Rebels in Paradise (4 page)

Duchamp doubtless enjoyed staging his retrospective far from Manhattan, the center of the art world. Half a century had passed since his Cubist painting
Nude Descending a Staircase
had been the scandal of the 1913 Armory Show, which introduced European modern art to New York. By 1963, the once scandalous Cubists and Dadaists were categorized as movements in art history. Duchamp told MoMA curator William Seitz: “My ‘Nude' [Descending a Staircase] is dead, completely dead.”
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Though Duchamp believed the weight of art history oppressed cultural controversy, he resurrected his outlaw reputation in Pasadena. For the exhibition poster, Duchamp recycled a 1923 placard stating “Wanted/$2000 Reward” and inserted photographs of himself along with a long list of possible aliases. In his own scratchy handwriting, he penned the name of the museum and the show's title: “by or of Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy.” That pun on the French observation of life and love, “Eros, c'est la vie,” was the pseudonym that Duchamp had adopted for a series of costumed photographs of him taken by Man Ray.

A week before the opening, Duchamp and his wife Alexina, known as “Teeny,” who was married previously to Henri Matisse's son, the art dealer Pierre Matisse, stayed at Pasadena's Hotel Green. Every morning, Duchamp would stride through the ornate Moorish lobby and amble five blocks east, inhaling air scented with the blossoms of nearby orange groves, until he reached the Pasadena Art Museum, where he would spend the first hour of his day speaking in French to the gardener, who recited verse by Surrealist poet Paul Éluard.

The Duchamps had flown from New York to Los Angeles on the same plane as the dashing dark-haired Copley and the flamboyant young British Pop artist Richard Hamilton, who described himself as the only Duchamp scholar who had never seen an actual Duchamp. For Hamilton, like many of the young artists embracing Pop art, Duchamp was an ideal.

Duchamp's art and life exemplified rebellion against the establishment though, at seventy-six, he stood erect and slender, with immaculate clothes and manners and the angular features and sleek hair of a matinee idol. He had lived in New York since World War II but still epitomized French reserve.

Hopps, who was never very practical about money, spent double the exhibition budget of $12,000. Instead of creating a new catalog, Hopps tore out the relevant sections of Robert Lebel's authoritative new book on Duchamp, added his own handwritten marginalia, mimeographed the pages, and stapled them together.

The Arensbergs had given their collection to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1954 after decades of futile and frustrating negotiations with first the L.A. County Museum of History, Science and Art and then with UCLA. At Duchamp's urging, many of the larger pieces were shipped back to Los Angeles while numerous ready-mades were re-created for the show. Most of the younger generation of Los Angeles artists and collectors had never seen any of the work before.

The installation was not without its challenges. Since many of the gallery walls were covered with brown burlap, Hopps and his preparator Hal Glicksman designed a series of zigzag panels covered in the same color used on Duchamp's
Green Box
. They stood them in the center of the galleries to support Duchamp's 1912 Cubist paintings. Other galleries contained his optical experiments and his ready-mades. These were everyday objects that the artist had transformed into his own sculpture simply by renaming and reorienting them, such as the upturned urinal titled
Fountain
that had caused a scandal when shown in 1917 under his pseudonym R. Mutt. Duchamp had signed a bottle rack and given it to Robert Rauschenberg, who loaned it to the show. Another gallery was dedicated to chess with a regulation set on display as well as the pocket-sized boards that the artist had designed for his own use. The old Chinese mansion contained 114 pieces that established Duchamp as the unwitting pioneer of Pop art.

Andy Warhol, Billy Al Bengston, and Dennis Hopper at the 1963 Duchamp retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum

Photograph by Julian Wasser, © Julian Wasser, courtesy of Craig Krull Gallery, Santa Monica

For the second time in a week, Los Angeles was the place to be for denizens of the modern art world. Dealers, collectors, and artists arrived from New York and Europe. The dinner held before the opening was hosted by patrician art collector and museum board president Robert Rowan and his wife Carolyn and attended by trustees and old-guard arts patrons. However, it was the party after the opening that was remembered by anyone who scored a coveted invitation.

That landmark fete was held in the ballrooms of the nineteenth-century Hotel Green. The black-tie dress code meant another trip to the thrift store for artists Larry Bell and Billy Al Bengston, both of whom had more dash than cash. Craig Kauffman, son of L.A. County Superior Court judge Kurtz Kauffman, didn't have to scavenge. Ed Ruscha imported an attractive girlfriend from his hometown of Oklahoma City, and the couple looked like they were ready for their Hollywood close-up. Julian Wasser, a contract photographer for
Time
magazine, snapped Bengston and Hopper clowning with Warhol in front of Duchamp's 1914
Network of Stoppages
.

Warhol was in black tie but Taylor Mead was denied entrance for wearing Wynn Chamberlain's sweater, which was so large it came down to his knees. Hopps sorted it out but then Wasser pushed past them to get a photograph of Duchamp, which prompted Mead to start screaming, “How dare you! How dare you!” Warhol dryly observed, “The idea that anybody had the right to be anywhere and do anything, no matter who they were and how they were dressed, was a big thing in the sixties.”
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When Duchamp realized that Mead was an underground actor and poet, he cordially invited him to his table. But Mead soon took off dancing with Patty Oldenburg. She and Claes Oldenburg were living in Los Angeles for a year while creating performances and sewing the giant soft sculptures of everyday objects that Claes showed at the Dwan Gallery. Warhol was left to spend time talking to Duchamp and drinking too much champagne, which meant pulling over to the side of the road on several occasions on the drive home. “In California, in the cool night air, you even felt healthy when you puked—it was so different from New York.”
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Hundreds of artists and hipsters and hangers-on overindulged in pink champagne into the late hours. Duchamp's old running mate Man Ray had moved from Los Angeles back to Paris, but a few other old friends came to the affair, including Beatrice Wood, a seventy-year-old ceramist whose purported love affair with Duchamp and writer Henri-Pierre Roché was the basis for the 1962 film
Jules et Jim.
She exhausted three much younger partners by dancing all night long at the party, claiming that chocolate and young men were the secrets to her longevity. (The day before, she had hosted a luncheon for Duchamp at her home in Ojai, wearing Indian robes and serving food on her own golden lusterware.)

Hopper, predisposed to being the life of the party, recalled, “I stole the sign that said ‘Hotel Green' with a finger pointing. When I saw it, I recognized that it's the same shaped finger as from Duchamp's painting
Tu M'
. I got some wire cutters and went to get it. He signed the finger with ‘Marcel Duchamp, Pasadena, 1963.' So Hopper and Hopps made the last ready-made!”
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(This “Signed Sign” sold for $362,500 at a Christie's auction on November 11, 2010.)

Getting Duchamp's signature quickly caught on. Joe Goode pulled the pink cloth from one of the dining tables and asked Duchamp to sign it. He happily obliged. Hopper recalled, “We all signed it. Andy signed it as ‘Andy Pie'; Jasper Johns, Ed Ruscha, Larry Bell, Kenny Price.”
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Goode, who was subletting an apartment from Hopps, later managed to convince him to accept the souvenir in exchange for two months of back rent.

In an interview with
Los Angeles Times
art critic Henry Seldes, Duchamp said he wanted to avoid being “the victim of the integration of the artist into society.” He saw the direction of contemporary art as “very dangerous,” because it had become fashionable, while he believed that “great art can only come out of conditions of resistance.”
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Such resistance in the realm of contemporary art was about to disappear altogether, and even Duchamp dropped his Gallic reserve to admit, “Life begins at 70. This show is fun. It gives me a wonderful feeling.”
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That wonderful feeling was borne out in the following few days when he and Teeny were transported to Las Vegas by Copley, who had operated a gallery in Los Angeles in 1947 to show Surrealist and Dadaists such as Max Ernst, Man Ray, and Joseph Cornell, whose boxes were priced then at seventy-five dollars. Sales were so scarce, the gallery survived only six months.

The small plane had a curved seating area where collectors Betty Asher and Betty and Monte Factor took turns with Hamilton and Hopps in sitting next to Duchamp. After checking in at the Desert Inn, they dined at the Stardust Lounge, where Marcel and Teeny were treated to long-legged showgirls performing a risqué version of the Folies Bergère. A photograph of the event reveals everyone smiling broadly, apart from the Duchamps, who looked stunned. The group then drove downtown to see towering neon signs and glowing casinos, evidence of American extravagance beyond even their expectations.

When the others started gambling, Duchamp returned to his role of archvoyeur. Though he was fascinated by games and had devised a system of gambling in the 1920s that allowed him to break even during his stay at Monte Carlo, he refused to play. When Hopps pleaded with him to demonstrate the system, Duchamp slyly responded, “Wouldn't you rather win?”
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At the Stardust Lounge, Las Vegas, 1963: Teeny Duchamp, Richard Hamilton, Betty Factor, William Copley, Monte Factor, Walter Hopps, Betty Asher, and Marcel Duchamp

Duchamp saved his gamesmanship for chess. After they returned to Pasadena, he visited PAM on October 18, 1963, to play on the board set up in his own exhibition. The event was to prove the truth of Man Ray's observation that “there was more Surrealism rampant in Hollywood than all the Surrealists could invent in a lifetime.”
25

Eve Babitz, a curvaceous nineteen-year-old, was Walter Hopps's girlfriend, a fact that he was trying to keep from the notice of his wife Shirley. He had refused to invite Babitz to the museum opening or the grand party. When Babitz got a call from photographer Julian Wasser inviting her to play chess with Duchamp she leaped at the opportunity for revenge. “I was going to be pissed off for the rest of my life or pay them back,” she said.
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Duchamp was dressed for the chess match in a dark suit and a straw hat that he had acquired in Las Vegas. At nine in the morning, the museum was not yet open to the public, and Duchamp seemed unruffled when Wasser set up his equipment and told Babitz to remove her blue artist's smock. Nearby stood two large sheets of glass containing Duchamp's play on sexual frustration,
The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.
Babitz had just started taking birth control pills so her 36 DD breasts were larger than usual. “I thought they should be photographed really … for immortality,” she said later.
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Duchamp seemed more impressed by the fact that Babitz was the goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky, whose
Firebird Suite
he and Beatrice Wood had seen in Paris in 1910.

Babitz's lackluster chess didn't discourage Wasser from shooting roll after roll of film. Babitz, who later became a successful writer, knew the photographs would be a triumph, something that Hopps would look at for years. “I always wanted him to remember me that way,” she said.
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Babitz was hungover and perspiring under the hot lights, but she felt it was all worthwhile when her unsuspecting lover walked in. The nude Babitz coolly greeted him, “Hello, Walter.” He turned ashen and dashed into his office. Raised voices could be heard. Babitz recalled, “It made him return my phone calls, which is what I wanted out of life.”
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(Their affair resumed the following week when he flew with her to San Francisco to see the debut of
The Beard
, Beat poet Michael McClure's play about Jean Harlow and Billy the Kid.)