"Ferus" at Gagosian - New York - Ferus Gallery

In the golden age of Los Angeles art many years ago, Ferus Gallery emerged like Brigadoon out of the foggy hills of West Hollywood. Ferus was founded in 1957 on a street named La Cienega for the swamps on which it grew. It came into existence under the care of legendary curator Walter Hopps, master of assemblage Edward Kienholz and the poet Bob Alexander. Returning to his studio in 1958, Kienholz sold his share of Ferus to Irving Blum, a charismatic, aspiring dealer with a movie star's voice. That year, Blum was instrumental in radically reducing the gallery's roster of 60 or 70 local artists and striking a balance between East and West Coast practitioners. Until Hopps left the gallery for the Pasadena Art Museum in 1962, he played Lerner to Blum's Loewe, the lyric to the tune. Ferus remained viable under Blum's direction until 1966, when it closed. Its legend has been rekindled at Gagosian, with primary focus on artists whose association with the gallery began in the Blum-Hopps years. (The gallery was reincarnated as Ferus/Pace, and then as Irving Blum Gallery after the brief partnership with Arnold Glimcher went south.)

Blum came to Ferus with a keen eye and a New York pipeline to new talent provided by Dick Bellamy of the Green Gallery and impresario and Metropolitan Museum curator Henry Geldzahler. Ferus exhibitions were largely reviled or ignored by the L.A. press, finally gaining critical visibility when Artforum moved upstairs and stayed for several years before decamping to New York. Blum's exhibitions included, from the Left Coast, the expressive painters Hassel Smith, Richard Diebenkorn, Ed Moses, John Altoon and Jay DeFeo, masters of funk Wally Berman and Bruce Conner, and pioneers of nontraditional mediums including Ken Price and Billy Al Bengston, Craig Kauffman, Ed Ruscha, Robert Irwin and Larry Bell. From New York there were Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Joseph Cornell, Robert Morris, Carl Andre and others. While some became internationally famous, others are more often remembered in the context of historical surveys at institutions that ponder the legend of contemporary art in Southern California before Vietnam and the Summer of Love.

With some examples borrowed from museum collections, this exhibition of works surfed the waters of nostalgia and commerce, with examples of varying degrees of accomplishment. Dennis Hopper's crisp and stylish portraits showed the Ferus studs in their immortal youth--Kauffman with billboard, Ruscha printing, Warhol with a flower. Presiding over the exhibition like a spectral conscience was Kienholz's funky, funny assemblage-portrait of the consummate showman: Walter Hopps, Hopps, Hopps (1959) represents its subject, taller than life, as a street hawker of hot goods, flashing his jacket to reveal clipping-file images of a de Kooning, a Kline and a Pollock. Bracketing Kelly's Chatham IV: Red/Blue (1971) were two rarely seen monochromatic oils by Irwin, reminiscent of the paintings of Agnes Martin, each just shy of a square with horizontal lines of pigment in the lower field. Of three Stella paintings included, the 10-sided, open-centered D. (1963), with a concentricity of glowing stripes of metallic paint on raw canvas, is said to be the only one of its inherently fugitive lavender color to survive. For all its good looks, this version of the Ferus story suggests that a more definitive take on L.A.'s glory years is still waiting to be done.

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