vol46_3-4-archives-of-american-art-journal

ARCHIVES OF AMERICAN ART JOURNAL 

A RC H I V E S O F A M E R I C A N A RT J O U R N A L VO L U M E 4 6 N U M B E R S 3 –4 FA L L 2 0 0 7 

60s 

THE

FROM THE DIRECTOR 

Endpapers inspired by a 1971 card 

from Richard Tuttle to Sam Wagstaff. 

Welcome to the inaugural issue of the newly redesigned Journal 

of the Archives of American Art. When I arrived at the Archives 

a little over one year ago as the new director, one of my first 

goals was to oversee a complete redesign of all of our printed 

materials. As frequently happens in organizations, over the 

years our newsletters, invitations, and the Journal have grown 

visually stale and, to my eye, no longer convey the energetic and 

intellectually engaged work being done by Archives staff and 

the scholars and researchers who are our primary constituents. 

Earlier this year we hired the design firm, Winterhouse, 

headed by William Drenttel and Jessica Helfand, to help 

us re-envision our publications and printed materials. They 

have proven to be a perfect fit for the job. Their sensitivity 

to intellectual and visual qualities of archival collections, 

coupled with their ability to present the material in a fresh 

and lively manner, have breathed new life into the Journal. 

I am deeply grateful to them and their team for the patience 

and thoughtful creativity they have brought to this project, 

and for the intelligence and expertise contributed by Darcy 

Tell and Jenifer Dismukes. 

It seemed especially fitting to launch the Journal’s new look 

with a series of essays highlighting the Archives’ important 

holdings documenting American art in the 1960s, a decade 

that witnessed profound changes. Not only was this a period 

of tremendous experimentation among artists, but it also 

ushered in a fresh breed of curators, dealers, and collectors 

who served as international cultural missionaries for the work 

of these young American artists. I am indebted to the authors 

whose essays so vividly capture the spirit of the era. 

This issue closes with a new feature — a project by the young 

artist Terence Gower. My intention is to invite other artists to 

contribute to successive issues of the Journal. Although it is 

their lives and work that are documented in the Archives, their 

perspective on our collections is engaged far too rarely. 

This project is a first step in rectifying this, and I appreciate 

Terence’s enthusiastic involvement. 

I hope that our members and subscribers are as pleased with 

these changes as I am and, as always, I look forward to hearing 

your comments and feedback.

C O N T R I B U T O R S 

James Crump’s film Black White + Gray: A Portrait of Sam 

Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe premiered at the 2007 

Tribeca Film Festival. He lives in New York City. 

Titia Hulst received a master’s degree in contemporary and 

modern art from the State University of New York at Purchase 

in 2006. She is currently pursuing doctoral studies at the Institute 

of Fine Arts at New York University. 

Jonathan Katz is the founder of the Harvey Milk Institute, the 

largest queer studies institute in the world, and the Queer Caucus 

for Art of the College Art Association. His forthcoming book, 

The Homosexualization of American Art: Jasper Johns, Robert 

Rauschenberg, and the Collective Closet, will be published by the 

University of Chicago Press. 

Jessica Dawson is a freelance art writer living in Washington, DC. 

She has written the Washington Post’s Galleries column since 

November 2000. She received her master’s degree in art history 

from George Washington University in 2007. 

David McCarthy is the author of The Nude in American Painting, 

1950 to 1980 (1998), Pop Art (2000), and H. C. Westermann at 

War: Art and Manhood in Cold War America (2004). He holds the 

James F. Ruffin Chair of Art and Archaeology at Rhodes College 

and is currently researching modern American artists’ opposition 

to imperialism and war. 

Judith Wilson is an independent scholar who recently retired 

after twenty years of teaching art history at the University of 

California, Irvine, Yale University, the University of Virginia, and 

Syracuse University. Her Ph.D. dissertation (1995, Yale) was on 

Bob Thompson. 

Marina Pacini is chief curator at the Memphis Brooks Museum 

of Art. In collaboration with the Toledo Art Museum she is 

organizing a Marisol retrospective, scheduled to begin its national 

tour in 2010. 

Cover: Detail of preliminary 

sketches for Roy Lichtenstein’s 

painting As I Opened Fire, 1964. 

Terence Gower is a Canadian artist who works primarily with 

strategies of representation in modernist architecture, with 

a special focus on Mexican modernism. He has exhibited his 

installations and videos in museums, galleries, and public sites 

in Europe, Latin America, the United States, and Canada. 

He divides his time between New York City and Mexico City. 

2 ARCHIVES OF AMERICAN ART JOURNAL 46: 3–4

I N TH I S I S S U E 

04 

Art of Acquisition: 

The Eye of Sam Wagstaff 

James Crump 

14 

The Leo Castelli Gallery 

Titia Hulst 

28 

Reading Watchman Through the Archive 

Jonathan Katz 

36 

Virginia Dwan Los Angeles 

Jessica Dawson 

46 

Defending Allusion: 

Peter Saul on the Aesthetics of Rhetoric 

David McCarthy 

52 

Underknown: Bob Thompson 

Judith Wilson 

60 

Tracking Marisol in the Fifties and Sixties 

Marina Pacini 

66 

The Castle: Esther McCoy 

A Project by Terence Gower 

ARCHIVES OF AMERICAN ART JOURNAL 46: 3–4 

3

In his book Letters to a Young Contrarian, Christopher Hitchens 

muses on the character Alain in Roger Martin du Gard’s novel 

Lieutenant Colonel Maumort. For Alain, “the first rule — he calls it 

the rule of rules — is the art of challenging what is appealing. You 

will notice that he describes this as an ‘art’: it is not enough simply 

to set oneself up as a person who distrusts majority taste as a matter 

of principle or perhaps conceit; that way lies snobbery and 

frigidity.” Alain implies that true opposition requires structure for 

belief, intellectual preparation, aesthetic drive, passion, and true 

conviction, traits useful to describe the twentieth-century curator, 

collector, and aesthete Samuel J. Wagstaff, Jr. (1921–1987). For 

nearly three decades in the arts, Wagstaff constantly challenged 

the status quo, first offering new ways of interpreting contemporary 

art and later going against the current as a groundbreaking 

collector and scholar of photography. 

Wagstaff’s “eye” was anomalous. At different points in his 

life, he also took up collecting, among other areas, African tribal 

art, pre-Columbian art, Old Master drawings, and decorative arts 

in silver, pursuing each of these seemingly disparate fields with 

intensity and rigor. The decisiveness of his visual taste was based 

on risk taking, iconoclasm, and authentic discovery, qualities that 

also were manifest in his personal life — skating “where the ice is 

thin,” he called it in 1978. As the auctioneer Philippe Garner eloquently 

put it, Wagstaff leaped first and “he let the rationalizing 

happen later.” 

For Wagstaff, “challenging what is appealing” was not the reaction 

of a snob or a frigid intellect, though he was known to be 

intolerant of those who didn’t share his passion or clarity of vision, 

and he occasionally displayed a “‘fuck you’ attitude to everyone 

who didn’t agree with him,” as his fellow collector and friend 

Clark Worswick remarked. Wagstaff’s impatience had rather more 

to do with what was being edited out and what was being overlooked 

by scholars and historians overly concerned with traditional 

notions about art — linear progressions that presupposed 

excellence, refinement, and absolute taste. Far from being a grandstander, 

though, Wagstaff worked relatively quietly and deliberately, 

on the “periphery,” as he once described it. He considered 

majority opinion in the arts to be suspect, perhaps even anachronistic. 

Audiences needed to be provoked, to be jostled from their 

lethargy and complacency in order to open up fully the imagination 

and the psyche to vital new forms of art, to be “turned on” as 

Wagstaff said, to receive the “pleasure,” and to feel the “kick” of 

challenging art. As curator and collector, Wagstaff always knew 

he was going against the grain and that some of his actions were 

certain to cause “general outrage,” as he remarked about his 1969 

Detroit Institute of Arts exhibition “Other Ideas.” “All art is an attempt 

to make the viewer take a fresh look at everything,” Wagstaff 

noted, “including himself.” Perhaps more than anything else, this 

represents Wagstaff’s life credo as he negotiated the higher echelons 

of the international art world of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. 

Art of Acquisition 

The Eye of Sam Wagstaff 

JA M E S C R U M P 

Opposite: Portrait of Sam Wagstaff, 

newsprint, hand colored and stamped 

by Ray Johnson. Photograph by Alwyn 

Scott Turner. 


5

As one can gather by examining his correspondence and writings 

today, much of it housed in the Smithsonian’s Archives of American 

Art, Wagstaff’s was a rarefied world, where “high” and “low” collapsed 

onto themselves and charting new territory as a curator 

was tantamount to art-making itself. 

Wagstaff entered the arts late in his career, having spent the 

better part of the 1950s working in advertising for the Madison 

Avenue firm Benton and Bowles. His was a somewhat privileged 

background. He grew up on Central Park South in New York and 

attended prep school at St. Bernard’s, the Harvey School, and 

Hotchkiss before going on to Yale, where he studied classics 

and theater. Completing her son’s application to Hotchkiss, where 

she lobbied successfully for Wagstaff to be a “scholarship boy,” 

Olga (Wagstaff) Newhall (née Piorkowska) wrote that in youth Sam 

was particularly “talented at decorating.” Wagstaff later claimed 

to have begun collecting as a child, when he put together a group 

of miniature cacti while living with his mother in Palma, Mallorca, 

before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. “All the Wagstaffs 

have been collectors,” he declared in 1987, the year of his untimely 

death from AIDS. “If they had a nickel, they collected with nickels. 

If they had a dollar, they collected with dollars.” After serving 

during the D-Day invasion of Normandy, Wagstaff returned to 

the United States. He made one of his first acquisitions by the late 

1940s, when he bought a floral painting by the American painter 

Charles Demuth. 

In 1957, at the age of thirty-six, Wagstaff entered New York 

University’s Institute of Fine Arts to study art history with the legendary 

scholar Richard Offner. Wagstaff’s years in Offner’s orbit 

were transformative. Among the most important classes he 

took — and mastered — were Offner’s courses in connoisseurship, at 

the time a rapidly waning mainstay of art-historical research and 

analysis. For Wagstaff, connoisseurship was not a hollow notion 

but rather the touchstone for his prescient tastes. The traditions 

of connoisseurship that he soaked up at the Institute may best explain 

his hungry eye, though desire played a key supporting role. 

In these years, Wagstaff was tenacious in acquiring the visual 

knowledge that later served him well as a curator and collector. If 

he didn’t already have an amazing eye by the time he began classes 

with Offner at the Institute, he certainly honed his visual prowess 

there. Wagstaff’s first exposure to Offner’s work may have come 

at Yale, whose collection Offner had analyzed in Italian Primitives 

at Yale University. The author also of Studies in Florentine 

Painting and influential essays on Italian Renaissance painting, 

Offner used a noniconographic approach to evaluating works of 

art, focusing instead on issues of style and technique, an approach 

that Wagstaff relied on throughout his life. 

Wagstaff’s range of interests and knowledge in the history 

of art were diverse from the beginning. At Yale, for instance, he 

had demonstrated an early interest in classical art and architecture. 

Later at the Institute, one of the first courses Wagstaff took 


was in ancient architecture with the renowned archaeologist Karl 

Lehmann. In a period predating the specialization and narrow 

focus of today’s art historians, Wagstaff in fact studied nearly everything. 

As his friend Richard Tuttle suggested, Wagstaff looked 

at all art on its own terms, neither prejudicing nor privileging 

one form over another. “Art is art,” Tuttle stated, and for Wagstaff 

“whatever beauties he found in contemporary art were also what 

he found in historical art.” In terms of his eye, Tuttle continued, 

Among the gifted, there are also those at even the genius level. 

Every eye needs development and if it doesn’t need development 

it needs to become aware of itself, and how it becomes aware of 

itself, and also the relation between creativity and seeing without 

going through an intellectual process. . . . Sam had no trouble 

looking at details. 

Wagstaff found himself at a crossroads toward the end of three 

years at the Institute. His dilemma was whether to go directly 

into a museum job or accept a coveted David E. Finley Fellowship 

(sponsored by the National Gallery of Art) to spend two years in 

Europe. Both were exceptional opportunities, for which only elite 

candidates were considered. Recalling his quandary, Wagstaff 

remembered in 1975 that Offner emphatically suggested he go to 

Europe and take advantage of the time to study and visit important 

collections. Wagstaff’s other chief adviser, James Rorimer, 

a well-known power broker in the museum world and founding 

curator and later director of the Metropolitan Museum’s Cloisters, 

took a more pragmatic view of Wagstaff’s future, telling him to 

“go to work right away.” Rorimer had in fact already contacted the 

Wadsworth Atheneum and its director, Charles C. Cunningham, 

about Wagstaff, who was being considered for a curatorial position 

at the museum as early as 1959. It was the kind of opportunity 

that few students of art history have waiting for them before graduation, 

but “I really wanted to go to Europe,” Wagstaff later said. 

“I liked Charlie [Cunningham],” but, he suspected that they “might 

kill each other.” Wagstaff departed for Europe in 1959, and typically, 

never looked back. 

Offner had numerous contacts and directed Wagstaff’s travels 

in Europe, opening doors and suggesting how best to spend his 

valuable time. He likely introduced Wagstaff to legendary connoisseur 

Bernard Berenson at I Tatti shortly before Berenson’s death 

at age ninety-four. He also introduced Wagstaff to John Pope- 

Hennessy, curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London 

and a leading historian of the Italian Renaissance. For Wagstaff, 

to be guided through European collections by the author of several 

important art-historical texts, including A Sienese Codex of the 

Divine Comedy, Paolo Uccello: Paintings and Drawings, and Fra 

Angelico, was an enormous opportunity. 

The American museum network in the early 1960s hadn’t 

evolved much since the first generation of directors graduated 

Futzie Nutzle [illustrator Bruce 

Kleinsmith] to Sam Wagstaff, n.d. 


7

I knew I was going into it 

whole heartedly, but I didn’t 

know it would be this bad. 

from Paul Sachs’ museum training program at Harvard. 

Wagstaff’s mentor Rorimer was a protégé of Sachs’, and together 

with his fellow students Alfred H. Barr, Jr., A. Everett “Chick” 

Austin, Jr., Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Jere Abbott, and Kirk 

Askew, he was part of a revolutionary guard that changed arts 

leadership in America. If there was a line from which Wagstaff 

descended it was these men — versed in the classics, medieval 

painting and sculpture, and European modernism — who in the 

postwar period were increasingly at odds with the “new” art that 

was emerging in America. Wagstaff distinguished himself from 

his mentors almost immediately, developing an expansive range 

of interests that took him beyond many of his peers. 

Though he was focused professionally on late Gothic and early 

Renaissance Italian painting, by the late 1950s Wagstaff was 

also cruising the Manhattan gallery scene whenever he had a free 

moment. On Saturday mornings, according to Tuttle, Wagstaff 

would wake up early and set off on foot, walking miles to visit 

the most important galleries, making side stops at the studios of 

artists he knew. The last five years of the decade were as exciting 

as any previous era in the New York art world, with small and more 

established galleries competing for the attention of a burgeoning 

crowd of sophisticates. The Betty Parsons Gallery was showing 

Ad Reinhardt, Ellsworth Kelly, and Agnes Martin; the Panoras 

Gallery, Donald Judd; the Heller Gallery, Roy Lichtenstein; the 

Martha Jackson Gallery, Louise Nevelson and Frank Lobdell; 

the Sidney Janis Gallery, Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, and 

Mark Rothko. Tibor de Nagy Gallery showed Larry Rivers, Grace 

Hartigan, Kenneth Noland, Frank Stella, and Helen Frankenthaler; 

the Stable Gallery, Cy Twombly, Joan Mitchell, and Lee Krasner; 

and the Leo Castelli Gallery, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.These 

artists were precursors to what lay ahead in the early 

and mid-1960s, when Andy Warhol and Pop, Minimal, Conceptual, 

and Performance art took the art world by storm, and Wagstaff 

came into his own as a collector and curator. 

In 1961, Wagstaff accepted a curatorial position at the 

Wadsworth Atheneum, a museum with a lively and distinguished 

past. According to Wagstaff, “The trustees [of the Wadsworth] 

were very tired when they hired Charlie [during the war years]. 

Charlie wasn’t bored, but I think he was ready for more fun and 

games. . . . He always wanted to do some things like [legendary 

Wadsworth predecessor Chick] Austin. But [he didn’t] know how.” 

Cunningham had taken over at Hartford when cultural activity 

was reduced significantly. All through his tenure at Hartford he 

endeavored to return to the excitement of the Austin years, and 

he recognized in Wagstaff an individualist spirit who might help 

fulfill this goal. 

Wagstaff and the Wadsworth, it turned out, were the perfect 

match at the perfect moment. Wagstaff soon had heads spinning 

with such innovative exhibitions as “Continuity and Change” 

(1962) and “Black, White, and Gray” (1964). He often provoked 


museum trustees, patrons, and visitors 

by the sheer audacity of his aesthetic 

choices. “He liked to surprise 

people,” renowned Museum of 

Modern Art curator John Szarkowski 

remarked much later. “ It was 

part of Sam’s makeup to think that 

what he did would drive others 

crazy.” In New York and elsewhere, 

word traveled fast that a tall, 

handsome new curator with a 

compelling intellect had begun to 

stir things up in Hartford. It was in these 

years that Wagstaff began his voluminous correspondence (now 

in the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art) with a diverse 

range of artists working in painting, sculpture, Performance, and 

Conceptual art. They included Robert Motherwell, Josef Albers, 

Merce Cunningham, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Lee 

Byars, Lee Krasner, Barnett Newman, Andy Warhol, David Smith, 

Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, Lee Bontecou, Donald Judd, 

Nam June Paik, Richard Tuttle, Dan Flavin, Grace Hartigan, Philip 

Guston, Tony Smith, Robert Morris, and Yvonne Rainer. But this 

simple list hardly reveals the full range of interests and extraordinary 

interactions found in the letters, Mail Art, and official correspondence 

from this relatively unknown period of Wagstaff’s life. 

Postcard from Ad Reinhardt 

to Sam Wagstaff, 1964. 

Postcard from Robert Morris 



9


What is clear from the cache at the Archives is that Wagstaff 

enjoyed the lively exchange of letters during his years at the 

Wadsworth, and later at the Detroit Institute of Arts, where he was 

hired as curator in 1968. Not only are many of these missives helpful 

in gauging the activities of the people and personalities of the 

time, but they also reveal Wagstaff’s enthusiasm and gamy playfulness 

with those whom he admired or was courting professionally. 

The letters also show that many of those writing confided in 

him to an extraordinary extent their ideas, aspirations, and plans. 

Wagstaff in these years was known for his intensity, his 

serious mien, and his buttoned-down Brooks Brothers appearance. 

The correspondence found in Washington often suggests a lighter, 

more relaxed side of his personality. Many artists seemed to 

rely on Wagstaff for expert opinions and, on occasion, comic relief. 

Humor is found throughout these exchanges, some of it hilarious, 

as in the correspondence with the artist Ray Johnson. 

Often struggling to make ends meet, in their letters to Wagstaff, 

a number of artists begged him for the money he owed for works 

either acquired for his employer or for his own private collection. 

Unlike the present day, in the 1960s there were fewer perceived 

conflicts of interest when a curator bought work he was simultaneously 

promoting within an institution. Wagstaff stretched 

his personal resources and compulsively added to his own collection 

throughout his years at Hartford and Detroit. “Could you 

pay me before Christmas?,” Diter Rot [a.k.a. Dieter Roth] wrote in 

an undated letter, adding parenthetically, “I [sic] poor and in need.” 

”Dear Sam, could you please send 50 dollars toward the collage 

you have already paid half for?,” Johnson queried. From the Union 

Square West “Factory” (where he was shot in 1968), Warhol wrote, 

“Dear Sam, can you send me the rest of the money for the Flower 

paintings? We’re going to buy a building and we need cash right 

away, Hugs, Andy.” 

Wagstaff supported a broad array of art from the 1950s, 1960s, 

and 1970s, acquiring several works by Warhol, Agnes Martin, Ad 

Reinhardt, Philip Guston, and even Jackson Pollock, whose late 

painting The Deep he acquired from the artist’s widow, Lee Krasner. 

In an undated letter to the sculptor Tony Smith from around 1968, 

Wagstaff wrote, “The Deep may be slipping away. It seems that 

when Lee found out what Heller had sold one of his Pollocks to 

MoMA for, she took all hers off the market prior to upping the prices. 

Oh dear! I knew it was too much of a bargain at its price.” 

Wagstaff stealthily acquired the painting. “I have been offered 

$225,000 for The Deep,” Wagstaff wrote to Smith in January 1970. 

“I paid $190,000 — but, I wonder if it isn’t worth more. Should I 

keep it? I don’t need the money though of course I could always do 

something with some of it. I don’t want to denigrate the picture or 

the artist. Any ideas?” Today of course, the Pollock would fetch 

many millions, but for Wagstaff the thrill was in the discovery. He 

eventually dropped Abstract Expressionism for edgier art — Pop, 

Minimalism, and even Earthworks — before his complete plunge 

Opposite: Diter Rot [Dieter Roth] 



11

Card sent by Richard Tuttle to Sam Wagstaff, 1965. 

into photography in 1973, a year following his first meeting with 

photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who would become his lover 

and soul mate. 

Artists often tend to be self-obsessed and narcissistic, traits 

that Wagstaff also shared, and as a collector-curator he took part 

in a number of revealing exchanges during this period, some car- 

ried out in letter-writing campaigns that went on for months. 

Responding to Wagstaff’s thoughtful 1964 invitation to visit 

Hartford, for instance, the sculptor David Smith jotted on the 

typewritten original, “No Sam — I do not like to go places and I’ve 

got too much work to do and I have no obligation to Hartford. It 

even ended up in costing me money to exhibit with Wadsworth. 

Greetings David S.” In an October 1969 postcard response to 

Wagstaff’s invitation to do an edition of his work in Detroit, the 

artist Carl Andre wrote, “I have never done graphics or multiples 

... I have always thought such bore the same relation to artworks 

as stock certificates do to the means of production.” 

Criticizing the Documenta art fair, which takes place every five 

years in Kassel, Germany, Walter De Maria wrote on 4 September 

1968: “If you did not come to Europe — and missed Documenta — 

I would say — you did not miss anything because outside of 

J. Beuys there seemed to be no European of status and most of 

the American work had been seen in N.Y.” A year earlier, De Maria 

had begun to correspond with Wagstaff about “land projects,” including 

his renowned Lightning Field near Quemado, New 

Mexico. “Sam,” De Maria wrote on 20 November 1967, “I am afraid 

that if much is written or spoken about projects none will be 

done. This is my paranoia speaking.” On 21 January 1964, at the 

moment he was breaking through with his radical light sculpture, 

Dan Flavin wrote to Wagstaff that “Bob Rosenblum on seeing 

my fluorescent tubes said that I had ‘destroyed painting’ for 

him. He was euphoric. He switched the light on and off several 

times because he wanted to sense ‘the difference.’” 

Perhaps the most touching correspondence in the Archives 

is that between Wagstaff and Tuttle during Tuttle’s undergraduate 

years at Trinity College in Hartford. Tuttle, whose letters are 

marked by uncertainty about the direction of his life and work, 

confided unreservedly in the older, more experienced Wagstaff. 

The Tuttle-Wagstaff correspondence underscores how Wagstaff 

enjoyed acting as a mentor. Wagstaff was in many ways a teacher 

of aesthetics, though he carefully chose to whom he would impart 

his knowledge. Taking an interest in many younger artists, 

he remained dutiful in his support and friendship. His extant 

letters from these years underscore a remarkable level of energy 

spent simply giving encouragement and, sometimes, advice. 

Wagstaff was the model for a number of later curators and 

collectors. An aesthete with a firm knowledge of the past, he was 

always changing course, staying open to discovery, and vehemently 

marking out an ideal way of seeing and collecting that 

made statements both about himself and about the destiny of art. 


Collaged postcard from Richard Tuttle 


Watercolor-and-ink drawing from 

Richard Tuttle to Sam Wagstaff, 1971. 

The correspondence housed in the Archives of American Art, a 

veritable who’s who in the visual arts, suggests how in the years 

before he met Mapplethorpe and started collecting photographs 

Wagstaff contributed to New York’s growing dominance in the 

international art world. His private and public acts, made in a 

simpler era now past, continue to resonate in today’s frenzied, 

self-congratulatory art market. 

Quoted material is taken from the Samuel Wagstaff Papers 

at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; 

from interviews conducted by the author; and from 

secondary sources. 


13

The Leo Castelli Gallery 

TITIA HULST

Andy Warhol, Leo Castelli, 1975. 

Previous Page: Leo Castelli and his artists, 

1982. Photograph by Hans Namuth. 

WAS THE FIRST DEALER 

TO ACHIEVE BROAD 

COMMERCIAL SUCCESS 

FOR AMERICAN AVANT- 

GARDE ARTISTS 

Since the development of the modern art market in the late nineteenth 

century, the achievement of commercial success for new art 

has depended on the activities of powerful dealers. In France, Paul 

Durand-Ruel fulfilled this role for the Impressionists, Ambroise 

Vollard for the Post-Impressionists, and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler 

for the Cubists. In the United States, this type of commercially 

powerful dealer did not emerge until the late 1950s, when Leo 

Castelli (1907–1999) brought a number of innovative business 

methods to the art-dealing world. 1 In fact, many of the practices of 

powerful art dealers today are rooted in Castelli’s pioneering efforts 

in the late 1950s and early 1960s. 

Leo Castelli was the first dealer to achieve broad commercial 

success for American avant-garde artists, and he represented 

many of the most important artists of the postwar period, including 

Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, 

Donald Judd, and Bruce Nauman. Castelli’s promotional activities 

had spectacular results. When ARTnews published its tally of the 

“Ten Most Expensive Living Artists” in May 2004, six of them (Johns, 

Rauschenberg, Stella, Cy Twombly, Richard Serra, and Nauman) 

had been discovered, nurtured, and promoted by Castelli. 2 While 

Castelli’s success has been widely documented, the methods 

behind his efforts on behalf of his artists in the early years of his 

gallery, which opened in 1957, are less well known. 

Castelli’s singular ability to promote his artists effectively in 

Europe played a crucial role in the postwar development of the 

market for American contemporary art. His extraordinary promotional 

efforts were, in fact, a crucial force in propelling New 

York to the dominant position it has today by helping to shift the 

center of the art market away from Paris. The conventional wisdom 

among art historians is that this happened concurrently 

with the rise of Abstract Expressionism in the late 1940s, but I 

believe this is wrong. 3 Contemporary accounts in business and 

art magazines show that Paris continued to be the center of the 

commercial art world throughout the 1950s. Castelli’s efforts to 

promote American avant-garde art culminated in the successful 

campaign for Robert Rauschenberg to win the prestigious 

international Grand Prize for Painting at the 1964 Venice Biennale. 

Rauschenberg’s award can be viewed as a signal event in the commercial 

triumph of new American art and the international business 

model developed by Castelli. 

In the early 1950s, the Abstract Expressionists enjoyed significant 

critical success, but they barely had a toehold in the market for 

contemporary art. These painters had a very difficult time showing, 

let alone selling, their work, and records show that sales in 

the 1940s and early 1950s were at best extremely modest. Jackson 

Pollock’s two shows at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery sold poorly, 4 

and he fared little better at the Betty Parsons Gallery. Willem De 

Kooning’s exhibitions at Charles Egan’s gallery were financial 

failures. 5 Samuel Kootz, who opened his gallery in 1945 showing 

William Baziotes, Robert Motherwell, and Adolph Gottlieb, also 


eported little in the way of sales. As Kootz 

put it, “Quite frankly, we could not have existed 

unless I had Picasso shows. Picasso 

paid continuously for the period of the first 

ten years of the gallery’s existence. If we 

had to exist on the sales of our American 

men, we would have been dead at the end of 

those ten years.” 6 

As Kootz’s quote suggests, selling contemporary 

French art in New York in the 

1940s and 1950s was not nearly as difficult 

as selling contemporary American art. 

Indeed, while the Abstract Expressionists 

were struggling to make ends meet, the 

market in New York for European art, especially 

French art, was flourishing as a 

result of an economic boom during and 

after World War II. Leo Castelli witnessed 

the demand for French contemporary art 

first hand. He had arrived in New York as 

a refugee from Europe in 1941, and, after 

military service, actively catered to 

the demand of American collectors of 

European work as the North American 

partner of his friend René Drouin, with 

whom he had briefly run a Paris gallery 

before the war. Unlike most of the expatriate 

European artists and dealers at the 

time, Castelli quickly forged friendships 

with the impoverished group of downtown 

painters, including De Kooning, who 

were loosely associated in what became 

known as The Club. Because he could get along with both the uptown 

art establishment, which included European expatriate 

artists and dealers, and the downtown artists, Castelli connected 

the old and new worlds. He remarked later, “I formed another 

kind of bridge between Europe and the American painters: I 

seemed to be the only European actually . . . who seems to have 

understood them, and not only understood them . . . they were my 

enthusiasm really.” 7 

Castelli played an important role in The Club’s famous 1951 

“Ninth Street Show,” which showcased the New York painters’ revolutionary 

work and is now considered a defining moment in the 

history of Abstract Expressionism. Not only did Castelli pay for 

the paint on the walls and the printing of the flyer (designed by 

Franz Kline), but he also helped select the seventy-five or so works 

for the show and smoothed over the political infighting and resentments 

that surfaced in the very diverse group of artists. By 

Castelli’s own count, the show was hung and rehung about twenty 

times, as many of the artists expressed dissatisfaction with the 

Advertisement for the Leo Castelli 

Gallery, summer 1964. 


17

UNDERSTOOD THAT 

INCREASING AMERICAN 

SALES SUCCESS IN 

EUROPE WOULD BE 

CRUCIAL FOR THE 

DEVELOPMENT OF AN 

AMERICAN MARKET 

FOR CONTEMPORARY 

AMERICAN ART 

position of their work relative to others. 8 His exemplary manners 

and his diplomatic approach defused the acrimony between the 

artists, and the show gave Castelli his first taste of success as a 

promoter of a significant new movement. 

In 1954, the market for fine art received a significant boost 

from the federal government when the tax code was changed to allow 

gifts of fine art to museums to be categorized as tax-deductible 

charitable donations (based on estimated market value) on 

personal income tax returns. The new provision allowed donors to 

take this deduction when they made their gifts known, while keeping 

possession of the art works during their lifetimes. 9 This made 

collecting art an attractive financial proposition, and American 

businessmen and investors took note. In 1955 and 1956, Fortune 

magazine ran two lengthy articles about the investment potential 

of art, ranking painters and collectors in terms usually reserved 

for the stock market. Most notably, Fortune identified a new class 

of American “venture capital” collectors who, as highly salaried or 

prosperous lawyers, physicians, and businessmen, were willing to 

spend up to twenty-five thousand dollars on a painting. Fortune 

believed these people to be most plentiful in smaller capital cities 

throughout the United States. 10 

For the most part, however, these collectors refrained from 

purchasing the new American art produced by the New York School 

painters, preferring instead the work of their European counterparts. 

The problem was that the venture capital collector was not 

convinced of the investment potential of works by American avantgarde 

artists. This could be attributed in part to the lack of a persuasive 

and single-minded dealer promoting these artists nationwide 

and to the absence of support from important taste-making institutions 

such as the Museum of Modern Art. 11 But most importantly, 

the lack of investor confidence in the value of American avantgarde 

art also reflected the fact that few Europeans were buying 

American work. As Kootz noted pointedly in Art in America, “The 

French artist has an undoubted advantage over the American in 

that his work is saleable on the international market. As everyone 

knows, the work of Americans is not.” 12 

Leo Castelli had come to the same conclusion and was contemplating 

opening a gallery in Paris with the express purpose 

of promoting advanced American art. In a letter to Alfred H. Barr, 

Jr., at the Museum of Modern Art, dated 26 October 1955, describing 

his idea for such a gallery, he expressed great concern that the 

Abstract Expressionists were going unnoticed by European collectors. 

13 The letter makes clear that he understood that increasing 

American sales success in Europe would be crucial for the 

development of an American market for contemporary American 

art. Castelli observed that 

the American public itself is often reluctant to give its full 

appreciation and support to U.S. artists who have not yet 

received the European stamp of approval; and, while many 


new arrivals from Europe — not infrequently watered-down 

versions of trends which have originated in this country — 

shown here by our museums and galleries meet with immediate 

success, parallel efforts to promote American art in Europe 

have had, at best, a succès d’estime. 14 

Castelli believed it was essential that the gallery be located in 

Paris because, in his words, “owing to longstanding habits of 

thought, Paris still reign[ed] supreme in the world of art, both as 

center and fountainhead.” The failure of Castelli to obtain financing 

for his Paris gallery showed the disinclination of the New York 

art establishment to expand the audience for American avantgarde 

painting. The largest dealers of contemporary American art, 

Samuel Kootz and Sidney Janis, remained quite content to sell to 

the handful of collectors interested in the American avant-garde 

and supplement their incomes with the sale of works by the more 

popular European artists. 

Unable to find backing for the Paris venture, Caselli opened the 

Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in February 1957 with an exhibition 

that included a mix of well-known European and American 

artists as well as a few new European painters. He showed works 

by David Smith, Pollock, De Kooning, and Jean Dubuffet, along with 

works by more established modernists like Piet Mondrian, Francis 

Picabia, Alberto Giacometti, Theo van Doesburg, Robert Delaunay, 

and Fernand Léger. The show was the first concrete manifestation 

of the dealer’s belief that American collectors needed to feel that 

the American artists were on par with the Europeans. 

Castelli’s skills at marketing were evident in the gallery’s first 

year. To cite one example, he shrewdly hooked his audience with 

his first “Collectors’ Annual” exhibition, which opened in December 

1957. For this show, Castelli invited twenty prominent collectors 

to select a “single work that they found significant or likeable,” 

reported the Times, noting it as a “novel idea.” 15 The design of the 

exhibition’s announcement listed the collectors, presented as a 

solid block of names, much more prominently than the artists they 

had chosen for the exhibition. With names like Richard Brown 

Baker, Mr. and Mrs. Roy Neuberger, and Mr. and Mrs. Ben Heller, 

the list was a who’s who of collectors of American contemporary 

art. 16 The design projected an importance, stability, and cohesiveness 

that was noticeably absent in the scattering of artists’ names 

below the fold. Castelli’s announcement was a first indication of 

the important role collectors came to play in the development of 

American avant-garde movements, especially Pop Art, in which 

the enthusiasm of collectors and their high profile in the press, 

rather than critical appreciation, provided the basis for success. 17 

The “Collectors’ Annual” exemplifies the tactics Castelli was 

beginning to formulate for the promotion and sale of vanguard 

art. Not only did the show put him in direct and active communication 

with the most important contemporary art collectors in 

New York, but it also publicized the fact that many of them had 


19



21

Leo Castelli in his New York City gallery, 

1960. Photograph by Eliot Elisofon. 

Previous Spread: Crated American art 

arriving at the Venice Biennale, 1964. 

been buying works from Leo Castelli. Although he later dismissed 

it as “sheer propaganda, a social sort of Madison Avenue type of 

promotion,” the exhibition was a significant preliminary to what 

can be considered, after the “Ninth Street Show,” one of the most 

important exhibitions of the 1950s: the first solo show of Jasper 

Johns’, the young artist Castelli had discovered when visiting a 

group show at New York’s Jewish Museum. Johns’ 1958 show of 

paintings of flags and targets, immediately followed by an exhibition 

of Rauschenberg’s combines, was widely seen as a decisive 

moment in the development of postwar art. Both exhibitions made 

a clean break with the dominant Abstract Expressionist aesthetic, 

and Johns and Rauschenberg greatly influenced the next generation 

of artists, including those associated with the Pop Art movement 

of the 1960s. 

Castelli had a strong ambition to make his mark on art history. 

After his arrival in New York in 1941, he had spent hours at 

the Museum of Modern Art studying Barr’s genealogy of twentieth- 


century art history. 18 Castelli was determined to continue this 

genealogy with his own artists. Having been closely associated 

with Surrealism first in Paris and then in his early years 

in New York, and having been associated with one of the defining 

moments of Abstract Expressionism, Castelli felt he was well 

suited to recognize, promote, and shape the artists who would 

succeed the Abstract Expressionists. He believed that in Johns 

and Rauschenberg he had identified key figures who could lead 

American art into a new direction. 

The success of the Johns exhibition and the failure of the 

Rauschenberg show have been well documented over the years. 19 

Nevertheless, Castelli committed himself wholly to both artists. 

He purchased a work from each show and started paying 

each artist a weekly stipend. 20 In return for these cash advances, 

Castelli had the right (but not the obligation) to purchase their 

work at a 50-percent discount of the sales price. While New York 

dealers sporadically had used this patronage model in the past 

(Peggy Guggenheim famously paid Pollock $300 per month), most 

American dealers operated on the consignment system, which did 

not require a financial commitment: the dealer merely agreed to 

show an artist’s work in return for a percentage of the price of 

works sold. 21 Paying an artist regardless of his or her sales was 

viewed as revolutionary in New York, and Castelli is often credited 

with the introduction of this practice. While these stipends are 

most often discussed as an example of Castelli’s generosity, they 

actually also made good business sense. Such payments ensured 

his artists’ loyalty, and they also raised Castelli’s credibility as 

their promoter. He made sure that collectors (and the press) were 

aware of his personal financial stake, thus underscoring the investment 

potential of the work. 22 

The switch from the consignment system to the stipend system 

also had a powerful effect on the promotional activities 

Castelli undertook on behalf of his artists. Because he purchased 

his artists’ works outright, Castelli had a direct incentive to find a 

market for their work, even at a reduced commission, so he could 

recoup his investment. He realized that he would need to access 

the broader base of collectors spread around the country — for 

instance, the kind of venture capital collector described so aptly in 

Fortune magazine. 

Castelli’s most instrumental contribution to the postwar 

American art market was that he set out, quite deliberately it 

seems, to provide the validation of American avant-garde art that 

was needed to activate these collectors. By pursuing exhibition 

opportunities in contemporary art museums nationwide; by publicizing 

his artists, collectors, and their lifestyles in American general-interest 

publications; and, very significantly, by selling their 

art directly to European collectors, Castelli was able to convince 

these collectors of the investment potential of his artists’ work. 

Equally at home in Europe and fluent in most European languages, 

Castelli decided to pursue exhibition opportunities for his 

FORMED ANOTHER 

KIND OF BRIDGE 

BETWEEN EUROPE 

AND THE AMERICAN 

PAINTERS 


23

BELIEVED THAT IF 

RAUSCHENBERG TOOK 

THE GRAND PRIZE 

FOR PAINTING AT THE 

VENICE BIENNALE, 

IT WOULD PROVIDE 

THE EQUIVALENT OF 

A EUROPEAN “SEAL 

OF APPROVAL” FOR 

CONTEMPORARY 

AMERICAN ART 

artists in Paris, Italy, and Germany. 23 Conditions there were ideal 

for Castelli. Collecting art had been a European tradition for many 

centuries, and sophisticated collectors were abundant. The market 

for contemporary art had been blossoming in Paris. Prices for contemporary 

artists had increased sharply after 1950, and bold, revolutionary 

work by young artists was in great demand throughout 

the decade. 24 Fortunately for Castelli, Europeans had tired of the 

School of Paris well before the Americans did and were looking for 

something new and different. 25 

Castelli’s efforts to expose European buyers to the work of 

Rauschenberg and Johns quickly met with success. Only one year 

after their first solo shows in 1958 at the Castelli Gallery, the dealer 

managed to arrange one-man exhibitions for Rauschenberg in 

Rome and Düsseldorf and for Johns in Milan and Paris. By contrast, 

it had taken Jackson Pollock nine years from his first exhibition 

at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery to have 

his first solo show in Paris. By 1962, Johns’ work had been seen in 

Paris, Milan, Stockholm, Bern, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Houston, 

Boston, Chicago, Dallas, San Francisco, Seattle, and New York. 

Rauschenberg had shown in Rome, Düsseldorf, Paris, Kassel, São 

Paolo, and in Yugoslavia, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, 

Denmark, and Japan. In the United States, his work had been seen 

in New York, Columbus, San Francisco, Milwaukee, Seattle, Dallas, 

Des Moines, Houston, Pittsburgh, and Newport. This geographic 

span is all the more remarkable considering the costs (particularly 

crating and transportation) associated with exhibiting 

Rauschenberg’s large-scale work, expenses that had been considered 

prohibitive by the artist’s previous dealer. 26 

This aggressive pursuit of exhibition opportunities for his artists 

led Castelli to develop what can be called the global cooperative 

gallery model. 27 Convinced that increasing the exposure of his 

artists would help sales as well as establish reputations, Castelli 

reached out to galleries across Europe. Castelli made it financially 

worthwhile for European dealers to promote his artists actively 

by not collecting commissions on work sold by these dealers. This 

flexibility was extended to American dealers as well. Irving Blum, 

who ran Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in the early 1960s, recalled 

that Castelli was willing to split his commissions fifty-fifty, and at 

times even go beyond that. Blum contrasted Castelli’s generosity 

with Sidney Janis, who he said would “allow me ten percent which 

would barely cover my shipping one way.” 28 

One indication of Castelli’s success is that some of the most 

significant American art works from the 1960s are now part of 

European collections. A 1995 Whitney publication documenting 

the impact of American art on Europe in the early 1960s confirmed 

that “any American institution mounting a retrospective of almost 

any major American artist of these years has to borrow key works 

back from Europe. This is a reversal of the earlier trend in which 

American collectors snapped up vast numbers of the master works 

of European modernism.” 29 (The European appetite for American 


art continued unabated throughout the 

1960s and 1970s. In 1973, Castelli reported 

that 70 percent of all his sales outside New 

York were to European collectors.) 

Castelli’s promotion of Rauschenberg 

and Johns culminated at the 1964 Venice 

Biennale. Not content to let their work simply 

speak for itself, Castelli marshaled all 

the resources at his disposal to secure a 

win for Rauschenberg. He believed that if 

Rauschenberg took the Grand Prize for 

Painting, it would provide the equivalent of 

a European “seal of approval” for contemporary 

American art. After all, the award 

had almost routinely been conferred on the 

School of Paris artists popular with 

American collectors. 30 Castelli blitzed 

Venice, orchestrating a special exhibition 

venue for his artists’ work and an elaborate 

marketing campaign that included 

placing major ads in all international art 

magazines, distributing photographs and 

flyers freely to all visitors, and organizing 

lavish banquets and private viewings for 

jurors. Rauschenberg took the prize. 

One year after Rauschenberg’s win 

in Venice, the first auction ever dedicated 

exclusively to the sale of contemporary 

American art took place at the Parke-Bernet 

Gallery in New York. The highest price, 

$37,000, was paid for De Kooning’s 1955 

Police Gazette. Rauschenberg’s Express, 

from 1963, sold for $20,000 — a surprising 

sum compared to the sales prices for the 

established Abstract Expressionists Kline 

($18,000) and Rothko ($15,500). 31 Castelli’s marketing strategy 

seemed vindicated by this extraordinary sales result for 

Rauschenberg; an independent auction market had come into 

existence for contemporary American art following critical and commercial 

success in Europe. American artists finally had the credibility 

they needed to compete fully in the international art market. 

Popular acceptance and success provided for a dramatic change 

in lifestyle for the new generation of artists. As Allan Kaprow observed 

in 1964, now the best of the avant-garde artists were famous 

and financially comfortable, unlike their Abstract Expressionist 

predecessors. “If artists were in hell in 1946,” he wrote, “now they 

are in business.” 32 The prosperous circumstances of Rauschenberg 

and Johns (Rauschenberg even drove a white Jaguar in 1960!) 

stood in sharp contrast with the romantic trope of poverty that 

surrounded the American artist in the 1940s and 1950s. 

French cartoon satirizing Robert 

Rauschenberg’s win at the Venice 

Biennale, summer 1964. 


25

This shift in fortunes was met with suspicion by old-guard 

critics. Harold Rosenberg, who had been an early supporter of the 

Abstract Expressionist movement, lamented in an essay for the 

New Yorker that “the necessity for an avant-garde has been replaced 

by the whimsicalities of competitive bidding.” 33 Similarly, 

when the critic and art historian Barbara Rose wrote that Castelli 

“has helped to make the whole country art-conscious through his 

cooperation with curators, critics, and writers,” she worried in the 

same sentence, “whether the creation of a mass public for art is a 

good thing or not is a question that troubles me.” 34 

The ambivalence of the art world about this newfound commercial 

success extended to Castelli. The avant-garde dealer had 

long been seen as a sentimental type. As Steven Naifeh pointed out, 

in people’s minds “a genuine picture dealer ought to be at the same 

time an intelligent connoisseur, ready if need be to sacrifice what 

seems to be his immediate interests to his artistic convictions; he 

should prefer to fight speculators rather than join in their activities.” 

35 As a consequence of his relentless promotion of his artists, 

Castelli was often viewed as an unscrupulous manipulator, the 

antithesis of this romantic notion. 36 

In fact, Castelli’s businesslike approach to art dealing can 

be seen as mirroring the artistic project of his young artists 

Rauschenberg, Johns, and Stella, who all looked to break with their 

predecessors’ practices. Rauschenberg, for example, had mocked 

the romantic myth of the spontaneous brushstroke in Factum I 

and Factum II, two paintings created with identical “spontaneous” 

gestural brushstrokes in the Abstract Expressionist style. Stella 

had posed as a businessman in his photo for the catalogue accompanying 

the “Sixteen Americans” exhibition at the Museum of 

Modern Art, denying any reference to the image of the artist as a 

paint-spattered bohemian. 37 

Auguste Renoir held the view that by the late nineteenth century 

the market, not the academy or critics, was the final determinant 

in the success of art. “Get this into your head,” the painter 

reportedly said. “No one knows anything about it. There’s only one 

indicator for telling the value of paintings, and that is the sale 

room.” By that measure, Castelli achieved spectacular results, and 

his single-minded pursuit of success for his artists created the 

blueprint for art dealing as it is practiced today. 38 


1 Famous New York dealers 

Alfred Stieglitz and Peggy 

Guggenheim had a major 

influence on the art world 

of their time, but neither 

succeeded in establishing a 

strong commercial market for 

the new art they championed. 

Sales of avant-garde American 

art lagged far behind sales 

of European (mostly French) 

contemporary art, despite 

pre–World War II government 

programs like the WPA, the 

general rise in prosperity of 

middle-class Americans during 

and after World War II, and 

tax law changes in 1954 that 

favored the purchasing of art. 

2 Kelly Devine Thomas, 

“The Ten Most Expensive 

Living Artists,” ARTnews, 

May 2004, 118. 

3 See also Deirdre Robson, 

“The Market for Abstract 

Expressionism: The Time 

Lag Between Critical and 

Commercial Acceptance,” 

Archives of American Art 

Journal 25, no. 3 (1985), 19–21. 

4 Jasper Sharp, “Serving 

the Future: The Exhibitions 

at Art of This Century,” in Susan 

Davidson and Philip Rylands, 

eds., Peggy Guggenheim and 

Alfred Kiesler: The Story of 

Art of This Century (New 

York: Guggenheim Museum 

Publications, 2004), 300, 321. 

5 Mark Stevens and 

Annalyn Swan, De Kooning: 

An American Master 

(New York: Alfred A. 

Knopf, 2004), 315. 

6 Interview with Samuel 

Kootz conducted by Dorothy 

Seckler, 13 April 1964. Archives 

of American Art, Smithsonian 

Institution (hereafter AAA). 

7 Interview with Leo Castelli 

conducted by Barbara Rose, 

July 1969, AAA. 

8 Ann Hindry, ed., Claude 

Berri Rencontre/Meets Leo 

Castelli (Paris: Renn, 1990), 

85. Accounts differ about the 

extent of Castelli’s involvement 

in covering expenses and 

selecting artists, but all agree 

he was the only Club member 

who could have installed the 

show since he was not an artist 

and did not have work in the 

show. See also Bruce Altshuler, 

The Avant-Garde in Exhibition 

(New York: Harry N. Abrams, 

1994), 154–159. 

9 John Russell Taylor and 

Brian Brooke, The Art Dealers 

(New York: Charles Scribner’s 

Sons, 1969), 70. 

10 Eric Hodgins and Parker 

Lesley, “The Great International 

Art Market, II,” Fortune, 

January 1956, 132. 

11 Between 1940 and 1960, 

Jackson Pollock was the only 

New York School artist who 

had a solo exhibition at the 

Museum of Modern Art (1956). 

Museumgoers were more likely 

to see French moderns, as the 

museum mounted solo shows 

by Matisse, Picasso, Léger, 

Rouault, Bonnard, Vuillard, 

Soutine, Toulouse-Lautrec, 

Seurat, Gris, Monet, Tanguy, 

and Tinguely, among others, 

in this period. See Rona Roob, 

“The Museum of Modern Art: 

Painting and Sculpture Loan 

Exhibitions, 1940–1963,” in 

The Museum of Modern Art 

at Mid-Century: At Home and 

Abroad, Studies in Modern 

Art 4 (New York: Museum of 

Modern Art, 1994): 200–204. 

12 Dorothy Gees Seckler, 

“Gallery Notes,” Art in America, 

October 1955, 46–47. 

13 Leo Castelli to Alfred H. 

Barr, Jr., 26 October 1955. Alfred 

Hamilton Barr papers, Museum 

of Modern Art (microfilm copy 

available at AAA, reel 218). 

14 Ibid. 

15 Stuart Preston, “Art: 

Collectors’ Choice,” New York 

Times, 21 December 1957. 

16 Announcement in “Leo 

Castelli,” artist file, Museum 

of Modern Art Archives. 

17 See Barbara Haskell, 

Blam! The Explosion of Pop, 

Minimalism, and Performance, 

1958–64 (New York: Whitney 

Museum of American Art, 1984). 

18 In 1988, Leo Castelli 

donated Bed, the first 

Rauschenberg work he had 

purchased, to the Museum 

of Modern Art, noting the 

donation was “in repayment 

of a debt of gratitude I owe 

the museum and its founding 

director, Alfred Barr, for 

having been my great mentors.” 

John Russell, “Leo Castelli, 

Influential Art Dealer, Dies 

at 91,” New York Times, 

23 August 1999. 

19 The Johns exhibition sold 

out; only two works (including 

Bed, to Castelli) were sold 

from Rauschenberg’s show. 

The collector who had 

purchased Collage in Red 

returned it for a refund. 

Calvin Tomkins, Off the Wall: 

Robert Rauschenberg and the 

Art World of Our Time (New 

York: Penguin Books, 1982), 145. 

20 Castelli could not recall 

the exact amount in his 

interview with Paul Cummings. 

Sidney Guberman reported, 

however, that in early 1960 

both Johns and Rauschenberg 

were receiving $75 per week. 

Sidney Guberman, Frank Stella: 

An Illustrated Biography (New 

York: Rizzoli International 

Publications, 1995), 45. 

21 This tradition resulted 

from the nineteenth-century 

import model, whereby 

New York dealers received 

paintings from European 

dealers on consignment rather 

than dealing with the artists 

themselves. See Peter Watson, 

From Manet to Manhattan: 

The Rise of the Modern Art 

Market (New York: Random 

House, 1992). 

22 A perfect example is 

the caption in Life that 

accompanied a large color 

photograph of Castelli and 

his artists’ works. Under the 

heading “Gains on Young 

Americans” the caption noted 

that “By taking a risk on 

young, unknown Americans, 

Dealer Leo Castelli has made 

gains for both himself and 

the artists. Here in his New 

York gallery he stands by five 

prime investments.” Life, 19 

September 1960. Reproduced 

in Susan Brundage, ed., Jasper 

Johns: Thirty-five Years [with] 

Leo Castelli (New York: Leo 

Castelli Gallery, distributed by 

Harry N. Abrams, 1993), n.p. 

See photograph on page 22. 

23 Alan Jones and Laura de 

Coppet, The Art Dealers, rev. 

ed. (New York: First Cooper 

Square Press, 2002), 98. 

24 Raymonde Moulin, 

The French Art Market: A 

Sociological View, trans. Arthur 

Goldhammer (New Brunswick, 

N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 

1984), 166–168. 

25 Telephone interview by 

the author, 26 September 2005. 

Edy de Wilde was director 

of the Van Abbe Museum in 

Eindhoven from 1946 to 1963 

and the director of the 

Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam 

from 1963 to 1985. De Wilde 

was credited with introducing 

American avant-garde art to 

the Netherlands. See Machteld 

van Hulten, “De man die de 

Amerikanen binnenhaalde,” 

De Volkskrant, 26 November 

2005. 

26 Elinor Poindexter, who 

had taken over from Charles 

Egan, declined to continue to 

represent Rauschenberg in 

the gallery, citing the cost of 

transporting his work. Tomkins, 

Off the Wall, 131. 

27 Alan Jones, “Preface,” in The 

Art Dealers, 16. 

28 Interview with Irving Blum 

conducted by Paul Cummings, 15 

June 1977, AAA. 

29 Hayden Herrera, “Postwar 

American Art in Holland,” 

in Rudi Fuchs and Adam 

Weinberg, Views from Abroad/ 

Amerikaanse Perspectieven 

(New York: Whitney Museum 

of American Art, distributed by 

Harry N. Abrams, 1995), 38. See 

also the introduction by Fuchs. 

30 See Howard Devree, 

“Award at Venice,” New York 

Times, 22 June 1958, and 

www.labiennale.org/en/art/ 

history. Contrary to popular 

belief, Robert Rauschenberg 

was not the first American to 

win in Venice. Just six years prior, 

in 1958, Mark Tobey had won 

the top award for painting; in 

1952, Alexander Calder had 

won the Grand Prize for 

Sculpture. For the record, 

there had been two other 

American winners: John Singer 

Sargent, who had won a Gold 

Medal in 1907, and James 

McNeill Whistler, who captured 

the Murano International Prize 

in 1895 (the year the Venice 

Biennale had its first exhibition). 

31 Sanka Knox, “Abstract 

Paintings by Expressionists 

Sold for $284,000,” New York 

Times, 14 October 1965. See 

also Jennifer Wells, “Pop Goes 

the Market,” in Definitive 

Statements: American Art: 1964– 

66, (Providence, R.I.: Brown 

University, 1986), 57. 

32 Allan Kaprow, “The Artist 

as a Man of the World,” in 

Essays on the Blurring of Art 

and Life, expanded ed., ed. Jeff 

Kelley (Berkeley: University of 

California Press, 2003), 47, 51. 

33 Harold Rosenberg, “Adding 

Up: The Reign of the Art 

Market,” in Art on the Edge: 

Creators and Situations (New 

York: Macmillan, 1975), 274. 

34 Barbara Rose, untitled 

essay in Leo Castelli: Ten 

Years (New York: Leo Castelli 

Gallery, 1967). 

35 Steven Naifeh, Culture 

Making: Money, Success and 

the New York Art World 

(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton 

University Press, 1976), 37. 

36 It should be noted here 

that everyone I interviewed 

stressed Castelli’s honesty 

and generosity in his dealings 

with his artists. Castelli paid 

stipends regardless of sales. 

Nassos Daphnis, for example, 

was carried on the gallery 

stipend system his entire 

career, despite the fact that his 

works did not sell well. 

37 The photograph had 

“dismayed” curator Dorothy 

Miller, who had wanted a more 

informal—bohemian—picture. 

See Caroline A. Jones, Machine 

in the Studio: Constructing 

the Postwar American 

Artist (Chicago and London: 

University of Chicago Press, 

1996), 116. 

38 William D. Grampp, Pricing 

the Priceless (New York: Basic 

Books, 1989), 15. 


27

Jasper Johns, Watchman, 1964.

J O N AT H A N K AT Z 

Reading 

Watchman 

Through 

The Archive 

By their very nature, archives seduce through the promise of intimacy, 

seeming to offer privileged access to a subject finally laid 

bare of artifice, dissimulation, and social performance — finally, 

the real person, the private one. For those interested in understanding 

the import of same-sex sexuality to the development of 

the American avant-garde, this form of unmediated access is 

doubly significant, for throughout most of American history, samesex 

sexuality was defined as a criminal activity, and its signs and 

traces were rigorously covered up. Yet far too often there is very 

little same-sex intimacy to be found in archives; partners, friends, 

or relatives have destroyed or refused to donate such material — if 

it ever even existed — while historical figures themselves likely 

took care to expunge such references from their possessions prior 

to donation. In place of the unselfconscious declaratives that announce 

heterosexuality (everything from birth announcements to 

anniversary cards to love notes), those inclined to members of their 

own sex instead tended to mobilize an inventive array of codes, 

ellipses, and not least, policed silences, carefully editing out any 

references to forms of behavior and/or identity under siege. 


29

Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns 

in Rachel Rosenthal’s Pearl Street loft, 

1955. Photograph by Rachel Rosenthal. 

In the Archives of American Art, however, there are a few precious 

signs of same-sex intimacy dating from the period before 

the rise of the modern lesbian and gay political movement. In the 

grand scheme of things, these faint traces are really no more than 

evidentiary hiccups, yet their very rarity gives them a historical 

value far out of keeping with their scale. Some of the most important, 

dating from the early 1960s, concern two key artists whose 

romantic partnership, while widely acknowledged, still isn’t permitted 

mention in the bulk of the art-historical literature: Jasper 

Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Ostensibly, the two have refused 

to discuss their relationship, save once, yet their art is larded with 

references to same-sex sexuality and to each other. 1 And in a surprising 

admission in an interview preserved in the Archives of 

American Art, Johns acknowledges that a key formal shift in his 

work turns, as he puts it, on new “emotional or erotic content.” 2 I’ll 

get to the full quote and its context momentarily, but for now, it’s 

important to note that the mere reference to “emotional or erotic 

content” should strike longtime Johns observers as a nearly unprecedented 

invitation to biographical interpretation from this 

most reclusive and self-concealing of artists. Through most of his 

career, Johns has taken pains to deny that his art had any aspect 

of the autobiographical. This quote is quite typical: “But I found I 

couldn’t do anything that would be identical with my feelings. So I 

worked in such a way that I could say that it’s not me.” 3 

It’s important to note here that Johns is not just working 

against his feelings, he’s telling us he’s working against his feelings, 

thematizing this aspect of self-denial or concealment as 

central to his work. He’s clearly not without feeling, but equally, 

he once sought to work in such a way as to foreclose access to 

his emotions. Analogizing this form of self-censorship to the imperatives 

of the closet restores something of the socio-historical 

conditions that once, not so long ago, operated as a kind of brake 

on the revelation of feeling in the work of same-sex-inclined 

artists like Johns. 


Yet the popular notion of the closet is as a binary construct 

— one is either in it or not. The idea that the closet is as tight as 

a bank vault, however, is manifestly untrue: indeed by definition 

it can’t be, for if it were, it wouldn’t be perceived as the closet in 

the first place, as a form of refusal, but would simply exist as the 

unmediated real. The dominant metaphor for withholding frank 

acknowledgment of homosexuality before the “in-or-out” notion 

of the closet that came to prominence at the close of the 1960s 

was one much more keyed to the circulation of illicit information 

and encoded communication, the spy. As spies, homosexuals were 

not trapped in the black-and-white binary construction that now 

simplifies and confuses our thinking about sexuality, but were 

acknowledged as adept at border crossings, at travel to and fro. 

Profoundly stateless, the “spy” was nonetheless at home in a range 

of territories, and sexuality wasn’t a simple out-or-not-out dualism, 

but was conceived as a complex series of postures to be mobilized 

or hidden as the occasion and audience demanded. Identity 

here is not a clear-cut social declaration but a highly variable, 

nuanced social performance — what Frank O’Hara memorably 

called “the scene of my selves” — a metaphor much more in keeping 

with the realities of lesbian and gay lives even today. 4 

Jasper Johns’ iconic painting Watchman of 1964, in the collection 

of Eli and Edythe L. Broad but recently on display in the 

exhibition “Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955–1965” at 

the National Gallery of Art, explicitly invokes this spy metaphor. In 

a sketchbook note published in Japanese in 1964 and in English in 

1965, Johns frames his painting in terms of the dynamic between 

a spy and a watchman. His language is, typically, as cryptic and 

dense as the painting, which features among other elements a cast 

of a leg in a chair hung upside down in the top-right corner. 

The Watchman falls “into” the “trap” of looking. The “spy” is 

a different person. “Looking” is & is not “eating” & also “being 

eaten” That is, there is continuity of some sort among the watchman, 

the space, the objects. The spy must be ready to “move,” 

must be aware of his entrances & exits. The watchman leaves 

his job & takes away no information. The spy must remember 

& must remember himself & his remembering. The spy designs 

himself to be overlooked. The watchman “serves” as a warning. 

Will the spy & the watchman ever meet? In a painting named 

Spy will he be present? The spy stations himself to observe 

the watchman. 5 

These complexly coded jottings, written over a sketch of the 

painting in Johns’ notebook, tellingly reverse the usual dynamic 

between the watchman and the spy, for now it is the watchman 

who is being watched, and the spy doing the watching. Making a 

parallel between looking and consuming (“eating” and “being 

eaten”), the notes make clear that while the spy and watchman are 

mutually implicated, it is the spy, not the watchman, who “stations 


31

himself to observe.” The spy, and not the watchman, is self-aware 

(“must remember himself & his remembering”) as if his very 

identity is less his own than an elaborate, and largely fabricated, 

social performance. While I’m certainly not interested in claiming 

that the spy-watchman dynamic is exclusively a coded reference 

to same-sex sexuality in a period of real constraint, it is telling 

that this interpretive frame has never before been raised with 

regard to this important painting, itself an image that succeeds 

as a kind of spy, through camouflaging its intentions (or as Johns 

put it, “design[ed] . . . to be overlooked”). At the very least, Johns’ 

sketchbook notes, with their clear recognition of the disciplinary 

consequences of visibility, resonate with a pre-liberationist 

understanding of sexual difference. 

But it is in the interview preserved in the Archives of American 

Art that Johns offers the clearest clue as to how fundamentally his 

sexuality structures his work. The interview is in the form of a 

vinyl record, since rerecorded onto a DVD, that accompanied the 

exhibition catalogue of an influential 1963 exhibition entitled “The 

Popular Image” at the now-defunct Washington Gallery of Modern 

Art. In this important interview with his friend (and Rauschenberg 

collaborator) Billy Klüver, Johns notes that his thinking is beginning 

to change seriously. As this was around the time he began his 

Watchman painting, completed the following year, the interview 

helps make sense of the painting’s densely coded imagery. Johns 

acknowledges that his earlier work was more concerned with 

“questioning whether there are such things” as the iconic images of 

flags, targets, and numbers that initially catapulted him to fame 

(whether his famous Flag painting is itself actually a flag or merely 

a painting of a flag). But he then goes on to suggest that his newer 

work substitutes an emotional and biographical frame for this 

once largely ontological form of inquiry. In answering Klüver’s 

question about the nature of this changing content, Johns begins 

his reply confidently, “It seems to me that the effect of the more 

recent work is that it is more related to feeling or emotion or . . . 

[then there is a pause of at least twenty seconds before he continues 

with] let’s say emotional or erotic content in that there is no 

superimposition of another point of view immediately in terms of 

a stroke of a brush.” 6 

What does Johns mean here by the advent of a new “emotional 

or erotic content?” A clue is provided in the Mitch Tuchman papers 

at the Archives of American Art, which include correspondence between 

the filmmaker Emile De Antonio, an early friend of Johns’, 

and Tuchman, who was writing a book based on transcripts of interviews 

De Antonio completed for his famous 1973 film Painters 

Painting. Tuchman used the word nihilism in the book’s introductory 

essay, and De Antonio takes him to task, reminding him 

of the social context of the period: “Nihilism, as that word is understood, 

is not appropriate unless you write a short essay on it. 

Homophobes used it about Cage, Bob, Jap [Jasper Johns], etc., and 

gave their work as examples of decadence.” 7 Albeit simple and 


Robert Rauschenberg, 

Untitled (with Stained Glass), 1954. 

unadorned, De Antonio’s statement, offered in a moment of protective 

concern for his friends, helps to lift the veil on how Johns and 

Rauschenberg’s supposedly “closeted” sexuality was in fact common 

knowledge in the art world at the time. 

This still doesn’t explain why Johns elected to include new 

“emotional or erotic” content in his work at this particular historical 

moment, abandoning the hieratic, all-at-once impact of his 

iconic imagery in favor of more subtle, part-by-part relationships 

in dauntingly complex works like Watchman. But the archive does 

offer a clue as to why in 1963 Johns’ work would acknowledge 

emotional or erotic feelings in ways it hadn’t before. In a recorded 

interview between Walter Hopps and Alice Denney, the former 

curator for the Washington Gallery of Modern Art and organizer 

of “The Popular Image” exhibition, Denney happened to mention, 

rather off handedly, that at the time of the exhibition, Robert 

Rauschenberg “was already living with Steve Paxton,” a dancer in 

Merce Cunningham’s dance company. 8 

The dating here is important, for it suggests that around the 

same time Johns’ work changed, he was also no longer romantically 


33

Jasper Johns, Untitled (Cut, Tear, 

Scrape, Erase), 1964. Photograph by 

Michael Fredericks. 

involved with Rauschenberg. And indeed, close attention to 

Watchman makes clear how profoundly the enigmatic image is 

concerned with the end of that relationship. A prominent feature 

of the work is a wooden shelf appended to the bottom of 

the canvas. Unprecedented in Johns’ work, it is in fact a notable 

feature of Rauschenberg’s very first 

self-nominated “combine” — a work of 

1954 entitled Untitled (with Stained Glass 

Window). Johns and Rauschenberg first 

became partners in the winter of 1953–54, 

and Rauschenberg told his friend Rachel 

Rosenthal — whose apartment, one floor 

above Johns, he would come to occupy 

— that Untitled (with Stained Glass Window) 

was painted “at a time of passion 

for a friend,” presumably, at the time that 

Johns and Rauschenberg were first falling 

in love. 9 The board attached to the bottom 

of the combine captures all the drips and 

squiggles of falling paint, an ironic gesture 

toward the Abstract Expressionists, but 

tinged with a distinct eroticism. But when 

Johns echoes this same shelf in Watchman, 

he inverts Rauschenberg’s precedent from 

the beginning of their relationship; now, 

the drips are aggressively scraped away, 

leaving a stained wooden shelf in a clear, 

almost violent gesture of erasure. Johns 

even adds the scraping device, a wooden 

shingle, to the shelf, leaning it in its scraping 

posture against a ball. Clear marks in the paint further reveal 

that the shingle has been aggressively pulled against the bottom 

of the image, leaving a scar. 

Watchman, bearing the marks of negation, reveals a solitary 

performance that accrues meaning only in the context of Rauschenberg’s 

own “passionate” tribute to Johns within that first combine. 

And it’s by no means the only negation of Rauschenberg’s 

practice to be found in this picture: the three clear blocks of color 

on the right — red, yellow, and blue — are themselves born of 

another early Rauschenberg image, Collection (1954), the largest 

image he completed immediately after becoming involved with 

Johns. Collection betrays a division into three separate canvases 

once clearly painted red, yellow, and blue. But in Watchman these 

colors have been covered in a sooty gray wash. That same sooty 

gray also entombs the words RED, YELLOW, BLUE, written on the 

left side of the image in the same order as the color blocks. 

More noticeably, Watchman contains an upended figure sitting 

in a chair glued to the top of the canvas, its leg cast from life. But 

the figure and the chair have been sawed in half. Below the savaged 

torso, patches of orange, green, and blue paint roughly imitate 


a human figure, as if lending completion to the cast form. What 

does this spectral, upended human image represent? Of course this 

must remain conjectural, but following so quickly upon the end of 

his relationship with Rauschenberg, perhaps the upended half figure, 

part paint, part cast from life, is a totem of a life overturned 

and split in two, a pale shadow or echo of what was once whole 

and is now in the process of destruction; scraped away, erased, 

covered in the gray wash of time. We do know that Johns regularly 

used his own body in mark-making at this period. And there exists 

a small drawing, formally unrelated to Watchman, that nonetheless 

remains a marvel of contained fury, transferred to, and transformed 

through, mark-making. Called Untitled (Cut, Tear, Scrape, 

Erase) and dated the same year as Watchman, the drawing offers 

four vertical boxes, respectively labeled at the top “cut,” “tear,” 

“scrape,” and “erase,” which then materialize their labeled activity 

in the box below. Of course, the drawing is the ultimate in self-referentiality, 

seemingly a closed system of reference and mark-making. 

But can’t these various violent marks, read in the context of 

similar cuts, tears, scrapes, and erasures in Watchman, also assume 

a more expressive, autobiographical cast? 

If “The Watchman falls ‘into’ the ‘trap’ of looking,” are we the 

Watchman, destined to “take away no information”? And if that is 

so, then is Johns the spy, who “must be ready to ‘move,’ must be 

aware of his entrances & exits”? And as Johns further inquires in 

that sketchbook note, “Will the spy and the watchman ever meet?” 

We admire Watchman, but we have no idea what to make of it, what 

it “really” means. It seems so closed-in on itself, so private. In this 

respect, perhaps, Johns should have the last word. In the transcript 

of an interview with the artist, filmmaker De Antonio mentions socialism. 

Johns’ reply is telling in the depths of its hopelessness. 

Johns If everything were owned equally by everybody then 

everybody has to own the entire despair. . . despair. And I don’t 

think they will do it and there is no way to force ownership. 

De Antonio You’re moving from a material to a spiritual idea. . . . 

Johns But stuff is that already. 10 

1 My forthcoming book for 

the University of Chicago Press, 

which I wrote thanks to the 

generosity of an Smithsonian 

American Art Museum 

Senior Fellowship, is entitled 

The Silent Camp: Johns, 

Rauschenberg, Twombly, Cage, 

and delineates this complex 

interpictorial dialogue across 

some of the most iconic images 

in American art. The single 

published acknowledgement 

of the Johns-Rauschenberg 

partnership by one of the 

principals came in an interview 

with Rauschenberg. See Paul 

Taylor, “Robert Rauschenberg: 

‘I can’t even afford my 

works anymore,’” Interview, 

December 1990, 146–148. 

2 Jasper Johns, interviewed 

on a 33 1 /3 rpm record included 

with the exhibition catalogue 

of The Popular Image 

(Washington, D.C.: Washington 

Gallery of Modern Art, 1963). 

Washington Gallery of Modern 

Art records, Archives of 

American Art, Smithsonian 

Institution (hereafter AAA). 

3 Vivian Raynor, “Jasper 

Johns: ‘I Have Attempted to 

Develop My Thinking in Such 

a Way that the Work I’ve Done 

is Not Me,’” ARTnews, March 

1973, 20–22. 

4 See Frank O’Hara, “In 

Memory of My Feelings,” 

The Collected Poems of 

Frank O’Hara (Berkeley: 

University of California Press, 

1995), 252-–257. 

5 Kirk Varnedoe, ed., Jasper 

Johns: Writings, Sketchbook 

Notes, Interviews (New York: 

Museum of Modern Art, 1996), 

59–60. 

6 The tape-recorded 

interview has been 

transcribed in Varnedoe, 

Jasper Johns, 84–91. 

7 De Antonio to Mitch 

Tuchman, undated, box 1, 

Mitch Tuchman papers 

related to the book Painters 

Painting: A History of American 

Modernism in the Words 

of Those Who Created It, 

Archives of American Art, 

Smithsonian Institution, 

Washington, D.C. (hereafter 

cited as Tuchman papers). 

8 Alice Denny, interview 

conducted by Walter Hopps, 13 

May 1976, untranscribed, AAA. 

9 Roni Feinstein, in her 

unpublished 1994 New York 

University Institute of Fine 

Arts dissertation, “Random 

Order: The First Fifteen Years 

of Robert Rauschenberg’s 

Art, 1949–1964,” discusses 

the comment made to an 

anonymous collector on p. 185. 

In a subsequent interview with 

the performance artist Rachel 

Rosenthal, she confirms that 

she was indeed the first owner 

of Untitled (with Stained 

Glass), author interview with 

Rachel Rosenthal, Los Angeles, 

26 June 1991. 

10 Jasper Johns, interview 

conducted by Emile De 

Antonio, n.d., Tuchman 

papers, 391. 


35

Virginia Dwan

J E S S I CA DAWS O N 

Los Angeles 


37

In 1950s 

Los Angeles . . . 

all dealers had 

to lose was 

their money. 

Thankfully, 

Virginia Dwan 

had plenty. 

Only the foolhardy sold contemporary art in 1950s Los Angeles. 

Given the city’s insular scene with its provincially minded artists, 

unengaged collectors, and reactionary art writers, most dealers 

didn’t even bother showing cutting-edge work. Those who showed 

local artists traded in banality. 

Yet creatively parched Southern California presented an opportunity. 

Renegades willing to shake up the community began 

showing work coming out of San Francisco, New York, and Europe; 

some, like the Ferus Gallery, incubated up-and-coming locals. By 

the late 1950s, galleries sprung up ad hoc on a strip of North La 

Cienega Boulevard west of downtown. The best known was Ferus, 

but there was also the Felix Landau Gallery, the Esther Robles 

Gallery, and a handful of short-lived venues. Together, they 

tapped a minuscule group of collectors willing to learn about 

new art, though even tutelage didn’t guarantee sales. As a result, 

the galleries in these years could show whatever they liked — so 

long as they didn’t mind losing their money. Thankfully, Virginia 

Dwan had plenty. 

Heir to the Minnesota, Mining and Manufacturing fortune, 

Dwan had deep pockets and a passion for art. When the young 

UCLA art-school dropout opened her first gallery in 1959, in a 

modest storefront on Broxton Avenue in Westwood, she was, by 


her own admission, totally naïve. In a 1984 interview, she recalled 

her relationship to the art business in those days as an “exciting 

infatuation . . . I was totally open . . . to all this energy that we were 

in the middle of suddenly.” 1 As a child growing up in Minnesota 

she’d visited Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center and been moved by 

exhibitions of Charles Sheeler and John Marin. After entering art 

school, Dwan soon acknowledged that she lacked the chops to 

be an artist. So she set out to learn the business of dealing from 

Beverly Hills gallery owner Frank Perls while gallery-sitting for 

him on Saturday afternoons. Though aware she would face struggles 

for sales and critical attention, she sensed opportunity. By 

November 1959 Dwan had secured the rented Westwood storefront 

far from the North La Cienega strip but close to her new 

husband, who was then a medical student at UCLA. 

It took time for Dwan to develop her own vanguard taste. 2 

She passed her first eighteen months showing a roster of secondtier 

Abstract Expressionists imported from New York, punctuated 

occasionally by more radical artists like Larry Rivers or Philip 

Guston. But by spring of 1961, Dwan was introducing Los Angeles 

to some of the most important artists of the time — Yves Klein, 

Robert Rauschenberg, and Ad Reinhardt among them — and her 

early naïveté was replaced by a nearly messianic sense of purpose. 

Clockwise, from left: Virginia Dwan, 

1969; Announcement for an exhibition 

of works by Larry Rivers at the Dwan 

Gallery, Los Angeles, 1961; Graphic 

portrait of Lucas Samaras, used in 

publicity for “Samaras” at the Dwan 

Gallery, Los Angeles, 1964. 

Previous Spread: “New York, New York” 

at the Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles, 1964. 


39


“I was, I suppose, on a spiritual high with this gallery,” she said. “I 

felt that what I was showing was not only for my good, but for everyone 

else’s and that it was a gift to the world.” 3 Dwan’s sense of 

mission was felt by her artists. She funded them generously and 

indulged their whims while asking little in return. For her, sales 

were happy accidents, not foregone conclusions. 

In 1959, Dwan had entered a scene in flux. The most celebrated 

artist in Los Angeles of the 1940s and early 1950s, or at 

least the most salable, was figurative expressionist Rico Lebrun, 

a charismatic man who taught for a time at Chouinard Art 

Institute. 4 His Italian roots, dramatic persona, and good connections 

secured buyers among the uninformed. Developing at the 

same time, though less prominent, was the movement that came 

to be known as Hard-edge Painting. Its originators were a small 

group of California painters who reduced abstraction to strict 

geometries and bold colors; four of the best known were showcased 

in a Los Angeles County museum exhibition “Four Abstract 

Classicists” in 1959. Yet even John McLaughlin, the group’s most 

celebrated member, was a tough sell whose dealer, Felix Landau, 

found few buyers. Also popular in the 1950s was the ceramicist 

Peter Voulkos and his Chouinard students Billy Al Bengston and 

Ken Price. Though all found a measure of success — Price enjoys 

excellent reception to this day — their reworkings of Abstract 

Expressionism in three dimensions remained a largely insular 

pursuit. Indeed, Abstract Expressionism lingered in Southern 

California. As art historian Thomas Crow pointed out recently, 

the movement’s “prestige among older West Coast artists (like 

the Chouinard faculty) constituted a sure-fire recipe for unending 

provincial status.” 5 

But by the mid-1950s, small centers of ambition had formed. 

A community of Beat-influenced assemblage artists headed by 

Wallace Berman and Ed Kienholz sprang up in Venice. Young 

Walter Hopps had come to UCLA, and his early gallery, called 

Syndell Studio, enjoyed a brief life in Brentwood showing mostly 

San Francisco painters. Soon Kienholz and Hopps were collaborating, 

and in March 1957 the two opened Ferus, which soon became 

the most talked about of the vanguard galleries. Kienholz 

eventually sold his interest in the partnership to Irving Blum, a 

consummate businessman who ensured the gallery’s place in 

history. As an incubator for local talent, Ferus was second to 

none — Ed Ruscha, Robert Irwin, and many others in its stable 

went on to important careers. In November 1958, Ferus moved 

to 723 North La Cienega near the Felix Landau and the Esther 

Robles galleries. Together, the venues co-hosted the well-attended 

Monday night art walks. 

Tucked into the Westwood neighborhood near UCLA and 

some miles from the burgeoning La Cienega scene, Dwan struggled 

to lure gallery crowds. Her first year passed unremarkably, 

its exhibition schedule given over to retreads of New York shows 

(on consignment) full of the kind of predictable work that local 

Opposite: Announcement for Yves 

Klein’s Los Angeles debut at the Dwan 

Gallery, 1961. 

I felt that what 

I was showing 

was not only 

for my good, 

but for everyone 

else’s and that 

it was a gift 

to the world. 


41

From top: Detail of a catalogue cover for an exhibition 

of works by Martial Raysse at the Dwan Gallery, 

Los Angeles, 1967; Announcement for an exhibition 

of works by James Rosenquist at the Dwan Gallery, 

Los Angeles, 1964. 

critics Henry Seldis, writing for the Los Angeles Times, and 

Charlene Cole of the Beverly Hills Times/Westwood Villager applauded. 

At the time, Dwan jetted to New York several times a 

year for studio visits and dealer meetings. With her French husband, 

she summered overseas each year and got to know France’s 

up-and-coming artists, the Nouveaux Réalistes. The connections 

made during those visits, coupled with Dwan’s increasing savvy, 

were reflected in her more daring exhibition schedule of 1961 and 

1962. French provocateur Yves Klein made his LA debut in May 

1961, just a month after his first American solo show at the Leo 

Castelli Gallery in New York, when Dwan showed monochromes 

in the artist’s signature international blue alongside brand-new 

sponge paintings and gold leaf works. Los Angeles was speechless. 

Local artists, provincial at heart, hated Dwan for showing 

a Frenchman, let alone one many considered a charlatan. As for 

the critics, silence reigned, at least until Seldis, writing a small 

item on Dwan’s Ad Reinhardt show, reassured his readers that 

Reinhardt’s paintings were not the work “of a flippant opportunist 

like Yves Klein.” 6 

Dwan delighted in the controversy. “I really enjoyed showing 

work which was so far in the avant-garde that by definition 

anyone logical would have to say, ‘It can’t sell yet, maybe later 


I really enjoyed showing 

work which was so far in 

the avant-garde that by 

definition anyone logical 

would have to say, “It can’t 

sell yet, maybe later on.” 

on,’” 7 she recalled. Dwan certainly had her share of unsalable 

shows on the roster. Nine months after Klein, she mounted a group 

of Robert Rauschenberg’s combines in what was his first West 

Coast exhibition. Again, no reviews appeared. And again, collectors 

balked — even after Dwan devoted a full eighteen months to 

the sale of Rauschenberg’s 1961 combine First Landing Jump. As 

she noted later, one person considered it, then another, then another 

collector in Texas. Finally, with no takers in sight, she crated the 

work for its trip back east. LA just didn’t get it. 8 

Despite mounting frustrations, Dwan, in June 1962, opened 

a new, custom-designed space at 10846 Lindbrook Drive, near 

her first gallery. The move cemented her commitment to dealing. 

She hired a student of Frank Lloyd Wright to design the space, 

asking that it be modeled after Wright’s V.C. Morris store in San 

Francisco, a building Dwan had long admired. The design included 

a tunnel-like entrance that funneled visitors off the street and 

into a large open space, physically reinforcing Dwan’s belief that 

art was something rarified and sacred. Art “was to be approached 

with a different part of [oneself] than the rest of . . . day-to-day 

living,” she said. 9 

Dwan inaugurated the expanded gallery with a show of 

works by the French neo-Pop assemblage artist Arman, setting 


43


off an important six-month period in the history of Los Angeles 

Pop. The next month saw Andy Warhol’s first-ever solo show open 

at Ferus; in September, Hopps’ “The New Painting of Common 

Objects,” now widely viewed as the first exhibition of American 

Pop, opened at the Pasadena Art Museum with works by Jim 

Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, Warhol, Ruscha, Robert Dowd, Phillip 

Hefferton, Joe Goode, and Wayne Thiebaud. Two months later, 

Dwan mounted her own hand-picked Pop show, “My Country ’Tis 

of Thee.” Like Hopps, she had noticed artists using everyday imagery 

that she thought shared a distinctly American theme. Her 

striking installation included some of the most important works 

of the day: a 1962 Warhol Marilyn, Marisol’s 1962 The Kennedys, 

and a Claes Oldenburg plaster and enamel coffee cup, which she 

installed with nonchalant grace near the floor. 

Looking back at Dwan from our vantage point, at the very 

top of a market-bubble-turned-hot-air-balloon, the young dealer’s 

conviction and generosity, extravagant as they were, offer a 

compelling testament to the power of gallerists. Her story recalls 

a time when exhibition schedules were driven by dealer passion 

and taste, not bottom lines, hip young things, or collector demand. 

In early 1960s Los Angeles, dealers created taste, if only 

for the few who would listen. For Dwan, art was a spiritual offering, 

a civic duty, and, if at all possible, something better left untainted 

by money. If selling hadn’t been an important aspect of 

gallery ownership, it’s doubtful Dwan would have bothered. She 

was a dealer who didn’t need — or want — art-world money. 

Yet no amount of curatorial acumen made up for lack of sales. 

In many regards, both of Dwan’s Los Angeles galleries were more 

museum than sales floors, and their mission was to generate 

buzz and expose Los Angeles to exciting work, not to generate 

cash. Dwan’s discomfort with the gallery system — she asked 

that her directors transact all sales — only underscored her ambition 

that art be exempt from the everyday, including the laws 

of the market. Of course, neither artists nor gallerists can live 

outside commerce — to do so is the stuff of myth. Yet the story of 

Dwan’s idealism, her conviction that art was a spiritual pursuit, 

is precisely the sort of fable the art world needs right now. 

1 Virginia Dwan, interview 

conducted by Charles F. 

Stuckey, 21 March–7 June 1984, 

Virginia Dwan Interviews, 

Archives of American Art, 

Smithsonian Institution, 

Washington, D.C., (hereafter 

cited as Dwan interviews). 

2 We know Dwan best for the 

eponymous New York gallery 

that she ran from 1965 to 1971, 

which became synonymous 

with the Minimalism and 

Earthworks movements. 

Her underwriting of Robert 

Smithson’s outdoor adventures 

and her association with 

Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre, and 

others have been exhaustively 

documented in dissertations, 

books, journals, and 

newspapers. 

3 Dwan interviews, 

transcripts, 21 and 27 

March 1984. 

4 For this information and 

large part of the Los Angeles 

gallery background, I owe great 

debt to the research of Anne 

Ayres and Andrew Perchuk. 

5 Thomas Crow, “November 

1962,” Artforum, November 

2002, 72. 

6 Henry Seldis, “Reinhardt 

Canvases Worth a Second 

Look,” Los Angeles Times, 9 

February 1962. 

7 Dwan interviews, 

transcripts, 21 and 27 March 

1984. 

8 Philip Johnson did. 

He bought First Landing Jump 

soon after it arrived back in 

New York and then promised 

it to MoMA, where the work 

now resides. 

9 Dwan interviews, 21 

and 27 March 1984. 

View of the exhibition “Fifteen of New York” 

at the Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles, 1960. 


45

ELLEN JOHNSON TO 

PETER SAUL, 8 JULY 1967 

Have you ever thought of dropping some 

of the specific allusions to your message, 

thus making the spectator have to work a 

little harder to get what you have to say? 

I am just asking a question—not making 

a suggestion that would be outrageous! 

Equal parts explanation and justification, the painter Peter Saul’s 

hearty defense of specific allusions and storytelling dates to the 

period when he was intensely focused on the violence of the war 

in Vietnam. In his 

steadfast insistence 

on clarity of meaning, 

even to the point of 

heavy-handedness, 

Saul asserted a 

strongly felt ambition 

to produce art 

that communicated 

with audiences beyond 

that small coterie 

of gallery goers 

familiar with the development 

of modernist 

painting. 

DEFENDING 

ALLUSION 

PETER SAUL ON 

THE AESTHETICS 

OF RHETORIC 

This letter is one of several found in the Ellen Hulda Johnson 

papers at the Archives of American Art. Artist and historian first 

corresponded in the summer of 1964 as Johnson was writing her 

catalogue essay for Saul’s solo exhibition at the Allan Frumkin 

Gallery in New York. 1 To facilitate her research, Frumkin put 

Johnson in touch with Saul, who was nearing the end of an eightyear 

stay in Europe. The dealer also sent her several of the painter’s 

letters from the preceding year. When taken as a group, this 

remarkable set of materials (which also includes exhibition announcements 

and photographs) provides invaluable documentary 

evidence of Saul’s thinking and development in the mid-1960s. 

DAVID MCCARTHY 


47

PETER SAUL TO ELLEN JOHNSON, 12 JULY 1967 

Dear Ellen Johnson, 

Thanks for your interested letter & question 

—certainly most of my best intellectual friends 

have advised me the same as you — to take 

out specific allusions to what my pictures are 

supposed to mean. I think this is because a 

”high class” or ”educated” or ”intelligent” audience 

wants to participate in the art work more than 

before. Also I’ve gotten real complaints on that 

from people who like art a lot, ”heavy-handed,” 

”spelling it out” etc. I don’t deny it, it’s my 

conscious direction that gets the complaint and I 

would like to comply. However, there’s a problem: 

*Who are these people who are going to ”work 

to get the message”? That’s a certain group of so 

many thousands in a fixed number of cities in 

Europe & U.S.A. In actual fact that is the audience 

for modern art, old art, rare books, jewelry 

etc. etc. — understands, rejects, accepts, pays the 

artist. Evidently, I can’t face up to this state of 

affairs, that there is that audience for my profession. 

The way I see — or feel it — when a ”wealthy 

intellectual” (?) buys a picture I made he’s helping 

me to live until I can make some contact with 

a more broad and ordinary group of people. 

It doesn’t occur to me that the purpose of my 

picture is to gain his appreciation. A person who 

does is to me an ”artist’s artist,” catering to the 

moneyed or influential sector of artists and their 

associates. If I were to take out specific allusions, 

I would be an ”artist’s artist.” Just like there are 

architects who spend their whole lives doing theoretical 

things that appear sensational to other 

architects but from the point of view of the contractor 

”blend right in” as minor improvements. 

A ”profession” is an overheated, over sensitive 

group of people who want to make a buck. So 

I can’t comply with this best advice. I can’t 

restrict myself to ”doing a job right.” Of course 

this train of thought is imaginary, I haven’t 

personally met any wealthy intellectuals, and 

only a handful of people involved with the arts 

on any level, and then only for brief periods 

like one hour. I just am absolutely convinced 

without good reason, probably for personal 

psychological reasons. 

*To return to your question: what happens 

when an ordinary person stands in front of 

a painting that lacks ”specific allusions” is that 

he moves on to the next one, doesn’t do ”the 

work.” If I want a house I measure the floor space, 

don’t crawl under the foundation. Same kind 

of thing. That’s why I’m trying to work towards 

a situation where the person stands in front of 

my picture and receives the meaning of the work 

without participation or benefit of exotic 

educational or social background. In spite of 

my work appearing heavy handed (rhetorical?) 

in your context, it’s still abstract & obscure in 

mine. When you’re ”talking,” or ”writing” in a 

publication you have to spell every word right 

or it’s goof-off?? (I’ve always assumed) 

*This position is increasingly untenable in 

this country, in this society. There is a tremendous 

expansion of sophisticated audience due 

to improvement of the country and an accompanying 

decline in the spiritual need for my 

story telling art —which I am ”on fire” about, 

getting better at. Towards a ”flat-out” story 

telling, not literary allusion. In other words — 

the audience being the same group of wealthy 

intellectuals for me and all other artists, it 

doesn’t matter at all in a practical sense whether 

I think I’m telling stories or making abstract 

pictures —money is paid to me for the degree 

of sophistication I show instinctively in my 

reactions, in my actual work—but for the sake 

of my pride its important that I make a more 

honest contact with people. Hence I’m beginning 

to make a successful contact with Eastern 

Europe. Even in museum circles! sales! understanding 

of the meaning of my work —the whole 

works! Accidentally started a few months ago 

when some Yugoslavs saw my work in France — 

I don’t know where it will lead — but I picture 

very big important pictures of mine speaking 

there, big dreams. Soon? 

*Anyway yours in haste, this should 

answer your question. . . . 

— Peter Saul 


Although Saul shared with the artists of his generation a pronounced 

commitment to form and composition, his emphasis 

on subject matter differentiated his work from pure abstraction, 

and his commitment to rhetorical style distanced him from the 

cool sensibility of Pop art. In a letter that Johnson quoted from 

in her catalogue text, he explicitly 

linked topical subject matter to the 

expressive effect he was looking for: 

I have 2 new pictures of guys being 

executed by electricity, a large green 

sex crime and a large ptg of a cop on 

w.c. that was a good breakthru. . . . 

Criticism will be that life is not a 

freak-show as I show it to be, but I’m 

not showing life itself, but rather 

diverting myself by letting my imagination 

wander over scare-comics 

and thrill magazines, specializing in 

those subjects which are already the 

most loved or looked at by millions. 

By doing this I reveal big truths in 

my opinion. Also I will show people 

that what they want most to look at 

is not the kind of thing that they will 

enjoy seeing. 2 

Read alongside the letter of 12 July 

1967, this earlier pronouncement 

helps clarify Saul’s gambit. His strong 

content held audience attention while 

issuing a morality tale about human 

behavior and people’s infatuation with 

sensationalizing mass-media imagery. 

In Saul’s paintings, audiences found 

their tastes challenged, confronted, 

and even rebuffed. 

Saul’s emphasis on visual and 

thematic intensity was inspired by 

modern figurative painting he often 

described as “humanist” in its consideration of the plight of modern 

men and women. 3 For Saul, the psychological drama of the British 

painter Francis Bacon and the civic awareness of the Mexican muralist 

José Clemente Orozco were important inspirations. Of the 

former he wrote: “Bacon’s psychology seems to me the most realistic 

since W.W. II — and I measure my own against it. Formerly 

I was frustrated, but now with this group of ptgs I see good signs 

that I will eventually be able to surpass Bacon in truth revealed.” 4 

Of the latter, Saul confessed: 

Poster for Peter Saul’s exhibition 

“New Pictures” at Sacramento 

State College, 1968. 

Page 46: Letter from Peter Saul to 

Ellen Johnson, 12 July 1967. 

Page 48: Partial transcript of 

Peter Saul’s letter to Ellen Johnson, 

12 July 1967. 


49

Peter Saul with his painting Human Dignity, ca. 1966. 


I feel close to Orozco and I’d like to do for my country what he’s 

done for his—if that isn’t too immodest. Making the way of life 

intensely real, using specifics—not too general but insisting on 

big meaning, that is social meaning which seems to me now very 

important. To make it real, I’ve put it thru the wringer in this 

“group” — the American way of life I mean — shown it in a 

disgusting light — and why not? Being a decent person actually 

involved at least with looking at it I can’t do anything else. 5 

The paintings included in Saul’s 1964 exhibition wedded the 

emotional drama of Bacon with the nationalist outlook of Orozco. 

They took as their themes comics, commodities, violence, consumerism, 

affluence, and sexual perversion. With garish, acidic colors; 

looping, biomorphic shapes; and densely packed spaces, the paintings 

provided a visual onslaught that effectively conveyed Saul’s 

jaundiced take on his home country. His concern would not abate 

in the following years. 

In a letter to Johnson just before his return from Europe in 

early fall 1964, Saul announced, “In subjects I am going to turn now 

to crucifixion, war, & politics.” 6 Once at home he began to modify 

the content of his paintings to increase the specific allusions. 

The results of this new focus were on view by 1965, and remained 

so through the decade. 7 Aggressive in form and subject matter, uncompromising 

in condemning overseas adventurism, and shocking 

in their suggestion that American soldiers were little more than 

thrill-seeking punks prosecuting a war of terror, the Vietnam 

paintings fully consolidated Saul’s position as one of the earliest 

and widely noted artists opposed to the war. 8 

1 Ellen H. Johnson, “Recent 

Paintings by Peter Saul,” in 

Saul (New York: Allan Frumkin 

Gallery, 1964), n.p. Reprinted 

in Stephen Henry Madoff, ed., 

Pop Art: A Critical History 

(Berkeley: University of 

California Press, 1997), 338–341; 

and in Peter Saul: The Sixties 

(New York: Nolan/Eckman 

Gallery, 2002), 5–11. 

2 Peter Saul to Allan 

Frumkin, spring 1964, Ellen 

Hulda Johnson papers, Archives 

of American Art, Smithsonian 

Institution (hereafter cited as 

Johnson papers). 

3 Saul to Frumkin, 22 April 

1964, Johnson papers. 

4 Ibid. 

5 Ibid. 

6 Saul to Johnson, 31 August 

1964, Johnson papers. 

7 Among the venues for 

these paintings were the 

Frumkin Gallery, the Whitney 

Museum of American Art, the 

Museum of Contemporary 

Art, Chicago, and the Corcoran 

Gallery, as well as several 

educational institutions, 

among them Reed College, 

Sacramento State College, 

Cornell University, and 

Bloomsburg State College. 

8 See Dore Ashton, “Art,” 

Arts and Architecture, 

April 1966, 6–8; and “The 

Artist as Dissenter,” Studio 

International, April 1966, 164. 


51

Catalogue cover for the exhibition “Underknown,” curated by Henry Geldzahler at P.S. 1 in 1984.

In 2006 the Archives of American Art received a small but choice 

collection of papers detailing the brief life and career of African 

American painter Bob Thompson (1937–1966). Thompson moved 

to New York to paint when he was twenty-one, and, in the years 

just before the city became the center of the art world, he became 

a much-loved figure in Manhattan’s downtown art scene and enjoyed 

recognition in avant-garde circles to a degree that was unprecedented 

for African Americans at the time. Scholar Judith 

Wilson, who has written extensively about Thompson’s life and 

art, sketches his story. 

UNDERKNOWN: BOB THOMPSON BY JUDITH WILSON 

In the summer of 1958, when he was still a student at the University 

of Louisville, Bob Thompson made his first major sale, to the collector 

Walter P. Chrysler in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Studying 

there all summer, Thompson found a number of important 

artistic mentors and allies. These ties soon led him to Lower 

Manhattan, where within a few years he was photographed by 

Robert Frank and Fred McDarrah, sketched by Larry Rivers, filmed 

by Alfred Leslie (in a lost remake of The Birth of a Nation), and 

included in Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts and Red 

Grooms’ The Burning Building (both 1959). 

Thompson was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1937, the 

youngest child and only son of a successful businessman and a 

schoolteacher, who raised him and his two sisters to aim high in 

life. As a child, he frequently spent weekends visiting his sisters 

in Nashville, where both girls earned undergraduate degrees at 

Fisk University. Verbally gifted and accustomed to the company 

of adults, the boy seemed unusually sophisticated, smoking cigarettes 

and listening to Charlie Parker records with his summer 

camp counselors. His precocity and religious zeal, however, and 

his paternal grandfather’s prominence as a Baptist deacon, led 

some to consider the youth a prime candidate for the ministry. 


53

Poster for the exhibition “Seven Younger Painters” at the Yale School of Art and Architecture, 1964. 


HIS FATHER’S DEATH IN A CAR ACCIDENT IN 1950 

permanently altered Thompson’s course. Stricken by grief, he succumbed 

to a wave of psychosomatic illnesses. Eventually the thirteen-year-old 

was sent to live with one of his sisters and her husband, 

a Fort Knox cartographer whose love of art and jazz left a lasting 

impression on Thompson. After graduating from Louisville’s Central 

High School, he enrolled at Boston University, planning to pursue a 

premedical program, honoring his mother’s wishes. A year of dismal 

grades and personal distress, however, led him to take his 

brother-in-law’s advice and return to Louisville to study painting. 

From spring 1957 through fall 1958, Thompson attended 

the University of Louisville’s Hite Art Institute, where his fellow 

students included the artists Sam Gilliam, Kenneth Young, and 

Robert Carter, and the future art historian Robert Douglas. These 

young African Americans shared Thompson’s taste for modern 

poetry, progressive jazz, and contemporary art, and they quickly 

joined with former Spelman College art instructor Eugenia Dunn 

to form Gallery Enterprises, an organization that showed murals, 

held poetry readings, and gave “live” painting performances. 

In doing so, they were inspired by Leo Zimmerman’s Arts in 

Louisville House, a combination coffee house, art gallery, foreign 

film–jazz–poetry-reading venue; and by the legendary black 

Beat poet, painter, and musician Ted Joans, who staged proto- 

Happenings at a local black cinema and covered the walls of a 

local bar with improvised abstract painting. 

When he arrived in Provincetown in the summer of 1958, 

Thompson found that his Louisville background had prepared 

him well for the rudely emphatic brands of figuration practiced by 

some artists he met there. Thompson’s college instructors had included 

a pair of German painters, Ulfert Wilke and Charles Crödel, 

who had strong ties to Abstract Expressionism, the Fauves, and 

German Expressionism. Moreover, as one of Wilke’s advanced students, 

Thompson had come in contact with Leon Golub, who was 

then teaching nearby at Indiana University. Finally, while he attended 

the University of Louisville, work by the Bay Area figurative 

painters David Park and Richard Diebenkorn, as well as New 

York gestural realists Larry Rivers and Grace Hartigan, appeared 

in several American Federation of Arts traveling exhibitions that 

Thompson was sure to have seen. 

Thompson found another inspiration that summer, when 

he saw the work of the late figurative expressionist painter Jan 

Müller. Müller’s brilliantly tessellated canvases combined a Hofmannesque 

understanding of color and spatial dynamics with 

a fondness for archaic visual modes (German folk art and late 

Gothic–early Italian Renaissance painting) and venerable literary 

sources (Shakespeare, Goethe, medieval literature, and pagan 

folk tales). Müller’s work created in Thompson the strong desire 

to make compelling visual narratives in a contemporary style. 

Müller’s widow, Dody, impressed Thompson even more that summer 

with her advice to study the Old Masters. 


55


Bob Thompson working on The Conversion of Saint Paul (1964). 

Opposite: Bob Thompson, ca. 1960. Photograph by 

Charles Rotmil for the cover of Kulchur Magazine, no. 2. 


57

The brilliant arc of Thompson’s life in New York played out 

in seven intense years. He arrived in the city in late 1958 or early 

1959 and hurled himself into a downtown scene saturated with 

jazz and Beat culture. Thompson became a personage almost immediately. 

At first he stayed with the painter Jay Milder and then 

with Red Grooms, both friends from Provincetown. He mingled 

with and painted portraits of LeRoi Jones and Allen Ginsburg, 

and listened to jazz at the Five Spot and Slug’s. He was close to 

Ornette Coleman, and Thelonius Monk always greeted him warmly 

when they met. 

By 1960 Thompson was painting furiously for days without 

resting and covering canvas after canvas, “hooked,” as he wrote 

in a letter preserved in the Archives, “on pigment” and buried 

alive in bright colors. He was also using heroin and drinking 

heavily (sometimes to control his craving for drugs), a tendency 

that betrayed a vulnerability that probably had its roots in 

childhood. According to Emilio Cruz (who wrote a memoir of his 

friend that is also at the Archives), Thompson “used dope as a 

screen” that “took [him] past some inhibitions.” Throughout, he 

worked and worked. 

Thompson’s paintings quickly gained him attention. 

Between 1960 and 1961, he had his first one-man show at the 

Delancey Street Museum, and his work was included in several 

important traveling shows and in group exhibitions in the city, 

including a two-person show with Jay Milder at Virginia 

Zabriskie’s esteemed Midtown gallery. In spite of the growing acclaim 

and his prodigious capacity for work, in the last years of his 

life Thompson seemed increasingly beset by personal demons. 

In spring 1961, funded by a grant from the stock analyst, artist, 

and avant-garde filmmaker Walter K. Gutman, Thompson and 

his wife, Carol, sailed for Europe. After a brief stay in London, 

where he participated in a methadone program, they spent a year 

at Glacière, an artist’s community in Paris. Then, in August 1962, 

the couple moved to Spain, where the artist partied steadily but 

continued to be almost superhumanly prolific. 

On his return to New York that fall, Thompson signed with 

Martha Jackson, one of the period’s leading art dealers. He had 

solo exhibitions at her Fifty-seventh Street gallery in fall 1963 

and fall 1965, as well as at Paula Cooper’s gallery in fall 1964. 

He also gained representation by two leading midwestern galleries: 

the Richard Gray Gallery in Chicago, where he held solo 

shows in spring 1964 and spring 1965, and the Donald Morris 

Gallery in Detroit, where he soloed in spring 1965. During this 

time the painter also collaborated with the novice filmmaker 

Dorothy Beskind on Bob Thompson Happening!, a quirkily 

evocative documentary filmed in New York in fall 1964 and 

Provincetown in summer 1965. A soundtrack supplied by 

Thompson, which ranged from James Brown, the Supremes, 

and Thelonius Monk to Bob Dylan and the Beatles, provided the 

only commentary. 


Bob Thompson with his painting Family Portrait at his 

one-man show at El Corsario Gallery in Ibiza, Spain, 1963. 

THOMPSON WAS LOSING THE BATTLE WITH ADDICTION. 

In November 1965, he and Carol went to Italy, where they spent a 

month or two in Florence, visited Arezzo, and eventually settled in 

Rome. The following spring, with his marriage in crisis and his 

strength sapped by recent gall bladder surgery, the artist died of a 

drug overdose after a night of partying with visiting musicians. 

Thompson’s friends were devastated. 

A service at the Judson Church in New York and a memorial 

concert at Slug’s took place in June 1966, followed by a funeral 

in Louisville a few days later. Benny Andrews, Mary Frank, 

Red Grooms, Allan Kaprow, Al Leslie, Larry Rivers, and Raymond 

Saunders were among the many artists included in a “Friends of 

Bob Thompson Memorial Exhibition” at 12 St. Mark’s Place in New 

York in spring 1967. 

Admiration for Thompson’s work has grown enormously in 

the decades since his death. Retrospectives have been staged at 

the New School for Social Research (1969), the Speed Museum 

(1971), the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (1974), the 

National Collection of Fine Arts (1975), the Studio Museum 

in Harlem (1979), and the Whitney Museum of American Art 

(1998). Prized by private collectors and treasured by his friends, 

Thompson’s art has been acquired for many important public 

institutions around the country, among them the Smithsonian 

American Art Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture 

Garden, the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, 

the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim 

Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute 

of Chicago, and the Detroit Institute of Arts. 


59

Tracking 

Marisol in the 

Fifties and 

Sixties 

M A R I N A PAC I N I 

Framing a chronology for Marisol (b. 1930) is a vexing but crucial 

task for understanding her artistic development. The challenge is 

not simply the reticence for which she is well known. Even from 

the earliest years of her career, she sometimes provided interviewers 

with conflicting information about her life. 1 Documents in several 

collections at the Archives of American Art reveal some of 

these inconsistencies and, ultimately, clarify some of the problems. 

For example, in the 5 June 1962 “Biographical Notes” [*] 

prepared by the Stable Gallery, her 1957 solo exhibition at the Leo 

Castelli Gallery was mistakenly identified as taking place in 1959; 

in a subsequent version it was listed in 1958. Although such discrepancies 

may appear inconsequential, they complicate attempts 

to chart her artistic education and the experiments that led to the 

development of her signature style. Despite the inaccuracies in 

dates, the “Notes” do provide a working overview of her background, 

art training, and early critical and commercial success. 



61

Previous Spread: Marisol, 

The Family, 1963. 

Right: Marisol, The Large 

Family Group, 1957. 

Marisol’s family led a nomadic existence. She was born in 

Paris to Venezuelan parents who moved frequently between 

Europe, the United States, and South America, a pattern she repeated 

as an adult. Her interest in art began at a young age, and 

when her father settled in Los Angeles in 1946, she began painting 

classes at night at the Jepson School of Fine Art. After graduating 

from high school, she traveled to Paris to study at the Ecole 

des Beaux-Arts, but she soon quit, complaining that her teachers 

wanted her to paint like Bonnard. Most biographies identify 1950 

as the year she took up residence in New York City; commenced 

studying with a series of teachers, including Yasuo Kuniyoshi, 

William King, and Hans Hofmann; and began absorbing a wide 

range of influences. 2 Throughout her career she credited Hofmann, 

who taught her painting, drawing, and composition, as 

the one teacher who taught her anything. 

After nearly a decade of training as a painter, Marisol switched 

media and, between 1953 and 1954, began making sculpture. She 

offered various explanations for the change, among them the influence 

of a pre-Columbian exhibition she saw in the early fifties 

and a personal artistic revolt. There are two possibilities for 

the revelatory pre-Columbian exhibition, a March 1952 exhibition 

at the Sidney Janis Gallery or a November 1953 exhibition at 

the Carlebach Gallery. 3 In either case, she was captivated by the 

“earthy and artful portrayals of animals and people.” 4 In a 1965 

interview with the art critic Grace Glueck, Marisol noted that in 

the early fifties she was mimicking Hofmann’s painterly style, but 

as she wasn’t very good at it, she took up sculpture. “It started as a 

kind of rebellion. Everything was so serious. . . . I was very sad myself 

and the people I met were so depressing. I started doing something 

funny so that I would become happier — and it worked. I was 

also convinced that everyone would like my work because I had so 

much fun doing it. They did.” 5 

Marisol was right; by the winter of 1954, while still enrolled 

at Hofmann’s school, she began exhibiting her sculptures at New 

York galleries, to favorable reviews. Her earliest appearance was 

at the Tanager Gallery, where she participated in several large 

group exhibitions until the gallery closed in 1962. 6 In 1955, she 

also began exhibiting regularly in the “New York Artists Annuals” 

at the Stable Gallery. John Ferren singled her out in ARTnews, 

stating that her “old type-box peopled with little clay figurines is 

a delight. There are lots of ideas in those niches and the very carelessness 

is appealing.” 7 

Laudatory write-ups probably partially accounted for Leo 

Castelli’s early interest in Marisol’s work. In a New York Times 

review of the May 1957 group show at Castelli’s recently opened 

gallery, Dore Ashton cited Marisol for her “primitive carving of a 

family group with curious undertones of both humor and anxiety.” 

8 The advertising poster for Marisol’s November 1957 solo 

exhibition at the gallery is illustrated with one of her roughly 

carved, pre-Columbian–inspired animal figures, although welded 


sculptures and terra-cotta boxes were also included. Again, 

Marisol received a positive review in ARTnews: 

[This] young Paris-born Venezuelan who has recently impressed 

New York with tiny ritual-images in cubicles, appears in full 

repertory for her first one-man show; in her case, this means 

a search for identity that experimentally echoes both naïf and 

primitive arts. Modernist lay-figures of Paris-New York lineage 

take “family” form out of heavy, crudely carved and painted 

wooden planks, the best of which seem private totem poles. . . . 

[L]ately she has added abstract weldings to what can be termed 

a creative pursuit of spiritual ancestors. 9 

Although non-figurative abstraction disappeared from her oeuvre 

by the early sixties, the Castelli exhibition chronicled the beginning 

of Marisol’s wide-ranging experimentation with materials. 


63

Marisol with her work The Party, 1966. 

Photograph by Geoffrey Clements. 

The author in ARTnews presciently highlighted issues of identity, 

the combination of fine and primitive art sources, and the subject 

of the family, all of which became significant in her later work. 

In the late fifties, taking flight from what she described as external 

and internal expectations, Marisol traveled to Rome. 10 That 

her thinking and art-making were sharpened by the hiatus is evidenced 

by the trajectory her career took upon her return. She was 

included in the pivotal Museum of Modern Art exhibitions “The 

Art of Assemblage” in 1961 and “The Americans” in 1963. From 

1962 to 1964, Marisol exhibited at Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery 

to popular and critical acclaim. In a May 1962 letter, Ward wrote 

to Jim Fitzsimmons, the editor at Art International, that Marisol’s 

current exhibition “is an unprecedented smash. You will be hearing 

about it, I’m sure.” 11 Sculptures were sold to the Museum of 

Modern Art, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and the prominent collector 

Roy Neuberger, among others. 

Marisol was selected by the staff of Art in America for inclusion 

in a June 1963 overview of young talent. 12 A statement was 

included, along with two reproductions, in which she described 

her work, noting that even though combinations of forms seemed 

incongruous, ultimately everything ended up where it belonged, 

“a hand at the end of an arm—a nose on the middle of the face . . . 

and a nostril inside the nose. . . .” 13 Her writing, like her sculpture, 

was both factual and wry. 


The incongruous combinations were firmly rooted in Marisol’s 

studies with Hofmann, as can be seen in The Family, which was 

shown in her 1964 Stable Gallery exhibition. She took Hofmann’s 

dictum of “push and pull” into the third dimension. Her figural 

sculptures are ostensibly representational, but they could be equally 

well described as minimalist boxes with attached details. Critic 

Max Kozloff had noted how disorienting her work was because of its 

“assault not only upon the integrity of traditionally separate media, 

but its juxtaposition of the most far-fetched sources. . . . Not even a 

great awareness of current incongruities in assemblage adequately 

prepares one for Marisol’s beguiling sense of the absurd.” 14 

Despite her success at the Stable Gallery, in October 1964 

Marisol moved to the Sidney Janis Gallery, where she remained until 

1993. Immediately, her work was included in the “3 Generations 

Exhibition”; The Kennedys, first shown in 1962 at the Stable 

Gallery, was exhibited with works by Andy Warhol and George 

Segal. In 1966, her first Janis solo exhibition was, as John Canaday 

wrote in the New York Times, “Predictably, the most popular of the 

exhibitions that opened during the week, . . . the new group of portraits 

. . . is no disappointment.” 15 

At some point between 1968 and 1970, Marisol trekked 

to Europe, Tahiti (where she took up scuba diving), and South 

America. The exact travel dates and locations vary, but it seems 

telling that once again, when her career appeared to be almost 

overheated, Marisol removed herself from New York for a period 

and returned having taken a new direction. During the seventies, 

she produced a series of fish sculptures inspired by her diving 

experiences. Later in the decade she embarked on a series of portraits 

of artists, including Louise Nevelson, Willem De Kooning, 

and Georgia O’Keeffe. Periodically, she would re-envision masterpieces 

in such works as the Mona Lisa (1962) and Self Portrait 

Looking at the Last Supper (1984). Critics continued to acclaim 

her work. Reviewing her 1984 Janis exhibition for Art in America, 

for example, Robert Edelman wrote that “the tour de force of this 

show, of course, is Marisol’s epic remake of Leonardo da Vinci’s 

Last Supper. . . . [H]er nearly 30-foot homage . . . [is] a compelling 

translation at monumental scale of a highly complex illusionistic 

image into a dynamic spatial composition.” 16 

From very early on, works by Marisol were included in important 

exhibitions, received favorable reviews, and were purchased 

by museums and collectors. The public flocked to her exhibitions. 

She was appreciated for the humor and sophistication of her subject 

matter as well as for her craftsmanship. Although this article 

focuses on the fifties and sixties, her early promise, witnessed in 

the 1962 Stable Gallery “Biographical Notes,“ was borne out by her 

long and successful career. 

[*] The “Biographical Notes” and other documents related 

to Marisol can be viewed online at www.aaa.si.edu, 

Keyword: Marisol. 

1 Marisol noted that her 

parents’ frequent moves made 

it difficult for her to remember 

specific biographical details. 

John Gruen, The Party’s Over 

Now: Reminiscences of the 

Fifties—New York’s Artists, 

Writers, Musicians, and their 

Friends (New York: The Viking 

Press, 1972), 200–201. This 

seems to have set a pattern 

as she continued—and 

continues—to be plagued with 

trouble remembering dates. 

2 The primary sources of 

information are Nancy Grove, 

Magical Mixtures: Marisol 

Portrait Sculpture (Washington, 

DC: Smithsonian Institution 

Press for the National Portrait 

Gallery, 1991), and Eleanor 

Heartney, Marisol (Purchase, 

New York: Neuberger Museum 

of Art, 2001). Letters between 

Marisol, the INS, and the Hans 

Hofmann School (in the Hans 

Hofmann papers, Archives of 

American Art, Smithsonian 

Institution, hereafter AAA) 

suggest that it was not until 

1954 that she became a fulltime 

resident of New York. 

3 The specific date sometimes 

cited for the exhibition 

is 1951. See Avis Berman, 

“A Bold and Incisive Way of 

Portraying Movers and Shakers,” 

Smithsonian, February 1984, 

58. Grove states Marisol saw 

the exhibition in 1951 and 

began making sculptures in 

1953, Magical Mixtures, 12. 

There are, however, general 

references to an exhibition that 

took place in the early fifties, 

Heartney, Marisol, 57. The 

earliest evidence of a Marisol 

sculpture is her inclusion in the 

1954 Tanager Gallery year-end 

sculpture exhibition. 

The 1952 Janis exhibition, 

detailed in photographs 

reproduced in anniversary 

catalogues, does not appear 

to include animal figures. See 

“Wood Carvers’ Comeback,” 

Life 14 July 1958, 59. The 

unillustrated ARTnews review 

of the Carlebach exhibition 

notes some “examples. . . 

wearing Egyptian-looking hats, 

have wide snag-toothed grins 

or vaguely dreamy expressions. 

. . . There are also bow-legged 

Tarascan terra-cotta dogs 

[and] a brace of ducks” 

(Lawrence Campbell, “Reviews 

and Previews: Mexican Art,” 

ARTnews, November 1953, 42). 

There was a second pre- 

Columbian exhibition at 

the Carlebach Gallery in 

March of 1954. 

4 “Wood Carvers’ 

Comeback,” 59. 

5 Grace Glueck, “It’s Not Pop, 

It’s Not Op—It’s Marisol,” New 

York Times Magazine, 7 March 

1965, 46. 

6 Marisol described William 

King, one of the founding 

members of the Tanager 

Gallery, as an important 

influence. Lawrence Campbell, 

“Marisol’s Magical Mixtures,” 

ARTnews, March 1964, 39. 

7 John Ferren, “Stable state 

of mind,” ARTnews, May 1955, 

64. Figures in a Type Drawer 

(1954) is reproduced, 23. 

8 Dore Ashton, “Art: A Local 

Anthology,” New York Times, 

8 May 1957, 75. 

9 Parker Taylor, “Reviews 

and Previews: Marisol,” 

ARTnews, November 1957, 14. 

10 Berman, “Bold and Incisive,” 

59. Marisol went to Italy for 

twelve to eighteen months 

sometime between 1957 and 

1960. 

11 Eleanor Ward to James 

Fitzsimmons, 15 May 1962, 

Stable Gallery records, AAA, 

microfilm reel 5822, frame 965. 

12 “Young Talent USA,” Art 

in America, June 1963, 51. The 

other artists included were 

painter James Rosenquist, 

graphic artist Jack Roth, 

photographer George Krause, 

and architectural designer 

Richard D. Hedman. Marisol, 

who was nominated by 

Dorothy Miller, was listed as 

woodcarver, 46–57. 

13 Ibid., 51. 

14 Max Kozloff, “New York 

Letter: Marisol,” Art International, 

September 1962, 35. 

15 John Canaday, “Art: 

Constructions on the 

‘Tensegrity’ Principle,” New 

York Times, 16 April 1966, 29. 

16 Robert Edelman, “Review 

of Exhibitions: New York: 

Marisol,” Art in America, 

October 1984, 189. 


65

A PROJECT BY TERENCE GOWER 

The following artist’s project is based on 

research in the Esther McCoy papers in the 

Archives of American Art. Terence Gower 

makes use of a selection from McCoy’s 

interview with Mexican architect Francisco 

Artigas. Gower uses the play format to 

dramatize McCoy’s first encounter in 1970 

with Artigas’ recently built “Castle,” shown in 

the two double-page photographs. 



67



69

SCENE ONE 

Curtain Up. 

Lights come up on the façade and 

forecourt of an Italianate castle, 

daytime. The architecture critic 

enters from left stage with a tape 

recorder and microphone. 

Esther McCoy: (Gazing at the façade 

while speaking into microphone) 

The tower, a view of the tower . . . 

It is . . . a square tower with hipped 

roof . . . it is about 70 feet high. 

Narrow, round-headed windows 

facing south-west . . . 

(Moving towards the entry) The 

loggia — the entrance with glazing 

on both sides — about 200 feet wide . . . 

(pause) A doorway, 8 feet wide, 

of 12-inch timber . . . 

(Opening front door and peering 

inside) The passage is covered with 

wood, with glass at the sides . . . (pause) 

Planting both sides . . . columns of 

old beams carved with acanthus. 


SCENE TWO 

Castle interior, afternoon. 

Esther McCoy: (Turning 360 degrees, 

speaking into microphone) It looks 

closed but it is passageways between 

hexagonal spaces . . . 

(Looking up) These beams are from 

an old church and the brackets are 

from an old house. Beams . . . with 

cord detailing . . . 

(Stepping through the door leading 

to terrace) Outside, a cold area . . . 

a barranca off the terrace . . . 

(Coming back into the Castle’s main 

hall) The central hexagonal space: 

a throw-away space, beautiful, with 

a small Diana, is it a Diana? No, it isn’t. 

A fountain in the center . . . A wood 

paving fanning out from the fountain . . . 

(Crossing to living room) The living 

room, the same hex with sofas on 

four sides steps down on the other two, 

one leading up to the fire place. 

Switches off tape recorder. 

Lights Fade. 


71



73

Pages 68–69: Casa Artigas, exterior view, 

ca. 1970. Architect: Francisco Artigas. 

Photograph by Roberto and Fernando Luna. 

Previous Spread: Casa Artigas, interior 

view, ca. 1970. Architect: Francisco Artigas. 

Photograph by Roberto and Fernando Luna. 

The photographs on the preceding pages show the home that the 

Mexican architect Francisco Artigas (1916–1998) designed for 

himself late in his career. The house was begun in 1968 and completed 

in 1970. The text is an extract from a five-hour interview of 

Artigas conducted by the American architecture critic Esther 

McCoy, whose papers are at the Smithsonian’s Archives of 

American Art. McCoy was a regular critic for the Los Angeles 

publication Art and Architecture and was instrumental to the 

planning and dissemination of the Case Study House program 

launched by the magazine in the late 1940s. She was a staunch 

advocate of modernist architectural ideology and a guiding force 

for the establishment of those ideas on the West Coast. McCoy 

also traveled frequently to Mexico and other Latin American 

countries, reporting back on the integration and sophistication of 

the modernist movement in those places. 

Mexico was fertile ground for modernist architecture in the 

1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. While the United States was adhering to 

a Soviet-style official architecture, Mexico — looking to express a 

progressive new identity after its revolution — had gone entirely 

Casa Gómez, Los Jardines del Pedregal 

de San Angel, Mexico City. Architect: 

Francisco Artigas. Photograph 

by Roberto and Fernando Luna. 

modern. Starting in the late 1940s, public building projects — government 

buildings, schools, hospitals, and public housing — were 

designed according to the logical economy of a stripped-down 

functionalism. Interestingly, this desire for an expression of modernity 

extended beyond public architecture to the realm of the 

wealthy and powerful. Francisco Artigas was an architect who 


was happy to design private modernist villas and luxury hotels 

for this sector. 

The majority of Artigas’ projects were houses built for clients 

in Mexico City’s most exclusive suburb, Los Jardines del 

Pedregal de San Angel, laid out on the south edge of the city by 

Mexico’s great real estate speculator Luis Barragán. These photogenic 

masterpieces (for instance, Casa Gómez, 1953, pictured left) 

made Artigas an icon of Mexican modernism. Esther McCoy — like 

this artist — was an admirer of these houses and their creator. 

Pedregal is a lava landscape, a brutal and beautiful setting for 

residential architecture. The introduction of Artigas’ man-made 

slabs into this landscape creates a very pleasurable visual 

contrast. McCoy was so taken with Artigas’ Pedregal houses 

that she wrote the introduction to the architect’s enormous 1972 

monograph. (Curiously no reference is made to this book in her 

published bibliographies.) 

McCoy’s interview took place just after Artigas had shifted 

his architectural style from modernism to a kind of fantasy historicism, 

evident in the pictures of his own house on the preceding 

pages. This shift was a capricious one, not unlike the modernisthistoricist 

shift in “styles” that occurred in the United States several 

years later and became known as “Postmodernism.” McCoy 

the modernist spends much time during the interview searching 

for a justification for this shift, in perhaps one of the first twentieth-century 

examples of a modernist critic or architect being 

faced with a New Architecture that isn’t based on a grand theory. 

In Artigas’ new work there is no manifesto, no justification, no 

larger plan based on a new concept of social engineering: The 

architect was simply bored with modernism. A kind of crisis registers 

in McCoy’s voice as Artigas calmly discusses his principal 

inspiration for the new house: the Robin Hood movies he saw as 

a boy. He confesses that since boyhood he had always wanted to 

live in Robin Hood’s castle, and now at last, he could turn his 

dream into reality. 

Francisco Artigas was born in 1916. When he was six years 

old, a dashing Douglas Fairbanks hit the screens as the protagonist 

in the costly Hollywood extravaganza Robin Hood. 

Sixteen years later Hollywood released a second Robin Hood 

film, this time with Errol Flynn opposite Olivia de Havilland’s 

Maid Marian. It’s possible that both films fanned the flames of 

Artigas’ Robin Hood obsession, and both are interchangeable 

in a way. In both films, most of the nature scenes (Robin Hood’s 

adventures in Sherwood Forest making up the bulk of the action) 

were filmed outdoors in the Los Angeles area. All interior shots 

were filmed in a Hollywood studio, mostly scenes of revelry or 

pageantry in the case of the earlier film or interminable swordfights 

in the later one. All these scenes take place in fake castle 

interiors or courtyards. 

The design of the castle in the films is allegedly based on 

Nottingham Castle, the key site of the Robin Hood legend. The 

Photograph of cassette tapes with 

Esther McCoy’s 1970–71 description 

of Francisco Artigas’ home. 

Photograph by Terence Gower. 


75

aesthetic provenance of Artigas’ castle is therefore an English 

castle as interpreted by a Hollywood set designer, later filtered 

through the imagination of a young boy. I should mention that 

this is in no way an unusual inspiration for a Mexican house. In 

the 1930s, certain of Mexico City’s architects-to-the-elite sought 

inspiration in Hollywood. While most architects were exploring 

art deco forms, these architects were looking at the Beverly Hills 

houses of Hollywood stars, built in what is known in the United 

States as Mission Style. These mansions incorporated the decorative 

details of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Colonial 

missions. This elaborate Spanish Colonial style, practiced by 

Hollywood set decorators freelancing as architects, was reimported 

to Mexico, where it became known as “Hollywood Baroque.” All 

of this is a testament to the density and richness of Mexican culture, 

seemingly able to absorb and digest just about every cultural 

assault without altering its own character. 

But why would Artigas choose to build a stone castle so late 

in his life and career? My hypothesis is that he built it because 

he could. What I did not mention in my introduction to this essay 

was that the technological aspects of modernism never really 

flourished in Mexico, a country with a very large pool of skilled 

building labor, which made the mechanization of the building 

trade redundant. For example, in the 1950s it probably would 

have been less expensive to have workmen handcraft an I-beam 

out of standard steel profiles than to fabricate it through an industrial 

process. The spectacular concrete architecture of Felix 

Candela was probably only possible in Mexico, handcrafted and 

tested by an army of workers. With this huge pool of artisan labor, 

wealthy patrons in Mexico have been able to afford to build any 

structure out of any material, including castles of solid stone. In 

Mexico, Artigas had the luxury of rejecting the apparent economy 

of modern building technology and indulging his childhood fantasies 

to the fullest. He could incorporate handcut cantera stone 

walls, handmade tile floors and roofs, and handcarved wooden 

beams. It is just possible that rejecting modern building technology 

could have been the easier route to take. 

What Francisco Artigas’ project demonstrates, and what 

seems to slowly dawn on Esther McCoy in her interview, is that 

modernism in Mexico’s elite private sector was often practiced 

as a style, symbolic of sophistication and novelty but divorced 

from the progressive social philosophy at the heart of the movement 

(and clearly at work in Mexico’s public sector, resulting in 

good housing, schools, and hospitals for many of the less fortunate). 

In McCoy’s interview, Artigas stresses that his ideas on the 

distribution of functions, exposures, and siting had not changed 

at all between his “modern” and his late work, nor were his ideas 

significantly different from those of premodern (Colonial) architecture. 

In other words, it was only the envelope that had 

changed. What I detect in the tone of McCoy’s voice in the tapes is 

a gradual realization that perhaps Artigas, an icon of modernism, 


was not a modernist and perhaps never was. The question needed 

to be asked: Was the modernist functionalism in his early work 

largely some kind of aesthetic apparatus designed to display the 

status of his clients? 

There is a certain drama to this scenario — the edifice of modernism 

crumbling before the eyes of the idealistic architecture 

critic. The drama is especially acute when McCoy lays eyes on the 

Artigas “Castle” for the first time. She rolls the tape and begins the 

peculiar soliloquy I’ve reprinted here in a tone of voice reminiscent 

of a news report from a disaster area. It is as if she is witnessing 

the demolition of an ideal, expressed paradoxically by the 

castle’s solid stones and sturdy beams. She is taking audio notes, 

as she clearly is accustomed to doing as she tours a building for 

the first time, but the various specs she is listing — “A doorway, 

eight feet wide . . . wood paving fanning out . . .” — are colored by a 

slightly frantic tone of disbelief. Like the narration of Joseph 

Conrad’s protagonist as he travels up the river and into the Heart 

of Darkness, Esther McCoy’s report sounds like that of a first 

witness to the horrors of a terrifying new Postmodern world. 

The Adventures of Robin Hood, 1938. 

Photograph by Elmer Fryer. 


77

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79

P H O T O C R E D I T S 

Cover: Roy Lichtenstein sketches for 

As I Opened Fire, ca. 1964, Archives of 

American Art, Smithsonian Institution; 

© Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. 

Pages 4–13: all images, Samuel Wagstaff 

Papers, Archives of American Art, 

Smithsonian Institution. 

Page 15: gelatin silver print (24.5 x 

22.7 cm.). National Portrait Gallery, 

Smithsonian Institution; gift of the Estate 

of Hans Namuth © Hans Namuth Ltd. 

T/NPG.95.129.09; Page 16: © 2007 Andy 

Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/ 

ARS, New York; Pages 17, 20–21: Alan 

R. Solomon Papers, Archives of American 

Art, Smithsonian Institution; Page 22: 

Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images; 

Page 25: France Observateur, 25 June 

1964. Alan R. Solomon Papers, Archives 

of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 

Page 28: oil on canvas panels with 

objects (216 x 153 cm.). The Eli and 

Edythe L. Broad Collection, Los Angeles; 

art © Jasper Johns/licensed by VAGA, 

New York, New York; Page 30: archives 

of Rachel Rosenthal, Los Angeles; 

Page 33: art © Robert Rauschenberg/ 

Licensed by VAGA, New York, New York; 

Page 34: graphite pencil on paper; 

collection of the artist; art © Jasper Johns/ 

licensed by VAGA, New York, New York. 

Pages 36–44: all images, Dwan Gallery 

Records, Archives of American Art, 


Pages 46–50: all images, Ellen Hulda 

Johnson Papers, Archives of American 

Art, Smithsonian Institution. 

Pages 52–59: all images, Bob Thompson 



Pages 60–61: wood, metal, graphite, 

textiles, paint, plaster, and other 

accessories, 202 x 160 x 185 cm., 

Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, 

New Hampshire. Museum purchase: 

The Henry Melville Fuller Acquisition 

Fund, 2005.12; art © Marisol/licensed 

by VAGA, New York, New York; Page 63: 

painted wood, 94 x 97 cm., collection 

of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, courtesy 

of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, 

Washington, D.C. Gift of Mr. and 

Mrs. C. M. Lewis; art © Marisol/ 

licensed by VAGA, New York, New York; 

Page 64: Rudi Blesh Papers, Archives of 

American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 

Pages 68–69, 72–73, 74: photographs 

© Roberto and Fernando Luna; 

Page 75: Esther McCoy Taped Interviews 

of and about Architects, Archives of 

American Art, Smithsonian Institution; 

Page 77: Warner Brothers/Photofest. 

© Warner Brothers. 

Endpapers: Samuel Wagstaff

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