Rebels in Paradise (25 page)

She hung out with the Ferus boys, as well as with Rolf Nelson's boys, at Barney's, where she wore work boots and smoked cigars to fit in with her male colleagues. “They spent most of their time talking about cars, motorcycles, women, and their ‘joints.' … They made a lot of cracks about my being a woman and repeatedly stated that women couldn't be artists. I was determined to convince them … that I was serious.”
3

By 1965, John Coplans was finding greater success as an art critic and curator than as an artist. At forty-three, twice divorced, he began dating Gerowitz, then twenty-four. Both Jewish, they also shared social and political interests. He tended to be combative, and so did she. Though he bought her art materials and took her to dinner, he remarked, “You know, Judy, you have to decide whether you're going to be a woman or an artist.”
4
Their relationship soon ended but they remained friends. Four years later, Coplans organized a show of her work at the Pasadena Art Museum. And when she went to New York, he set up a meeting with the powerful critic Harold Rosenberg, who, though married, tried to seduce her. She returned to Los Angeles after the meeting, thinking “the new world really is the West Coast.”
5

Influenced by Leider's
Artforum
article “The Cool School,” praising the efforts of Bengston, Bell, and Kauffman, Gerowitz decided to attend an auto-body school to learn to spray paint on metal. The only woman among 250 men in the class, she enjoyed a fling with the African American instructor, who drove a lavender convertible. She applied her new painting skills specifically in her 1964 work
Car Hood
. She described it: “The vaginal form, penetrated by a phallic arrow, was mounted on the ‘masculine' hood of a car, a very clear symbol of my state of mind at this time.”
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She kept striving to gain acceptance into the inner circle of Ferus bad boys. One night at Barney's, she got drunk enough to thank Bengston for influencing her work. Far from flattered, he dismissed her as a “flash in the pan.”
7

By that time, her earlier friendship with sculptor Lloyd Hamrol, who had divorced his wife Nancy, had taken a romantic turn and in 1965, the couple rented a five-thousand-square-foot loft on Raymond Avenue in Pasadena for seventy-five dollars, which they shared with Llyn Foulkes. They had found similar loft space for di Suvero. (Ruscha had briefly rented a three-thousand-square-foot studio in Pasadena but felt his work was overwhelmed by the enormity and moved his studio to an apartment on Western Avenue in East Hollywood that he kept for twenty years.)

Around that time, Gerowitz met Stanley and Elyse Grinstein at a party. Elyse said that until she met Judy, she wore a girdle and carried a handbag to match her shoes. The Grinsteins became her patrons, and one of their first gestures was to send a set of white porcelain dishes to the young couple's loft.

At her first solo show in January 1966 at Nelson's gallery, she wore a backless tuxedo of her own design.
Rainbow Pickett
, named after Wilson Pickett, consisted of six trapezoids of different lengths and pastel colors leaned against a wall at an angle in decreasing size. They were not airbrushed but made of painted canvas stretched over plywood forms. Her unpleasant encounter with Bengston had had an impact.

“I'm finished with the kind of surface & craft preoccupation of the Ferus boys,” she wrote. “It's a dead end that leads to preciousness, & they're really fucked up by it.”
8
These sculptures evolved during the earliest years of Minimalism but, as her biographer Gail Levin wrote, “Her developing feminist ideas were expressed indirectly in her choices of soft, feminine colors.”
9
Kynaston McShine selected
Rainbow Pickett
for the breakthrough Primary Structures show at the Jewish Museum in New York that opened on April 26, 1966. Developed with Lucy Lippard, then at the Museum of Modern Art, the landmark show also included work by Bell and John McCracken, along with Andre, Smithson, Robert Morris, and Walter De Maria.

Judy Chicago with her sculpture
10 Part Cylinders,
1966

Photograph courtesy of Through the Flower Archives

Due to Gerowitz's flat Midwestern accent, in 1966 Rolf Nelson started calling her Judy Chicago, and soon she started listing herself that way in the phone book. Nelson had moved to a larger gallery and in his empty room, Chicago and Hamrol erected plastic inflatable walls and filled the space with three hundred pounds of chicken feathers. Amusing and somehow in tune with the times, it garnered the publicity that she was increasingly adept at attracting. This was especially important after Nelson was forced to close his gallery at the end of 1966 due to mounting financial losses. His 736 North La Cienega Boulevard gallery had featured shows of Herms, Foulkes, and Hamrol. Nelson even convinced Georgia O'Keeffe to lend her monumental masterpiece
Sky Above Clouds IV
with a price tag of $75,000, but no one in Los Angeles, not even the new museum, bought it. Later, it went to the Art Institute of Chicago. Meanwhile, Eugenia Butler and Riko Mizuno had taken over his previous space and named it Gallery 669 for the address. They showed watercolors by the author Henry Miller, who later titled a book of his work
Paint As You Like and Die Happy.

A number of artists were interested in moving out of the confines of their studios and into the industrial environment. Chicago, Hamrol, Oliver Andrews, Eric Orr, DeWain Valentine, and others formed a cooperative called Aesthetic Research Center in 1966. All wanted to be involved in new technological discoveries.
10
Around Christmas 1967, Hamrol and Orr helped Chicago manifest
Dry Ice Environment
at Century City, with thirty-seven tons of dry ice donated by the Union Carbide Company producing thick mist when stacked into low walls and ziggurats. They were inspired by Allan Kaprow, who had conceived the Happening in New York ten years before as a combination of his interests in the work of John Cage, Zen Buddhism, absurdist theater, and poetry, and to break down the barrier between art and life.

Kaprow's first survey exhibition had been held in September 1967 at PAM with a Happening called
Fluids
. For three days, volunteers stacked blocks of ice in rectangular arrangements some thirty feet long, ten feet wide, and eight feet high throughout the city. In the sweltering heat, the sculptures quickly attained the fluidity promised in the title but lived on in the many photographs of the event taken by Dennis Hopper.

Chicago was slowly coming to the realization that her experience as a woman was not legible in her work, yet she didn't want to be labeled a “woman artist,” either. In 1968, she refused to be included in California Women in the Arts, an exhibition organized by Josine Ianco-Starrels, director of the Lytton Center, saying, “I won't show in any group defined as women, Jewish or California.”
11

Chicago and Hamrol married in 1969. The following year, with some reservations, she accepted a teaching position at Fresno State College, two hundred miles north of Los Angeles. Far from urban influence, Chicago pulled together all of her diverse ideas about the suppressed role of women in art history and in society to form the first Women's Art Program. Chicago invited her friend the artist Miriam Schapiro up to Fresno to observe classes of woman exploring their history, their place in society, their personal assets, and their liabilities as professional artists. Schapiro suggested moving the program down to the newly opened California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, where her husband, painter Paul Brach, was dean. In 1971, Chicago and Schapiro launched the Feminist Art Program at Cal Arts. It proved deeply influential for artists of both sexes and inspired a plethora of similar programs at art schools and universities around the country.

In Los Angeles, it led to the founding of Womanhouse, where female artists could exhibit their work without the pressures to conform that came from commercial galleries, which rarely showed their work in any case.

 

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

A Museum at Last

When the trustees of the Pasadena Art Museum, led by Harold Jurgensen, promoted Hopps from curator to director in 1964, they lost the best of him. Hopps was most effective as an artists' liaison, able and willing to bring the latest developments into view at the museum. As director, he had less time to organize shows, so he hired as curator James T. Demetrion, who had been at UCLA with him and was teaching art history at Pomona College in Claremont, California. Like Hopps, Demetrion had had no previous museum experience. In fact, lack of experience had become something of a qualification for new hires at the museum. Energetic charm made do in the absence of a conventional bureaucracy. When photographer Jerry McMillan was hired to work on catalogs and other publications for the museum, Hopps handed him a set of keys so that he could work whenever it suited him.

Hopps organized a few shows, including a survey of Alexei Jawlensky, drawn from the Galka Scheyer collection, and he imported the Guggenheim's Kandinsky retrospective and MoMA's Schwitters retrospective, to which pieces were loaned by painter and photographer Kate Steinitz, who had met the artist in 1918 in their mutual hometown of Hannover, Germany. These were big commitments yet, as director, his primary role was to raise funds and build the permanent collection.

To that end, Hopps arranged exhibitions of work owned by trustees and museum supporters: Contemporary Selections from the Mr. and Mrs. Robert Rowan Collection, May 25 to June 27, 1965; Contemporary Selections from the Edwin Janss Collection, July 20 to September 5, 1965; Contemporary Paintings Lent by Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Weisman, November 25 to January 9, 1965; and another Contemporary Selections from the Mr. and Mrs. Robert Rowan Collection, February 25 to March 3, 1966.

Hopps had advised all of these collectors on their choices, both recommending artists and sometimes recommending specific works. The museum also showed the collection of Ed Janss's brother, William Janss, a trustee of the San Francisco Museum of Art, who owned works by Hans Hofmann, Robert Motherwell, and Willem de Kooning, from January 26 to February 28, 1965. Did he hope that works from these collections would be donated to the museum to build a permanent collection? No doubt.

“I did the gallery work because the art that the California artists and I wanted to look at, we couldn't see in Los Angeles in the late 1950s, early 1960s,” he said later.
1
Hopps brought that outlook to the museum, hoping to endow Los Angeles with works by the Abstract Expressionists who had been his early heroes and the color-field painters, as well as the already valuable art of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

One reason that the tiny Pasadena Art Museum attracted so much attention for its inventive, if modest, exhibitions was that the city of Los Angeles did not have a museum devoted exclusively to art, let alone modern art. The Getty collections were housed in the oil tycoon's former residence on a bluff in Malibu. The university galleries did not have permanent collections. The Huntington had exceptional British paintings and decorative arts—as well as a library and gardens—but little interest in art of the twentieth century.

The provincial nature of Los Angeles, so beneficial to the originality of its young artists, had long been a problem for its few cultural institutions. The L.A. County Museum of History, Science, and Art, a beaux-arts behemoth, was erected south of the downtown district near the University of Southern California in 1913. The program of traveling art exhibitions tended to be conservative and the galleries were given over regularly to groups such as the California Watercolor Society. Upon entering the rotunda with its stained-glass dome, one walked past the dinosaurs and dioramas to reach the art. This discouraged one group of Japanese curators from loaning Buddhist art since it could not be shown in proximity to dead animals.

Nonetheless, the collections grew through the largesse of Los Angeles's swelling ranks of wealthy individuals. William Preston Harrison donated fine nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and American paintings. German-born William Valentiner had been a curator of decorative arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a founder of
Art in America
magazine, and director of the Detroit Art Institute when he was hired in 1946 as codirector of the L.A. County Museum. Thanks to his convincing personality, publisher William Randolph Hearst contributed a warehouse of decorative arts, Renaissance sculptures and tapestries, and Greek, Roman, and Egyptian antiquities. Crowded into small galleries and overflowing the storage areas, these collections were the reason that the city needed a new general art museum to be modeled after the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Valentiner laid the groundwork for a museum where visitors would not have to walk around T. rex to see the Renaissance paintings, but before he could start in earnest, he left to become director of the first J. Paul Getty Museum, still in the tycoon's house, but with the goal of building an appropriate structure for collections of antiquities and decorative arts. Valentiner's successor was Richard Fargo Brown, grandson of William George Fargo, who had cofounded Wells, Fargo and Company. With a doctorate in art history from Harvard University, Brown pursued the plan to build a separate art museum. He appealed to the L.A. County Board of Supervisors and wealthy individuals. In 1961, after Brown was made museum director, the county donated seven acres of land along the Miracle Mile, a wide stretch of Wilshire Boulevard lined with department stores such as Ohrbach's and the May Company. Alas, the parcel also harbored the infamous La Brea tar pits. Before construction could begin, archaeologists had to inspect the excavation for fossils and bones. Engineers then covered the tar with a three-foot-thick, two-hundred-foot-long floating slab of concrete that led
Time
to refer to the new museum as the “temple on the tar pits.”