of discrimination. I’m concerned with whether one can get into that vast body of work—and truly represent the vastness of Rauschenberg’s oeuvre, and yet still seem discerning.
HUO So it’s a paradoxical enterprise, to frame abundance without annihilating or reducing it.
WH Yes. We’re talking about using both spaces—both the uptown and the SoHo Guggenheim. That appeals to me.
HUO The last Rauschenberg retrospective you curated, in 1976—it must have been one of the first times a contemporary artist made the cover of The New York Times Magazine.
WH Yes.
HUO This leads to what I call the double-leg theory: an exhibition that is highly regarded by specialists but also makes the cover of Time—in other words, having one leg in a popular field and one in a specialized field.
WH Yes, I realized early on I couldn’t live without both fields. It isn’t made quite clear in Calvin Tomkins’ article [in The New Yorker], but early on, when I was at UCLA, I kept this small gallery—Syndell Studio—which was like a very discreet laboratory. I didn’t care if four or five people came, as long as there were two or three that were really engaged. I met any number of interesting people that way.
We had only one or two reviews written in all the years it was there. It didn’t matter. But, at the same time, I felt compelled to do this show of the new California expressionists in a very public place—in an amusement park on the Santa Monica pier...
HUO Was this the Action exhibition?
WH Action 1—in a merry-go-round building. It was near Muscle Beach. It attracted the most totally inclusive mix of people—Mom, Dad, and the kids, and Neal Cassady, and other strange characters, and the patrons of a transvestite bar nearby. I got Ginsberg, Kerouac, and those people to attend. It’s amazing they came. Critics I’d never met before showed up. It had a big attendance. So I wanted to work, as it turns out, both ways.
You can see this clearly in the most extreme show I’ve done in recent years, The Automobile and Culture—at MoCA, in downtown LA, in the early 1980s. It later went to Detroit. Paul Schimmel and I came up with the absurd premise. I owe the title to Pontus Hultén. What I was talking about doing was looking at the history of the automobile, from the late 19th century to the present—beautiful and interesting and important cars, no trucks, no motorcycles, just cars—as a kind of quotidian device and fetishistic emblem of cultural life in the 20th century. The automobile had its own aesthetic and its own engineering imperatives. I wanted to see that in a fresh survey of 20th-century art—in cases where the automobile becomes part of the subject matter and in other cases where I think the kind of mobility the car provides influences the art.
So, as you can imagine, it was a crazy show. When you start looking for these references—arcane and goofy but perfectly wonderful things—other things turn up. There’s an early Matisse in the show, a portrait of Madame Matisse sitting in the front seat of the car, looking through the windshield.
He composed the whole painting as a horizontal structure, based on the kind of horizontal windshields cars had in the 1920s. I had a wonderful picture by Alfred Stieglitz—a cityscape of old New York—where two things suggest the coming of Modernism. One is the steel frame of a skyscraper going up, and here, coming down the street, is a very early automobile—the first picture Stieglitz ever took that has an automobile in it.
I was very serious and intrigued with that 1984 show. But the local critics didn’t care for it much—the local critic here in Los Angeles.
HUO Did it bring a non-specialized audience to the museum?
WH It was very, very popular. People who would never come down to look at modern art were there.
HUO Your first gallery, the Syndell Studio, was an almost-private venue. Action 1 and Action 2, on the other hand, were very public venues. What about the Ferus Gallery? Was it a more in-between place for artists?
WH It was relatively more private, but less so than Syndell. Ferus was a complicated thing, in that when Kienholz and I ran it as partners from 1957 to 1958 we did it in our own clean, but bohemian, way. We did it just the way we wanted. We didn’t care whether we sold work or not. I had enough money to pay the rent. But a number of the artists we represented started getting impatient—they wanted more material success. So the later history of Ferus, after 1958—when I hired Irving Blum to be director—well, I didn’t compromise the kind of art, but it was meant to be more conventionally economic. I had no idea what the gross sales would have been at the old Ferus Gallery for a year—maybe $5,000, if that? In about eight months of the first year of the new Ferus, we’d sold $120,000 worth of art. But it was a thoroughly commercial enterprise at that point.
HUO So at first the idea was to create a platform?
WH That’s right. I mean, we could show this wonderful woman, Jay DeFeo, when there wasn’t anyone to buy her work. Now she’s in the Beat show at the Whitney. She’s a heroine, and deservedly so. The style of the first Ferus was to resemble what an artist’s working studio was like—or a salon that artists would run themselves, although they didn’t. Kienholz could be ruthless with other artists; he was a taskmaster. I was never as blunt as he was. Sometimes he would cancel a show if he didn’t think the work looked good enough. He would just say: “C’mon, get to work—let’s see something better. We’re not going to show junk. It’s not good for you, it’s not good for us.” The first Ferus looked as though it didn’t care whether it was successful or not. Somehow clients could tell that. People came to it like it was a little Kunsthalle.
The second one, with Blum, took exactly the opposite tack—it was to look very well-to-do, as if it were doing successful business—whether we were or not. And, I tell you, that approach works. It does work.
HUO So at the beginning it was almost like an artists’ collective?
WH Right. The solidarity between the artists was very strong. That’s the positive side. The negative side, by the way, is that the artists felt they had a ruthless say over who else would be part of the enterprise.
Robert Irwin, for example, was an artist who wasn’t with Ferus in the beginning, and his work was kind of weak—very lyric, easygoing, a not very powerful version of Diebenkorn. He was a conventional abstract lyric painter; his paintings weren’t bad, but they were of no particular distinction. He desperately wanted to be shown by Ferus, but there wasn’t a single artist in the Ferus Gallery—around Los Angeles, anyway—who wanted him in there.
I was president of the corporation. Being with him and looking at what he was up to—hearing what he was thinking about—I knew something was going to come of him. But a tyranny of the majority would have prevented it. So there are times when you just have to risk losing everyone’s good opinion and sort of ram it down their throats—that was one. So I just, by sheer will, forced an Irwin show in there. And he turned out to be quite an important artist, obviously. He knocked himself out with his first show trying to do the work. It owed a lot to Clyfford Still—it was a transition. And by his second show, things got different very quickly.
HUO At Ferus
