Rebels in Paradise (22 page)

Though they rarely frequented gay bars, Isherwood and Bachardy went with Hockney and his friend Patrick Proctor to one on Melrose in 1965. “They were three years younger than I but I was the only one to get carded,” says Bachardy. “That was my last great triumph.”
33
Hockney was amazed by the nightlife at bars that stayed open until the wee hours—as opposed to the early-closing London pubs—but it was still risky. As Bachardy recalled, “You could still find yourself in a raid and arrested as well.”
34

Isherwood and Bachardy preferred hosting small dinners at their home where artists found themselves in cozy conversation with movie stars and writers. The flirtatious Bengston became great friends with Jamie Lee Curtis, Teri Garr, and
Gigi
star Leslie Caron, who was married to producer Michael Laughlin. Director and producer Tony Richardson, Vanessa Redgrave, Roddy McDowall, and Vivien Leigh were regulars who mixed easily with art dealer Nicholas Wilder, the Ruschas, and Joe Goode, who was living with
Beaches
screenwriter and director Mary Agnes Donoghue. Other guests included Igor Stravinsky, authors Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, and visiting poets Stephen Spender and W. H. Auden—the Isherwood-Bachardy dining room became a center for bringing together the usually segregated artists of the city. Hockney was invited whenever he was in town.

 

CHAPTER TEN

Wilder Times with Bruce Nauman and
Artforum

Nicholas Wilder's conservative family in Rochester, New York, expected him to prepare for a career in law when he enrolled at Amherst College. A part-time job as a slide projectionist in art history classes derailed that ambition. Then he met Marcel Duchamp, who had come to lecture, and though he was only a guard at the college's Mead Art Museum, Wilder gave the artist a tour of the collection. In graduate school at Stanford, he studied art history while selling art at the Lanyon Gallery in Palo Alto. After selling some forty-five works by abstract painter Tom Holland in one year, he abandoned the academic life. He sold work by young artists Robert Graham, Ron Davis, and John McCracken, all then working in Northern California. By 1965, the twenty-eight-year-old Wilder knew it was time to open his own gallery, and he felt Los Angeles was his future.

To help launch the gallery, Barnett Newman gave him a painting to sell and two years to pay him for it. (
Tundra
was sold to Robert Rowan.) Ruscha designed his stationery. With $10,000 in shares sold to five backers—including his Stanford friend and publishing heir Charles Cowles, who also backed
Artforum
, and the father of another Stanford friend, Katherine Bishop, who became his business partner—he renovated the gallery space at 814 North La Cienega Boulevard next to the respected bookseller Jake Zeitlin. Within a year, he had bought back all of the shares from his backers.

As Bishop put it, “He loved Southern California as perhaps only an East Coast person could … an alternative to the expectations of [Eastern] educated ‘good taste.' … Los Angeles epitomized the transgressive beauty Nick most enjoyed.… He was a gay man who hated associations of the
Queer Eye
sort, preferring steaks, scotch, Pink's chilidogs and ignoring his wardrobe and furniture completely.”
1

Wilder opened his gallery on April Fool's Day, 1965, shortly after the sensational opening of the new L.A. County Museum of Art. Trim, with thin brown hair, Wilder wore white suits and large horn-rimmed glasses. He was nothing like the flamboyant bleached-blond Hockney, with his propensity for wearing unmatched but brightly colored socks, but like Hockney, Wilder became liberated living in Los Angeles. Hockney lived at his house briefly in 1966, though not as a lover, and Wilder and the young men congregating around his swimming pool became a small but important genre within the immense Hockney oeuvre.

In spring 1966, Wilder showed the artist who came to be known as his greatest discovery: Bruce Nauman. At the apartment of artist Tony DeLap, Wilder saw his first Nauman. “It was like a rancid piece of toothpaste on the wall. About forty-six inches wide, a kind of khaki-colored thing that was cast plastic that dropped forty inches down the wall.”
2
He couldn't get it out of his mind and decided to visit the artist.

By then, the Rolf Nelson Gallery was closing, so Joe Goode joined Wilder. Wilder invited Goode to drive north to meet the unknown Nauman. Goode recalled the saga: “Nauman was very shy. He didn't talk much but he was very bright and very nice. So we pick up these slimy, fiberglass things that were taken off molds to hang on the wall. I was mesmerized. We put them in the back of the station wagon. We both were so excited to see what they looked like on a white wall that we hung that fucking show at three o'clock in the morning.”
3

Nauman, twenty-five, was still a student in the new fine-arts graduate program at the University of California–Davis near Sacramento. His teachers William Wiley and Wayne Thiebaud were far more progressive that those Nauman had had as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, where abstract painting was barely tolerated. Raised in a middle-class family in the Midwest, Nauman had an aptitude for math and music that would percolate through his art after he abandoned painting to make abstract sculptures that incorporated nontraditional materials and processes. Even before Nauman had graduated and moved to San Francisco, Wilder showed his cast body parts of raw fiberglass and pieces of rubber that lay on the floor or hung at angles on the walls.

Wilder tried to convince collectors with his basic premise of collecting contemporary art: “That nineteenth-century notion of connoisseurship doesn't rule. There's no exam to be passed. You're on your own. The first thing you have to do is be comfortable with the fact that you're not on firm ground. That's a delightful situation.”
4
Few got it until the following year when Fidel Danieli published an eight-page article in
Artforum
beginning: “A first encounter with the work of Bruce Nauman is extremely disconcerting.”
5
By that time, Nauman was ready for his first show at Castelli in New York, where he and his wife Judy Govan had moved.

A year later, in 1969, they moved to Los Angeles and paid seventy-five dollars a month to live in part of Hopps's craftsman-style house in Pasadena. (Artist Richard Jackson and his girlfriend Christine Langras lived in the other half.) This enviable rental was passed from artist to artist for decades. Goode had lived there a few years before. Nauman's modest lifestyle was offset by the fact that he drove a classic Ferrari purchased for him by Paris dealer Ileana Sonnabend, Castelli's ex-wife, who owed him a significant sum for European sales. Like Ruscha, Nauman discovered snazzy cowboy shirts and boots at Nudie's, San Fernando Valley tailor to Roy Rogers and other singing cowboys. Nauman, who had become successful quickly, was friendly with other Los Angeles artists but not one to hang out at the Barney's scene.
6

In addition, Wilder discovered John McCracken as a student at California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. Influenced by the Zen Buddhist–inspired paintings of John McLaughlin, which mostly contained just two or three bands of very specific colors, McCracken covered a simple plank of plywood with some thirty coats of polyester resin, each coat sanded to a glossy, translucent sheen. Initially, he used other geometric shapes, but once he discovered the plank, which leaned against the wall like a surfboard, it became his principal unorthodox support for pure color. Wilder showed his work in Los Angeles in 1967, after it had been included in the Primary Structures show in New York.

Wilder thought Joe Goode was a “great artist” and eventually owned thirty-seven of his works. Sales were never very strong so Goode supported himself by betting on the horses at Santa Anita and Hollywood Park, often sitting with his mentor Robert Irwin, who made more money at the track than from sales of his art. Irwin taught Goode the complex mathematics of the handicap but there was a drawback. “You become addicted to it,” Goode admitted. “I couldn't do it half-assed. So on my bio, in 1963 and 1964, there were no shows because I was at the race track the whole year.”
7
When Wilder showed the New York artist Walter De Maria, Goode took him to the track as well, and pretty soon he, too, was avidly dedicated to the sport of kings.

When Wilder came to see his work in 1965, Goode was building sculptures of staircases that led to blank walls but didn't have the funds to complete them quickly. Wilder said, “What if I helped you financially and you can have a show in six months?”
8
Priced from $400 to $700, a couple sold, including one to Charles Cowles.

In addition to Hockney, Nauman, Goode, and McCracken, Wilder showed Hockney's former neighbor Ron Davis, who used resin to make dodecahedron-shaped abstract paintings. Robert Graham made Plexiglas containers bearing small nude figures of women or men, sometimes both having sex. Otherwise, Wilder drew from New York, bringing in the color-field painters supported by critic Clement Greenberg—Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Helen Frankenthaler—and included in Greenberg's 1964 Post-Painterly Abstraction show. He also showed Flavin, Newman, Agnes Martin, Cy Twombly, and Richard Tuttle. Mary Lynch Kienholz came to work for him in 1969 and after that, he took on many more Los Angeles artists who had been with Ferus. In short, Wilder's taste was catholic. He showed seventy-one artists in one decade. Many showed with him only once, and he got a reputation for not being able to pay his artists, but he was revered for extravagant openings that always featured a fully stocked bar. Plus, he took out full-page ads every month in
Artforum
, which he had been instrumental in founding when working in San Francisco.

*   *   *

Shortly before relocating to offices above the Ferus Gallery,
Artforum
dedicated their summer 1964 issue to “The Los Angeles Scene Today.” Articles about collectors, architecture, artists, and museums provided context for the new L.A. County Museum of Art scheduled to open the following year. In one article, editor Philip Leider coined the phrase “The Cool School” to describe artists from the Ferus and Rolf Nelson galleries: Irwin, Price, Bell, Bengston, Ruscha, Goode, and Foulkes. “Taken as a group, the Los Angeles avant-garde may be producing the most interesting and significant art being produced in America today.”
9

In the same issue, John Coplans eviscerated Post-Painterly Abstraction, the exhibition organized by Clement Greenberg, who was waning in power but still an influential New York critic. Held at what he must have thought of as a provincial outpost, the L.A. County Museum of History, Science, and Art, Greenberg attempted to define what might follow the Abstract Expressionism that he had promoted so intensely. Irwin, then doing paintings of two thin lines on feathered backgrounds of soft earth tones, was invited to add work to the show but refused after reading Greenberg's catalog essay. “I was correct in the sense that what he was trying to do I had no sympathy for, it was not what I was doing, and it was not my involvement,” Irwin recalled. “I was naïve in the sense that I didn't know who he was. I just wrote him a letter and told him how dumb I thought his ideas were.”
10

Coplans, born in England but raised in South Africa, was mature from his military experience as a young fighter pilot during World War II. A self-taught painter of geometric abstractions, he was inspired by the 1959 New American Painting show in London to move to San Francisco. He was hired at UC Berkeley two years later as a visiting assistant professor. He befriended Peter Voulkos, who was teaching in the architectural design department, as well as Hopps after hearing him lecture at the San Francisco Art Institute. Influenced by the pluralistic views of English critic Lawrence Alloway and far removed from the intimidating force of Greenberg's personality and reputation, Coplans questioned that critic's belief system because it allowed only certain methods of making art and rejected artists as talented as Rauschenberg and Warhol. “Greenberg, in rejecting the notion that contemporary art is clearly distinguished by the co-existence of a number of perfectly valid, credible and widely diverse styles, asserts that there is only one correct logical style at any one given time.… In short, what is not in the right style cannot be art, and what is in the right style must be art.”
11

Here was a magazine willing to take a stand against one of New York's most powerful critics and willing to defend the art of Los Angeles!
ARTNews
magazine's Thomas Hess and Harold Rosenberg had reigned for a decade as the promoters of Abstract Expressionism; their magazine covered a diverse range of exhibitions but rarely acknowledged the existence of artists in Los Angeles—or Europe for that matter. The art magazines of that time were focused on New York.

Artforum
came about in recognition of this fact. A salesman for a San Francisco printing company, John Irwin, had come to the Bolles Gallery in Palo Alto to solicit business. Philip Leider, who was working there at the time, suggested, “Look, if you really want to make money as a printer, publish a West Coast art magazine. That's what we really need.”
12
Leider, a graduate of Brooklyn College with an interest in literature and music, had moved with his wife Gladys to San Francisco to follow its thriving poetry scene. He did not know much about art but felt he could be an editor.

Shortly after, Leider left his job at the gallery and Irwin hired him at eighty dollars a week to edit the fledgling magazine. Their combined inexperience contributed to a chaotic launch. Irwin hired a “kid just out of art school” who designed the distinctive ten-by-ten-inch-square format based on the News Gothic font. Early issues were not dated by month because they were not sufficiently organized or funded to predict such details. However, the magazine covered galleries and museums from Portland to Tucson, and within two years, advertising revenues had soared. It attracted well-heeled backers in San Francisco, including Elizabeth Heller and Charles Cowles, but it was not profitable enough to pay writers. Nonetheless, the magazine attracted talented contributors such as Coplans and James Monte, a painter who had worked at Bolles Gallery and eventually became a curator at the L.A. County Museum of Art and later at the Whitney Museum of American Art.