as his own hand tossed the gold away, glittering before splashing into the water. “I felt a wave of exaltation … a sensation of being outside my body, not completely myself; a paradox of taking in more than I gave out,” he wrote later.
14
Klein handed Michael a bill of sale but instead of keeping it, he fumbled in his pocket for a match. Klein had one ready and lit the corner of the paper, which quickly turned to ash. Michael Blankfort was a proprietor of an experience, the owner of
The Zone of Immaterial Pictorial Sensitivity
, as Klein titled the incident.

The Blankforts were feeling quite pure until they discovered that the entire performance had been documented by Klein's photographer, pictures that now constitute unique evidence of this work of art. At first, the Blankforts were disturbed to have the intimacy of the act sullied but as those photographs became a part of Klein's touring retrospective, Michael admitted, “Vanity came to the surface to appease me.”
15
It was destined to be more memorable than expected. Four months later, on June 6, 1962, Klein died of a heart attack at the age of thirty-four.

Another unique art adventure began for the Blankforts two years before, in 1960, when Ed Kienholz asked Michael if he thought he would “make it” as an artist. When Michael responded in the affirmative, Kienholz proposed one of his dubious deals. He asked Blankfort to confirm his faith by buying a work that he would not be able to look at for a decade. The deal was for a down payment with the balance paid at the end of that term. “If you open it during that time,” Kienholz added, “you pay it all and I keep the piece.” Blankfort agreed and kept the wrapped box in storage until he opened the piece as scheduled on April Fool's Day, 1970. By then, Kienholz's career was firmly established, and he offered to buy the piece back. Blankfort refused and the artist removed the wrapping to reveal the gaping, hollow neck of a preserved deer still covered with its soft brown fur, surrounded by a coil of ochre-colored rubber hose in a painted wooden box. It was terrifying and Michael thought the horrors of war had inspired the title,
The American Way II
. Dorothy asked the meaning of the title: “It's obvious,” said Kienholz. “The way you bought it is the American way. On the installment plan.”
16

*   *   *

Dwan held half a dozen shows by abstract painters, including Ad Reinhardt, before her 1962 coup: the first West Coast showing of Robert Rauschenberg's “combines,” a word coined by Johns for what he described as “painting playing the game of sculpture.”

Tinguely and Saint Phalle were showing with Everett Ellin while Blum was presenting Kienholz's
Roxy's
. To promote this trifecta of assemblagists, the three dealers discussed renting a billboard on the Sunset Strip and asking the artists to collaborate in making an ongoing, changing public art piece. Since all were working with found materials and had become friends, it seemed a very Pop idea, though it was abandoned after a cost analysis.

Ellin sponsored a performance by Saint Phalle, then Tinguely's girlfriend and later his wife, that garnered plenty of attention. Kienholz, Bengston, Price, Ruscha, Goode, and Hopkins were among the 150 in the audience on March 8, 1962, in the parking lot behind Club Renaissance on the Sunset Strip. Niki de Saint Phalle, pretty and petite, sporting a Joan of Arc hairstyle, had spent days constructing a twenty-foot-tall fortress out of ladders, dummies, and bicycle wheels. Dressed in a fitted white jumpsuit with Kienholz and Tinguely supplying cartridges for her rifle, Saint Phalle shot balloons filled with paint and beer that exploded over the surface of a canvas to create an “action” painting. Her exhilarated audience then filed over to Ellin's La Cienega gallery to see Tinguely's hopping, waving, jittering machine sculptures.

The Rauschenberg show at Dwan included
First Landing Jump
, a canvas topped with a rusted license plate, an enamel light reflector, a black tarpaulin, and a street barrier that impaled a tire resting on the floor in front of the work, evidence of Rauschenberg's view of the world as one gigantic painting. For the next year and a half, Dwan tried to sell the daring piece to dubious Los Angeles collectors for $5,800. Finally, she had to ship it back to Leo Castelli who immediately sold it to architect Philip Johnson, who later gave it to the Museum of Modern Art. Castelli was patient, however, and continued to work with Dwan on future exhibitions. “Leo was a revolutionary at the time in his attitudes about consigning exhibitions,” she recalled.
17
Dwan said that Castelli lent art on favorable terms hoping to develop a West Coast clientele that would buy from him in New York—a strategy that ultimately paid off.

For his part, Castelli was thrilled to have access to Dwan and Blum. He ran into Lorser Feitelson at the Guggenheim and told him, “Oh, Los Angeles is wonderful. We've got to have more collaboration,” adding that he was exhibiting his artists there.

Feitelson asked, “Does that mean that you are exhibiting Californians in your place here?”

“Oh, no,” he said. “They are not ready for that yet.”
18

Dwan's private income reduced the pressure to sell, and she enjoyed showing work “which was so far in the avant-garde that by definition anyone logical would have to say, ‘It can't sell yet, maybe later on,'” she recalled. “I really enjoyed the challenge of putting out there into the world things which were rather stunning and surprising and to me very challenging and exciting, and then just sort of seeing what happened.
19

“We were all trying to convince the world that Los Angeles was a viable art world in itself,” she added.
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“Irving would come and visit and discuss what was happening in the so-called art world in Los Angeles because really the collectors were not that open to the things that I was showing. We sort of gave each other strength and commiserated with each other and joked with each other about the whole thing.”
21

“I remember Irving coming into the gallery and saying, ‘I've just come back from New York and I was telling them what a great art market we have out here.' The gallery was empty, nothing was happening. But at that time, Irving was taking shows on consignment from Leo and Sidney Janis, and so was I. So we couldn't very well indicate that nothing was happening in L.A. because they would question why they would want to send anything out there. So it was a pact between us that I've always enjoyed. It was a myth that became real.”
22

Dwan gave artists stipends and formal contracts and then sold the work. This gave her first choice of the finished work, and she took one-half of the sale price. She sold to the key Los Angeles collectors, but unlike Blum, Dwan did not relish courting them. “My relationships were always with the artists I was showing more than the collectors,” she said. “I remember having a party for Merce Cunningham and John Cage and the dance troupe at my house in Malibu and I didn't invite any collectors. Just David Tudor, Sven Lukens, and myself.”
23

Though her inheritance gave her the freedom to make provocative choices in the works she chose for her gallery, Dwan had to recognize that her wealth was finite. “We were not wealthy,” she said.
24
“There were five different people that started 3M so all of them are inheritors as well. I am just one person who has an inheritance and it is not enormous.” Referring to Michael Heizer's gigantic Earthwork piece
Double Negative
, she said, “It cost thirty thousand dollars [$136,000 in today's currency]. It is written up as though I put billions into it. I find that painful because the emphasis is on money rather than having an eye.”
25
She was not discouraged, however. “More and more I was, I suppose, on a spiritual high with this gallery. I felt that what I was showing was not only for my good, but for everyone else's and that it was a gift to the world.”
26

In May 1962, Dwan opened a larger gallery at 10846 Lindbrook Drive designed by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright and modeled after Wright's V. C. Morris Gift shop in San Francisco. A broad arch separated the interior from the street “to give a sense of setting aside one's other rush-rush attitudes.”
27
Twice as large as the previous gallery, the main room was fifty by fifty feet. “There is the beginning of a sense of almost sacredness—that the viewer in coming in to look at art should in my mind feel that this was to be approached with a different part of himself than the rest of his day-to-day living.”
28

Dwan met Arman through Klein and gave the French artist the inaugural show at her new gallery. Kienholz took Arman shopping to find old violins and cellos to break up and encase in clear plastic boxes. “Kienholz had the largest pick-up truck. He knew his way around everywhere.… He was ambassador from Los Angeles to these European artists in particular,” Dwan said.
29

Dwan also hired John Weber, who had worked for Martha Jackson in New York and had organized a 1961 proto-Pop show called Environments, Situations, Spaces featuring Jim Dine, Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, and Robert Whitman. His first task as director was to help critic Gerald Nordland with his American Pop-themed show My Country Tis of Thee at the gallery from November 18 to December 15, 1962, around the time of Hopps's Common Objects show.
30
Kienholz joined the Dwan Gallery in 1963.