Download or read book The Ferus Gallery written by Kristine McKenna and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1950s California, and especially in Los Angeles, there existed few venues for contemporary art. To a whole generation of California artists, this presented a freedom, since the absence of a context for their work meant that they could coin their own, and in uncommonly interesting ways. The careers of Ed Ruscha, Wallace Berman and Ed Kienholz all begin with this absence: Ruscha turned to books as a means of dissemination, Berman pioneered mail art through his magazine Semina and in March 1957, Ed Kienholz, in collaboration with curator Walter Hopps, co-founded one of California's greatest historical galleries, Ferus. Within months of opening, Ferus, which is Latin for "wild," gained notoriety when the Hollywood vice squad raided Berman's first--and, in his lifetime, last--solo exhibition, following a complaint about "lewd material." Shows by Kienholz and Jay DeFeo followed, but 1962 was Ferus' annus mirabilis, with solo shows by Bruce Conner and Joseph Cornell, and the first solo shows of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol on the west coast. The following year, Ferus also hosted Ed Ruscha's first solo exhibition. After Kienholz and Hopps parted ways--Hopps went on to mount the first American Duchamp retrospective at the Pasadena Art Musuem--the reins were handed to Irving Blum, who got Ferus out of the red and ran the gallery until its closure in 1966. A Place to Begin is an illustrated oral history of this heroic enterprise. With 62 new interviews with Ferus artists and more than 300 photographs (most previously unpublished), it retrieves a lost chapter of twentieth-century American art. Edited by Kristine McKenna, noted expert and co-editor of the critically acclaimed Semina Culture.
Download or read book Ferus written by Gagosian Gallery and published by Rizzoli International Publications. This book was released on 2009 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Under the seminal direction of Irving Blum, Ferus Gallery quickly became one of the leading galleries on the West Coast, showing important and groundbreaking works--including Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans, Roy Lichtenstein's Drowning Girl, and Ed Ruscha's Los Angeles County Museum on Fire--and helping to launch the American Pop movement. The book was first published on the occasion of the 2002 exhibition of the same name at Gagosian's Chelsea gallery. A timeline documenting the Ferus gallery's history opens the fully illustrated catalogue, followed by an interview with Irving Blum by Roberta Bernstein and a critical discussion of Warhol's Campbell's soup can paintings by Kirk Varnedoe. This hardcover edition is 148 pages, with 93 color and 67 black-and-white reproductions, including evocative documentary photography by Dennis Hopper.
Download or read book The Dream Colony written by Walter Hopps and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-06-06 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Art Forum’s Best of the Year List A panoramic look at art in America in the second half of the twentieth century, through the eyes of the visionary curator who helped shape it. An innovative, iconoclastic curator of contemporary art, Walter Hopps founded his first gallery in L.A. at the age of twenty-one. At twenty-four, he opened the Ferus Gallery with then-unknown artist Edward Kienholz, where he turned the spotlight on a new generation of West Coast artists. Ferus was also the first gallery ever to show Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans and was shut down by the L.A. vice squad for a show of Wallace Berman’s edgy art. At the Pasadena Art Museum in the sixties, Hopps mounted the first museum retrospectives of Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell and the first museum exhibition of Pop Art--before it was even known as Pop Art. In 1967, when Hopps became the director of Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art at age thirty-four, the New York Times hailed him as "the most gifted museum man on the West Coast (and, in the field of contemporary art, possibly in the nation)." He was also arguably the most unpredictable, an eccentric genius who was chronically late. (His staff at the Corcoran had a button made that said WALTER HOPPS WILL BE HERE IN TWENTY MINUTES.) Erratic in his work habits, he was never erratic in his commitment to art. Hopps died in 2005, after decades at the Menil Collection of art in Houston for which he was the founding director. A few years before that, he began work on this book. With an introduction by legendary Pop artist Ed Ruscha, The Dream Colony is a vivid, personal, surprising, irreverent, and enlightening account of his life and of some of the greatest artistic minds of the twentieth century.
Download or read book The Ferus Gallery 1957 1961 written by Patricia A. Perbetsky and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Los Angeles written by Alexandra Schwartz and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Schwartz examines Ruscha's diverse body of work, including paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, books, and films, and discusses his relationship with other artists with whom he sparked the movement known as West Coast pop.
Download or read book Rebels in Paradise written by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2011-07-19 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The extraordinary story of the artists who propelled themselves to international fame in 1960s Los Angeles Los Angeles, 1960: There was no modern art museum and there were few galleries, which is exactly what a number of daring young artists liked about it, among them Ed Ruscha, David Hockney, Robert Irwin, Bruce Nauman, Judy Chicago and John Baldessari. Freedom from an established way of seeing, making, and marketing art fueled their creativity, which in turn inspired the city. Today Los Angeles has four museums dedicated to contemporary art, around one hundred galleries, and thousands of artists. Here, at last, is the book that tells the saga of how the scene came into being, why a prevailing Los Angeles permissiveness, 1960s-style, spawned countless innovations, including Andy Warhol's first exhibition, Marcel Duchamp's first retrospective, Frank Gehry's mind-bending architecture, Rudi Gernreich's topless bathing suit, Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider, even the Beach Boys, the Byrds, the Doors, and other purveyors of a California style. In the 1960s, Los Angeles was the epicenter of cool.
Download or read book Tosh written by Tosh Berman and published by City Lights Books. This book was released on 2019-02-12 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The triumphs and tragedies of growing up as the son of a famous Beat artist. TOSH is a memoir of growing up as the son of an enigmatic, much-admired, hermetic, and ruthlessly bohemian artist during the waning years of the Beat Generation and the heyday of hippie counterculture. A critical figure in the history of postwar American culture, Tosh Berman's father, Wallace Berman, was known as the "father of assemblage art," and was the creator of the legendary mail-art publication Semina. Wallace Berman and his wife, famed beauty and artist's muse Shirley Berman, raised Tosh between Los Angeles and San Francisco, and their home life was a heady atmosphere of art, music, and literature, with local and international luminaries regularly passing through. Tosh's unconventional childhood and peculiar journey to adulthood features an array of famous characters, from George Herms and Marcel Duchamp, to Michael McClure and William S. Burroughs, to Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell, to the Rolling Stones, Neil Young, and Toni Basil. TOSH takes an unflinching look at the triumphs and tragedies of his unusual upbringing by an artistic genius with all-too-human frailties, against a backdrop that includes The T.A.M.I. Show, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Easy Rider, and more. With a preface by actress/writer Amber Tamblyn (daughter of Wallace's friend, actor Russ Tamblyn), TOSH is a self-portrait taken at the crossroads of popular culture and the avant-garde. The index of names included represents a who's who of midcentury American—and international—culture. Praise for Tosh: "Tosh Berman's sweet and affecting memoir provides an intimate glimpse of his father, Wallace, and the exciting, seat-of-the-pants LA art scene of the 1960s, and it also speaks to the hearts of current and former lonely teenagers everywhere."--Luc Sante, author of The Other Paris "This is the story of a kid growing up inside of art world history, retelling his upbringing warts and all. A well-written, fast-moving book that is candid, funny, often disturbing, and never dull."--Gillian McCain, co-author of Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk "TOSH is a delightfully entertaining memoir filled with sly wit and a profound personal perspective."--John Zorn, composer "One could not wish for a better guide into the subterranean and bohemian worlds of the California art/Beat scene than Tosh Berman, only scion of the great Wallace. Tosh has a sly wit and an informed eye, he is both erudite and neurotic, and often hilarious."--John Taylor, Duran Duran "There's the life—and then there's the life. With TOSH you can have both. My life, and that of many who sailed with me, was formed by the 40's & 50's. TOSH takes you there."--Andrew Loog Oldham, producer/manager, The Rolling Stones "As the son of artist Wallace Berman, Tosh Berman had a front row seat for the beat parade of the '50s, and the hippie extravaganza of the '60s. It was an exotic, star-studded childhood, but having groovy parents doesn't insulate one from the challenge of forging one's own identity in the world. Berman's successful effort to do that provides the heart and soul of this movingly candid chronicle of growing up bohemian."--Kristine McKenna, co-author of Room to Dream by David Lynch "This is a beautifully written memoir, and I highly recommend it to those who are interested in the Sixties, Topanga Canyon, the Southern California art scene, and for those who wonder what it might mean to grow up as the son of one of our most acclaimed artists."--Lisa See, author of The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane
Download or read book Los Angeles to New York written by James Sampson Meyer and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the catalogue for an exhibition organized by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, which explores the considerable contributions of Virginia Dwan and her legendary gallery to post-WWII American art.It is being carefully curated by Press author James Meyer. Founded by Virginia Dwan in 1959, the Dwan Gallery was a leading avant-garde space with locations in Los Angeles and New York, presenting the art of Franz Kline, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Smithson, among others. Where the Los Angeles gallery featured abstract expressionism, neo-dada, and Pop, the New York branch reflected the emerging movements of minimalism, conceptualism, and land art. The activities of the Dwan Gallery transpired not just in and between Los Angeles, New York, and Paris, but also in the wilderness of the American West, where Dwan fostered a new genre of art known as earthworks (land art). A keen follower of the Parisian art scene, Dwan also gave many nouveaux realistes such as Yves Klein their debut shows in the United States."
Download or read book Art and the City written by Sarah Schrank and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Art and the City" explores the contentious relationship between civic politics and visual culture in Los Angeles. Struggles between civic leaders and modernist artists to define civic identity and control public space highlight the significance of the arts as a site of political contest in the twentieth century.
Download or read book John Altoon written by Carol S. Eliel and published by Prestel Publishing. This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first major book on John Altoon, a legendary figure of the Los Angeles art scene in the 1960s, examines the artist's work not only in the context of his peers but also considers his resonance for later generations of artists. Dynamic and often erotically charged, the drawings and paintings are intimately connected--Altoon's exuberant canvases both respond to and inform the primal energy of his works on paper. This book includes photographs of many previously undocumented works as well as a historical and contextual essay, a distinctive text by artist Paul McCarthy, and brief statements by Monica Majoli, Monique Prieto, Laura Owens, and Barbara T. Smith.
Download or read book Pop L A written by Cécile Whiting and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2008-08-04 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this original and engaging book, Cécile Whiting examines what Pop looked like when it left the highbrow cloisters of Manhattan's art galleries and ventured westward to the sprawling suburbs of Los Angeles.
Download or read book Art Politics and Dissent written by Francis Frascina and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Art, Politics and Dissent provides a counter history to conventional accounts of American art. Close historical examinations of particular events in Los Angeles and New York in the 1960s are interwoven with discussion of the location of these events, normally marginalized or overlooked, in the history of cultural politics in the United States during the postwar period.
Download or read book Andy Warhol and the Can that Sold the World written by Gary Indiana and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2010-02-09 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the summer of 1962, Andy Warhol unveiled 32 Soup Cans in his first solo exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles -- and sent the art world reeling. The responses ran from incredulity to outrage; the poet Taylor Mead described the exhibition as "a brilliant slap in the face to America." The exhibition put Warhol on the map -- and transformed American culture forever. Almost single-handedly, Warhol collapsed the centuries-old distinction between "high" and "low" culture, and created a new and radically modern aesthetic. In Andy Warhol and the Can that Sold the World, the dazzlingly versatile critic Gary Indiana tells the story of the genesis and impact of this iconic work of art. With energy, wit, and tremendous perspicacity, Indiana recovers the exhilaration and controversy of the Pop Art Revolution and the brilliant, tormented, and profoundly narcissistic figure at its vanguard.
Download or read book Jasper Johns written by Carlos Basualdo and published by Whitney Museum of American Art. This book was released on 2021 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This lavishly illustrated retrospective of Jasper Johns's work offers a new perspective on the artist's work based on his own enduring fascination with mirroring and doubles"--
Download or read book Made in Los Angeles written by Rachel Rivenc and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2016-04-01 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1960s, a group of Los Angeles artists fashioned a body of work that has come to be known as the “LA Look” or West Coast Minimalism. Its distinct aesthetic is characterized by clean lines, simple shapes, and pristine reflective or translucent surfaces, and often by the use of bright, seductive colors. While the role of materials and processes in the advent of these truly indigenous Los Angeles art forms has often been commented on, it has never been studied in depth — until now. Made in Los Angeles focuses on four pioneers of West Coast Minimalism — Larry Bell, Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman, and John McCracken — whose working methods, often borrowed from other industries, featured the use of synthetic paints and resins as well as industrial processes to create objects that are both painting and sculpture. Bell, for example, coated plate glass with films of material that alter the way the light is absorbed, reflected, and transmitted, while Kauffman employed a process usually reserved for commercial signs for his work. McCracken coated plywood with fiberglass then spray painted it with countless layers of automotive paints, and Irwin spray-painted discs of hammered aluminum or vacuum-formed plastics. The detailed study of each artist’s work is presented in the context of the emergence of modern art in Los Angeles, the burgeoning mid-twentieth-century gallery scene, and the light-infused LA cityscape. Initially undertaken as part of the Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A.1945–1980 initiative, this volume combines technical art history and scientific analysis to investigate conservation issues associated with the work of these artists, which are often emblematic of issues in the conservation of contemporary art in general.
Download or read book Pacific Standard Time written by Martin-Gropius-Bau (Berlin, Germany) and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2011 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This volume is published for the occasion of the Getty's citywide grant initiative Pacific Standard Time: Art in Los Angeles 1945-1980 and accompanies the exhibition Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture 1950- 1970, held at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles."
Download or read book Now Dig This written by Kellie Jones and published by Prestel Publishing. This book was released on 2011 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive, lavishly illustrated catalogue offers an in-depth survey of the incredibly vital but often overlooked legacy of Los Angeles's African American artists, featuring many never-before-seen works.
