Rebels in Paradise (27 page)

 

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Gemini GEL

With an art magazine, a museum, and some seventy midtown galleries in Los Angeles, collectors started to feel a proper art scene was coming together, and no one was more energetic in their support than the Grinsteins, a couple who were small in stature but large in their enthusiasm. Stanley Grinstein shared his zest for modern art with Sidney Felsen, his friend and Zeta Beta Tau fraternity brother at the University of Southern California. After graduating, they continued to be friends in part due to their mutual interest in art. Grinstein took over his father's downtown surplus company and transformed it into one that sold, leased, and serviced forklift trucks. Felsen went into accounting. Both men were geared for such conventional careers but yearned for more creative endeavors.

In 1952, Grinstein married Elyse Schlanger, who had been a student with him at USC. Felsen was their best man. As a young couple, the Grinsteins joined the Westside Jewish Center board and its art committee. Elyse got to know artists personally as she picked up work that they donated for holiday charity sales. Stanley was a member of the men's support group at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where the art committee was led by painter Ed Biberman. (He was the uncle of Jeremy Strick, who would later become director of the Museum of Contemporary Art.) They made modest purchases of modern art from dealer Bud Holland, who came annually from Chicago to sell to the Los Angeles collectors. In 1962, Elyse and Stanley joined the L.A. County Museum of Science, History, and Art's newly formed contemporary art council.

After moving from midtown Carthay Circle into a sprawling Spanish-style house in Brentwood in 1965, the Grinsteins started hosting legendary parties. “The house shaped our life,” recalled Elyse. “If we hadn't had it, we couldn't have had all these great parties and we couldn't have had all the great houseguests: Man Ray, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Rauschenberg, Frank Stella.”
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Over the course of the same decade, 1955 to 1965, Sidney Felsen, a fastidious man with a sartorial sophistication exceptional at that time in Los Angeles, worked as a CPA for a small firm and then for the giant company Arthur Young. He spent weekday evenings and weekends taking painting classes. After taking a ceramics course at the art center in Barnsdall Park, he found that to be a better fit for his interests and carried on with it at Chouinard in the early 1960s. At times, Grinstein would come along to watch his friend and chat with the other artists. By then, Felsen had left Arthur Young and assumed the business of another accountant. He was not terribly excited about his work but in 1960, at a party at the Grinsteins, he had met a recently divorced beauty with three young children. He married Rosamund Faibish later that year, and in 1961 they had a daughter, Suzanne.
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They bought a house on Fifth Street and La Jolla Avenue in the same, largely Jewish, neighborhood where he was raised. Felsen had a family and meant to honor his obligations.

Then, after attending a workshop given by a European print publisher in 1965, he suggested to Grinstein that they consider publishing contemporary art prints. The Grinsteins invited to their annual Christmas party printer Ken Tyler, who had opened a lithography studio behind the Art Services framing shop founded by Manny Silverman and Jerry Solomon.

Tyler had been a technical director at the Tamarind Institute, a teaching facility founded in Los Angeles in 1960 by artist June Wayne. Funded by the Ford Foundation, Taramind was a nonprofit center to train printers in lithography, which had all but died as an art form in the United States. Kay Tyler, Ken's wife, served as curator. The Tylers left Tamarind to execute projects by individual artists, but their new company, Gemini Ltd., was struggling. Tyler agreed to become a master printer for Felsen and Grinstein, and their joint venture was renamed Gemini GEL, or Graphic Editions Limited.

Grinstein and Felsen each put in $10,000 (about $70,000 today) to start the business. In those early years, Gemini was a family operation. Rosamund worked as shipping clerk, carefully packing each print to be mailed, but soon became the de facto registrar, keeping track of the quantity and quality of the prints. They felt that the key to profitability was in selecting well-known artists whose prints could be sold through their galleries in New York and elsewhere. After being put off by such heavyweights as Rothko and De Kooning, they were able to land Josef Albers, as Tyler had worked with him on a previous project and the Grinsteins owned one of his paintings.

Albers, seventy-eight, was teaching at Yale and didn't want to travel but designed an edition of eight colored squares bordered by white lines. He mailed Tyler one-half of a cardboard with each color and retained the other half. Tyler matched the colors in the prints and flew with them back and forth to Connecticut several times to get the artist's approval. Half a year later, Gemini published their first edition. Felsen went over to the La Cienega offices of
Artforum
and handed the design for their first full-page ad to “a kid,” who was the art director: Ed Ruscha. When the magazine came out that fall, Gemini was overwhelmed by some three hundred requests. The prints were offered at $125 or the prepublication price of $100. “We sold a lot,” recalled Felsen.
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In 1966, the L.A. County Museum of Art held Dadaist Man Ray's first American retrospective, which was organized by Jules Langsner. (The show had a profound effect on Bruce Nauman.) Ray, born Emmanuel Radnitsky in Philadelphia, had moved to Paris in 1921. Displaced in 1940 by World War II, Ray relocated to Los Angeles for eleven years. He met dancer and artist's model Juliet Browner shortly after he arrived, and they were married in 1946 in a double wedding with Surrealists Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning. The Rays had moved back to Montparnasse in 1951 and were excited to be back in Los Angeles for the exhibition. They stayed at the Grinsteins' house, and parties were held in their honor. In exchange, Ray executed three lithographs for Gemini featuring photographs of his hands in tones of black and gray to resemble his so-called Rayograms. These photograms that he named after himself were made by placing any object, including his hand, on a piece of photographic paper and exposing it to light in the darkroom to create pictures of shapes without using a camera. Of the three lithographs, one was printed on Plexiglas. Once again, they were advertised in
Artforum
and sold briskly.

Encouraged, Grinstein and Felsen approached Sam Francis, the successful abstract painter who had moved to Santa Monica in 1961. He enjoyed playing the role of godfather to younger artists; Ruscha worked as his assistant for a time and recalled that when it came time to get paid, Francis would peel off a few of the thick roll of hundred-dollar bills that he carried in his pocket. Part of this largesse extended to Single Wing Turquoise Bird, a collective that included Fluxus artist Jeffrey Perkins. Francis funded the group's psychedelic light shows for rock bands playing at clubs around Los Angeles. Francis also supported the fledgling Gemini by creating a lithograph of primary colored splashes and drips. Again, it sold well.

However, the artist who effectively propelled their operation to profitability was Robert Rauschenberg. He was known for the prints that he had made for Tatyana Grosman's Universal Limited Art Editions press on Long Island. Rauschenberg had been coming to Los Angeles since 1962 to show with the Dwan Gallery and had created sets for and performed with Merce Cunningham's dance troupe on tour there. Through Douglas Chrismas, who showed his work at his Ace Gallery in Vancouver, Rauschenberg met Ken Tyler. In 1967, he agreed to create something unique for Gemini.

Rosamund recalled, “Bob, of course, is always interested in doing something new and innovative, and anybody who would present him with an idea of something he had never done before, that was the most interesting thing.”
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And the very premise of Gemini, she continued, was that “whatever the artist wanted to do, no matter how difficult it seemed, Gemini would do it.… We were very adventurous.”
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Rauschenberg told Felsen that he wanted to make a portrait of his inner self and asked if he knew anyone who could X-ray his entire body. As it happened, another of Felsen's fraternity brothers, Jack Waltman, was a physician who offered to take a series of X-rays to depict the entire torso. (There was no machine on the West Coast that could take an X-ray more than six feet in length.) Rauschenberg stacked the X-rays vertically and added various other details, including a drawing that he found on a curb of a child carrying a rocket booster that led to its title:
Booster.
The largest fine-art print ever made at that time, it was a groundbreaking achievement for the nascent publisher. Individual works by Rauschenberg had become relatively expensive so Gemini offered the print at $1,000. Again, it sold briskly. (Since, it has sold at auction for $250,000.)

Rauschenberg, handsome and extroverted, became great friends with the Felsens and the Grinsteins. He spread word of the publishing venture among all of his cronies in New York. After that, it was fairly easy to convince the top echelon of Pop and hard-edge abstract artists to come out to Los Angeles, all expenses paid, to make prints. “We're a support system, not a co-creator,” said Felsen. “Each artist is the captain of the ship while he or she is here.”
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Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg's former lover, went there to produce the Color Numeral Series. Stella, Oldenburg, and Ellsworth Kelly all made prints over the next few years. “Very important artists had gotten very famous very quickly, and there was a lot of excitement about beginning to collect, and many people were not able to buy paintings and sculpture by these particular artists, so prints, being multiples, enabled them to be able to afford to get works by these artists,” said Rosamund.
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The Gemini founders, priding themselves on their relationships with the Los Angeles artists, also published prints by Altoon, Ruscha, and Goode in 1967. As Gemini grew more successful, Kienholz, Hockney, Nauman, Berman, and Davis were invited to make prints. In 1976 Frank Gehry designed an edgy building of plywood and aluminum for the publisher on Melrose Avenue.

Bicoastal friendships were forged at the Brentwood parties where the Grinsteins served an informal buffet of cheeses, sausages, and breads with a full bar, which meant that guests occasionally wound up in the pool. “We had the New York artists of Gemini like Rauschenberg or Oldenburg and it was a kind of interaction with the local artists,” Elyse said. “Richard Serra, Bob Morris, and Jasper would be sitting around the table talking. We made a point of not taking photographs. It kept everything flowing open and easy.”
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One evening the New York Minimalist Carl Andre, who was wearing his trademark overalls, was becoming a little obstreperous with Larry Bell about the sort of art made in Los Angeles. The disarming and dapper Bell simply slipped his fingers under Andre's suspenders and said, “Carl, I'd really like to fuck you.”
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Stanley recalled, “There was a thing out here that you didn't live in New York and if you went back there, you were a traitor. It was a badge of honor of that older group that you didn't kowtow to the New York artist. We didn't know we were so totally insulated. Richard Serra said, ‘I know the difference between California artists and New York artists.' I said, ‘Really? What is it?' He said, “When New York artists make a work of art, they think how is it going to fit into the continuum, who is going to write about it, who is going to publish it and how many pictures. When L.A. artists make art, they just make art about how they feel.'”
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While the remark was clearly meant to be insulting, Stanley was unfazed. “I thought, you know, that is true. Artists here were out of that continuum of what happened after Matisse, Cézanne, Picasso. But you think about Billy Al taking pieces of tin and banging them up, or the Light and Space artists. These things were independently thought up out of the continuum and I think that is pretty interesting.”
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John Coplans had moved to Los Angeles around the inception of Gemini and observed the influences firsthand, saying it was “enormously important.”

“For the first time, the so-called mythical figures of the East became ordinary figures in the West,” he explained.
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On the other hand, excitement over the East Coast artists often eclipsed the cachet of the Ferus group. Irving Blum recalled, “Did that make for bad feeling? Yes. Did that make for resentment? Yes. Did that make for hostility? Yes. Yes. Yes.”
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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Between Form and Function: Frank Gehry

In 1964, architect Frank Gehry walked out of the Danziger Studio that he had designed and saw a tall, muscular character wearing dark glasses and staring intently at the gray concrete structure. Though the architect had met Ed Moses before, he greeted him with surprise. The artist had come to pay compliments to Gehry for the radical elegance of the graphic design studio, which stood like a grace note of Modernism along a stretch of Melrose Avenue crowded with old Spanish buildings and low-rise stucco shops.

The building was a breakthrough for Gehry, completed just two years after he had started his own firm. Off and on in the 1950s and early 1960s, he worked for Gruen and Associates. Gehry described Victor Gruen, who designed many of the postwar shopping centers in Southern California, as “a Viennese guy who trained me to be perfect.”
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