Rebels in Paradise Read online

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.”17

  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.”18

  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.”19

  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!”20 (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.”21 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.”22

  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.”23

  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?”24

  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.26

  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.27 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.28

  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.”29 (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.)

  While Wasser took dozens of photographs, the one that became a celebrated poster depicts Babitz seated on a wooden chair and leaning her elbows on the table so that her breasts dangle and her hair hides her face; Duchamp, with a neutral expression, holds a cigar and focuses on the board. For Duchamp, it was completely unplanned and therefore a perfect coda to his retrospective.

  * * *

  The back-to-back receptions in honor of Warhol and Duchamp invigorated the feisty Los Angeles art scene. Warhol said, “For a while there in the early sixties, it looked like a real solid art scene was developing in California. Even Henry Geldzahler felt he had to make a trip out once a year to check on what was happening.”30 A few months later, one of the city’s few progressive critics, Jules Langsner, wrote in Art in America, “In the space of a half-dozen years, the state of the Los Angeles art community has changed from the nuts who diet on nutburgers to a living and vital center of increasing importance.”31

  Eve Babitz and Marcel Duchamp play chess at Pasadena Art Museum, 1963

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

  A lively consensus emerged that these shows represented some sort of shift in terms of the city’s viability as a contemporary art center. Duchamp scholar Dickran Tashjian said, “The L.A. artists, who were outsiders, saw the success of Duchamp, who was an outsider, and thought, ‘Hey, if this guy can do it, so can we.’”32

  Encouragement from a rising star such as Warhol gave a boost to the artists who believed that their own unique contributions deserved to be recognized in New York and Europe. Most of those artists showed at Ferus, the first gallery in Los Angeles to capture the zeitgeist.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Ferus Gallery

  Before Ferus, art galleries owned by Felix Landau, Earl Stendahl, Dalzell Hatfield, Frank Perls, Paul Kantor, David Stuart, and others imported Impressionists, Cubists, Surrealists, and New York School Abstract Expressionists and occasionally showed some L.A. artists with modern leanings. However, this awareness and practice of modern art did not constitute much in the way of a scene. The city’s distinctive Modernist enterprise in art, as in architecture and design, attracted spirited individualists. Hopps explained, “Although a quasi-official Los Angeles avant-garde, centered around the post-Cubist painter Rico Lebrun, was visible throughout the city, alternative modern art could be seen in only a few experimental movie houses or the walls of bohemian cafés.”1

  Ferus, founded in 1957 by Hopps and artist Ed Kienholz, represented a group of Los Angeles artists who were friends—who hung out and supported one another in their attempt to create something that departed from the immediate past and embraced the aesthetics of the sixties. Their synergy with one another and with musicians, actors, photographers, fashion designers, and architects would eventually transform Los Angeles. Robert Irwin later said, “The idea of a career wasn’t an issue for any of us because if it had been we would’ve left and gone to New York like all the generations before us, because that’s where careers were made. The reason that generation of artists is so seminal to L.A. is because it was the first one that didn’t leave and made a commitment to stay in L.A.”2

  The Ferus Gallery gang: John Altoon, Craig Kauffman, Allen Lynch, Ed Kienholz, Ed Moses, Robert Irwin, and Billy Al Bengston, Los Angeles, 1958

  Photograph by Patricia Faure, © The Estate of Patricia Faure

  Virtually all of the artists who showed at Ferus in the early years were enamored of Abstract Expressionist artists Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, and others. These artists had toiled in poverty and obscurity for decades before finding support from patron Peggy Guggenheim or critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. The Ferus founders and artists admired the stubborn determination of the New York painters to make something original and authentic. For a few years, most of them emulated that gestural abstract style of painting, though it was difficult for them to accept the New Yorkers’ soul-searching angst. Also, on the West Coast, they were slightly behind the curve in their understanding of such painting, which they knew initially from black-and-white reproductions in magazines such as ARTNews and Studio International.

  In 1956, Pollock killed himself in a car crash. Within two years, his paintings and those of the other Abstract Expressionists started selling for large sums, and
the outsiders were suddenly insiders. The Abstract Expressionists were practically establishment in the opinion of young Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, who challenged virtually all of the ideas Rothko, De Kooning, and company held dear. Hopps and Kienholz, neither of whom had been to New York at that point, were not yet aware of such shifts and proudly showed gestural abstract painting from Northern and Southern California. For conservative Los Angeles during the Eisenhower years, such work was viewed as pretty radical.3

  They were quite the odd couple: The square-jawed, sandy-haired Hopps was so often outfitted in a suit and tie, sporting black, square-rimmed glasses, that his friends used to tease him about being in the CIA. In contrast, Kienholz was a cherubic farm boy and aspiring Beat with a receding hairline, a goatee, and an expanding belly. Both were autodidacts who were seemingly incapable of getting along individually in the conventional world. Together, they had a chance. “We couldn’t have been more different sorts of people,” Hopps said, “but it was clear to both of us that we had an agenda to further the kind of art that interested us in our own ways.”4

  Hopps insisted that the name of the gallery derived from Ferus hominus, which he believed to be an anthropological term for pre–Homo sapiens man. “They were described as being very hardy, irascible, dangerous beings and I thought that was an apt description of the artists I was involved with,” he explained.5

  On another occasion, Hopps said the gallery was named in honor of James Ferus, a talented teenager at Eagle Rock High School, Hopps’s alma mater, who had committed suicide. “It was two edged, something very involved about what we felt was living art and how it would be named after someone who was no longer alive.”6

  Walter Hopps

  Photograph courtesy of Nancy Reddin Kienholz

  Irving Blum insisted later that it meant “for us,” a gallery conceived as a support system for artists. In name as in all else, Ferus was many things to many people, and it gained a mythic reputation.