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1. 1 2018-08-15T06:56:34-07:00 Phil Ethington e37d40405599cccc3b6330e6c4be064cc03ef7a5 1950s Phil Ethington 2 Decadal Tag vistag 2018-08-15T07:23:42-07:00 Phil Ethington e37d40405599cccc3b6330e6c4be064cc03ef7a5

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• 1 2018-07-19T17:25:41-07:00 From Paris to New York City to San Francisco and Los Angeles: Duchamp's Beatnik Successors: 1912-1966 9 plain 2018-07-21T01:56:18-07:00

  Born in Glendale in 1932, Walter Hopps’ father was a doctor who had been born and raised in the Mexican oil-export city of Tampico. His grandfather had been a permanent Tampico resident since 1880s and the young Walter spent a year as a teenager with the elder Hopps, acquiring the nickname “Chico,” and remembering a household filled with Pre Columbian art. Schooled at home until junior high school, Walter attended Eagle Rock High School in the late 40s.  Hopps was a serious intellect, taking 3rd place honors with awards in science, but his precocious passion for cultural knowledge also led him into acts of rebellion. His classmate, the future Ferus Gallery artist Crag Kauffman, painted a “hard core modernist, Bracque-esque” version of the school’s mascot, a Cavalier, which the Principal labeled as Communist and “absolutely freaked out.” The gifted Kauffman nearly won a prize for an architectural drawing that was judged by Richard Neutra, but his entry was disqualified because he had placed a nude model in the rendering. “I cannot [over] emphasize,” recalled Hopps, “how much, in the late forties and early fifties, everything that looked modernistic, in terms of new art, was considered Communist.” Hopps entered Stanford University in 1950, but was suspended before the end of his freshman year for “having collaborated on putting out a pornographic issue of the Stanford Chapparel.”[2]
  
  While in the Bay Area, Hopps was able to indulge his passion for the artistic avant garde. San Francisco, long an outpost for American and international rebels, was home to a vibrant circle of Abstract Expressionists , which had an institutional base at the California School of Fine Arts. There, Duchamp's student Clay Spohn mentored Clyfford Still, who in turn joined the faculty and mentored Frank Lobdell, Jay DeFeo, and others. This “San Francisco School” mirrored the New York School of Abstract Expressionists such as Mark Rothko, who rejected representational, figurative art. Inspired by the still-revolutionary example of Marcel Duchamp and the Surrealist/Dadaist tradition, many in the San Francisco School went a step further by rejecting conventional standards of “beauty,” rendering their works intentionally ugly.

  Returning to Los Angeles in 1950, Hopps lived in the “slums of Brentwood” attending UCLA and fomenting a Beat movement on the West Side. The rebellious arts of that moment included jazz music and poetry. The Los Angeles Beats sought to combine all of these arts, playing improvisation off of the rigid, bureaucratic, conformist formalism of the Cold War and capitalist rationality. By 1952, Hopps and L. James Newman, a jazz fan and later producer, opened their first gallery, named Syndell, after Maurice Syndell, who had committed suicide in the middle of the desert. Hopps and Newman even remade the unfortunate man into an artist. In what became a running joke, numerous artists created “Syndell” works, placing them in shows for years thereafter.[3] Hopps and his circle sought “to establish ways that new and radical artists … could create working relationships with one another and engage a concerned public. This involved founding and literally building galleries managed and directed by the artists themselves. It involved artists trading their own art works with one another when no one else was interested [and] engaging the official art world and a sometimes confused public with as much direct confrontation and talk as possible.”  Indeed, they had little choice, because, as Richard Candida Smith and Sarah Schrank have made clear, this avant garde was openly hounded and persecuted by the Anti-Communist Otis-Chandler / LAPD regime.[4]
  
  “Everyone” in this circle “was unimaginably poor,” Hopps recalled. The general economy was overflowing with military-industrial wealth, but “the art world didn’t have it.” Painter George Herms called their poverty “economic censorship,” and Hopps “didn’t count on fifteen cents from my family. I couldn’t. They didn’t like what I was doing.” When one artist made a sale, they often shared some of the proceeds with the others.[5] The Los Angeles Beats loved everything that the mainstream of Cold War America abhorred: flagrant erotics, leftist politics, drugs, and underground jazz music. Their rebel practice had a firm foundation in poverty. They literally had nothing to lose.  
  
  Despite the bohemian lifestyle, no one who knew him underestimated Walter Hopps. Practically alone among his circle, Hopps was always clean-shaven and dressed in suit and tie (“fronting for the operation,” he later recalled). Already by the age of 20, in 1952, he taught informal art appreciation classes to the wealthy elite in Los Angeles, some of whom, interested in the avant garde, ventured into the Syndell, and later, the Ferus Gallery, wanting sincerely to know what these new revolutionary art forms were all about. Hopps showed a series of slides that began with Edward Hopper’s A Woman in the Sun then Hopper's student Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm, and then “I’d show them a [Joseph] Cornell,” the reclusive assemblage artist who made small boxes filled with found images and other objects. While not overtly hostile to Abstract Expressionism, Hopps showed a persistent preference for art that was not constrained by the narrow modernist rules codified by Clement Greenberg and his circle. Hopps especially appreciated new artists who drew on the Surrealist and Dadaist traditions of found-object assemblage, genre-busting, and confrontational, counter-cultural critique.
  
  While still in High School, Hopps had been inspired to study art history by visiting the collection of Walter and Louis Arensberg, Los Angeles residents since 1927 who had earlier been leading champions of Dada and Surrealist artists in New York City. That tradition was centrally represented by Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), who had already lived a long career in art and critical influence that can be seen, in retrospect, as a model for Hopps’ own. Duchamp the artist was a powerful innovator in the modernist, Surrealist, and Dadaist movements that spanned Paris and New York City. As a critic, dealer, and collector, he was an instrumental figure in the assembly of New York City’s major art institutions, advising not only the Arensbergs, but also Peggy Guggenheim and the directors of the Museum of Modern Art, Alfred Barr and James Johnson Sweeney in the their collection priorities. By the 1930s, Duchamp mostly abandoned art production in lieu of becoming a chess master, but remained very involved in the art world, as in his 1968 chess-music collaboration with composer John Cage, Reunion.
  
  Already with his Nude Descending a Staircase (1912), Duchamp disrupted the cubist movement and earned rejection from the avant garde itself. He went on to propound “anti-art,” “found art,” and “readymades,” or objects of vernacular material culture. Most infamously, Duchamp submitted a urinal titled "Fountain" and signed “R. Mutt” to the 1917 New York City show of the Society of Independent Artists, under Mutt’s name. As a fountain of influence on the rise of the Los Angeles arts revolution, the central themes of Duchamp’s artistic theory and practice are impossible to exaggerate. When Hopps was appointed curator of the Pasadena Art Museum in 1962, he mounted the first-ever retrospective of Duchamp the following year in 1963, crowning a direct channel to avant-garde Paris, playing chess with Duchamp as a performance artwork in the show itself.
  
  Adherence to Duchamp’s principles of anti-art, absurdity, three-dimensionality, and kinetics helps explain Hopps Southern California promotion of the San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionists--which had already drunk from Duchamp’s Fountain, principally via Clay Spohn’s tutelage under Duchamp in 1930s Paris. Hopps helped the budding Los Angeles collectors to appreciate Clyfford Still, Hassel Smith, and Richard Diebenkorn. Among his pupils were Marsha and Fred Weisman, and the wife of Weisman’s partner, Betty Freeman. Marsha Weisman was the sister of Norton Simon, who later founded one of the major Los Angeles art museums. Hopps essentially lived a double life. Smoking dope with his Beat friends—eventually becoming a heroin addict—he presented the clean front for the group. Collectors would pay his airfare to New York, so he could give them personal gallery tours. This clever, and in fact sincere, wooing of the monied classes, enabled Hopps to adopt the role of avant-garde intermediary, linking the two major established art capitals of New York and San Francisco, to Los Angeles, pollinating the latter, as it were, with path-breaking gallery shows and cultivating a base of patrons and collectors. It would be impossible to overestimate the pivotal role that Hopps played in the “birth of an art capital” in Los Angeles. He and his wife, Shirley, a grad student in Art History at UCLA, joined later by Ferus partner Irving Blum gave classes for years. “That entire first-generation of California collectors,” Blum later recalled, “came out of those classes.”[6]
  
  The defining elements of the Los Angeles Beats can be seen in the first of the important shows organized by Hopps during the Syndell years “Action One,” mounted in the abandoned 1910 merry-go-round at the base of the Santa Monica Pier. With a gay bar—the Tropical Village—across the street, the Santa Monica Merry-Go-Round had become “a real bohemian hangout.” “Action” was the key term. Breaking with the modernist insistence on stable genres of easel painting, sculpture, and architecture, Hopps and his circle brought a theatrical, performative element to the show, as Pollock had brought “action” to painting. Newman and Hopps had made tapes of jazz concerts and played these throughout the show, which they alternated with Merry Go Round calliope music . They also produced a full performance of John Cage’s revolutionary “Fourteen Radios” (19**), which required tuning fourteen radios to the prescribed frequencies on cue, using a stop watch. Action One prominently featured the San Franciscans Jay DeFeo and Clyfford Still, mixing them with the new work by the Los Angeles Beats, especially that of Craig Kauffman and Wallace Berman. The show was an underground success, attracting Beat poet Allen Ginsberg and writer Jack Kerouac from San Francisco. Hopps later recalled that the show was met with hostility by Los Angeles Times art critic Arthur Millier, but in fact, there is no mention of the show at all in the Times. Millier seems to have paid “Action One” the greater insult of ignoring the show entirely.
  
  One of the experimental, underground places of the Beat artists was a shop called Stone Brothers Printing, on Sawtelle on the Westside of LA. While filming Rebel Without A Cause (1955), the actual rebel James Dean (1931-1955) frequented Stone Brothers to see what Hopps and his friends were up to. He brought with him his young protégé, the actor and artist Dennis Hopper. Dean visited avant-garde galleries because he was living on the edge of the commercial world, and his mass cultural iconicity reified all those rebellious things kids could do with cars and sex. James Dean made the Los Angeles youth and car culture, not to mention landmarks such as Griffith Observatory, a major part of postwar Los Angeles’s placeness. He was an icon who straddled the worlds of John Entenza and Walter Hopps.
  
  Central figures in the of drama of artistic rebellion were Walter Hopps and Edward Kienholz, and the central place for this revolution was the Ferus Gallery co-founded by them at 736-A N La Cienega, in 1957.  Walter Hopps provided intellectual, curatorial, and organizational leadership; Kienholz provided existential energy and creativity, and the very essence of American liberty as an artist.  Bohemian culture rebels in the darkest days of McCarthyism, Hopps and Keinholz wove jazz music and street theatricality into the already-powerful stream of avant garde modernism directly transmitted from the Dada and Surrealist movements, and inspired a regional explosion of creativity by an electrified Los Angeles-area arts community. Collectively, the artists of the Los Angeles School achieved the ultimate culmination of an aesthetic revolution that literally ended a phase of Western art.  If Renaissance was a rebirth of classicism, the Los Angeles School saw to its death. 
  
  A crucial moment in this revolution was the first solo show for Andy Warhol at Ferus in 1962, a moment that epitomizes the avant-garde relationship between Los Angles and New York City.  It is summarized succinctly by Bob Bishop:

  "Critics contend the exhibition was the breakthrough moment that launched Warhol’s career. Even though it wasn’t successful critically or commercially at the time, it made history, as Warhol eventually reached the stratosphere of New York’s art world by way of L.A.
  
  Warhol didn’t attend the 1962 exhibition, but he was on hand for a second one at Ferus Gallery the following year when he showed “Gold Marilyn” for the first time, which he made in response to Marilyn Monroe’s death. His “Triple Elvis” was other main piece of artwork first exhibited at Ferus Gallery at the 1963 showing."Note

  
  Paris, New York, and San Francisco also worked toward this turning point, but Los Angeles emerged as a spearhead and a node connecting both Paris and New York City.
  
  [2] “Conversation with Walter Hopps,” 16 November 2004, in “Modern Art in Los Angeles: The Beat years,” Audiorecording. Getty Research Institute, Special Collections. (Hereafter GRI) Quotation at 58 min 22 sec.
  
  [3] “Conversation with Walter Hopps,” 16 November 2004, in “Modern Art in Los Angeles: The Beat years,” CD #2. GRI.
  
  [4] Quotation in Hopps (1967): n.p.; Candida Smith (1995); Schrank (2009): Ch. 3.
  
  [5] “Conversation with the ‘Beat Group’,” 19 November 2003, in “Modern Art in the Beat Years,” CD #7. GRI.
  
  [6] Blum quoted in Grenier, ed (2006): 100.