The Art Set
Charlie Scheips

Casting the Net to LA

I spent last week in Los Angeles staying with David Hockney at his lush compound in the Hollywood Hills. I lived in LA from the mid-1980s to 1991 — first as David’s assistant and later as the organizer of the Los Angeles International Contemporary Art Fair. By the time I left I thought I had my fill of LA but since then every trip back has rekindled my love for the place. It can be heaven.

On Sunday, we drove out to Sandy Gallin’s newly built $22 million “cottage” on a cliff just above the Malibu Colony. It’s unusual to have so much rain in October but whenever it rains in LA, nature quickly responds with a palette of lush greens and cascading multi-colored bougainvillea making for a lovely drive from the Hills to the beach. Sandy was playing host to Bob Colacello whose new book on the Reagan’s Ronnie & Nancy was just published.

We were among the first arrivals that included David Geffen and Connie Wald. We visited with Connie on the veranda as about forty people trickled onto the lawn. Cornelia Guest, artist/designer Martin Saar, Vanity Fair’s Wendy Stark, Betsy Bloomingdale, film director Brian Singer, and Bianca Jagger were among the guests. Bob had been feted all week around town and the casual elegance of a Sunday luncheon al fresco was just the right touch.

Colacello was the editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview — to my mind the best magazine of its period — that is until Andy died. Bob wrote a great column during that time called Out in the magazine that really captured the zeitgeist of the moment — and was fun too. We all got copies of the book that is the fascinating tale of the Reagan’s path to the White House. It’s a great read no matter what side of the political fence you sit on.

That night, I drove out past Pasadena to San Marino with David and textile and rug designer Gregory Evans to the Huntington Library for Don Bachardy’s opening for Celebrities, Friends, and Strangers: Portraits by Don Bachardy (though February 6, 2005) The Huntington was one of my favorite places to take visitors when I lived there — its enormous gardens, art collection and library offers one of Southern California’s best outings — and if you have time to go to the Norton Simon Museum and tour the famous Green & Green Gamble House you can make a day of it.

	Don Bachardy, Self Portrait

In 1999, the Huntington acquired the papers and artifacts of Don’s life partner the English California ex-pat writer Christopher Isherwood. It is the centenary of Isherwood’s birth this year.

I met Don on my first visit to Los Angeles, just after Isherwood’s death and a few months before I moved there. Besides Hockney, we shared a friend in composer Virgil Thomson. We quickly became friends and I met a whole gamut of interesting figures at the many wonderful dinners Don gave at the house he shared with Isherwood overlooking Santa Monica Canyon. Tony Richardson, Stephen Spender, Richard Buckle, Jim Bridges and Jack Larson, to name just a few. I sat for Don a couple of times. The experience of sitting for Don is captured brilliantly in Academy Award winning filmmaker Terry Sanders’ 12-minute film The Eyes of Don Bachardy that is featured in the current show.

The exhibition was curated by the Huntington’s Sarah S. Hodson and features 35 works ranging from the black and white portraits of the early 1960s and 70s to the vividly colored acrylic portraits that have been the hallmark of Bachardy’s work during the past two decades.

He told a group of us that he started to draw as a young child copying movie stills of the famous stars of Hollywood. He met Isherwood in 1952 when he was 18 years old and Isherwood was 48. Isherwood encouraged Bachardy to go first to the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles and the Slade School of Art in London.

Jack Larson by Don Bachardy

The bright lights of the literary, artistic, and cinematic world all seemed to have dined at one time or another at the house on Adelaide. Bachardy took advantage of the situation by asking scores of them to sit for him. Several of these early portraits have entered the collection of the Huntington and are featured in the exhibition including his portraits of Julie Harris, Gerald Heard, Aldous Huxley, Anais Nin and Dorothy Parker.

We ran into Jack Larson outside of the exhibition and decided to go downtown to Chinatown for dinner. I drove with Jack in his truly fabulous baby blue 1961 Mercedes convertible. Jack is famous to most as Jimmy Olsen in the Superman TV series of the 1950s. He is in fact, a celebrated poet and librettist whose credits include Virgil Thomson’s opera Lord Byron and more recently with composer Charles Fussell — The Astronaut’s Tale — there as CD from Albany Records you can get narrated by Jack.

Over dinner Jack regaled us with stories including how he met his great friend Montgomery Clift. In 1953 he was making Three Sailors and a Girl for Warner Brothers that starred Jane Powell. Merv Griffin was in the cast and told Jack that Clift was also on the lot making Alfred Hitchcock’s I, Confess and wanted to meet Larson. The feeling was mutual for Larson so a meeting soon took place and they were remained close friends until the actor’s early death in 1966.

We had seen director Brian Singer at Gallin’s luncheon that day who told us he was off to Australia to make the next Superman film. Jack told us that they talked to him about playing the Perry White character but he’s not a big traveler and won’t leave his dog for any length of time. And why should he want to leave the incredible Frank Lloyd Wright house in Brentwood that he shared with film director James Bridges until Bridges’ death in 1993.

The conversation was all over the place during dinner. It ranged from the destruction of Lord Byron’s diaries as well as Edgar Degas’ 800 erotic drawings that his family destroyed after his death. We moved onto the current doings of Jack’s friend Leslie Caron to a reminiscence of the strange cult singer Florence Foster Jenkins and her pianist Cosme McMoon. Jenkins’s debut at Carnegie Hall in 1944, a month before her death at 76, was sold out despite her apparent lack of any musical talent. She said, “people may say that I couldn’t sing but nobody can say I didn’t sing.” A compilation CD of her work is hilariously titled Murder on the High C’s.

His recent book The Artist Observed: The Photographs of
Sidney B. Felsen, featured in NYSD is a fantastic selection from the more that 20,000 photos he has taken of artists working at Gemini over the years. Sidney looks about 20 years younger thanks to life surrounded by close friends and talented artists — and maybe some good genes to assist. Happy Birthday Sidney!

	Sidney Felsen. Photo: JH.

On Wednesday, I went down to Koreatown to the Beverly Hot Springs spa for an hour and a half of bliss — it’s the city’s only natural mineral baths. That night we met LA Louver gallery Peter Goulds and his wife Liz for a quick bite on the plaza of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion before seeing George Bizet’s Carmen at LA Music Center Opera. I first met Peter around 1982 when I was working at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Peter had come out to help set up the Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz show. Peter represents David Hockney on the West Coast and will present a show of Hockney’s new watercolors in February 24th, 2005.

During the first intermission, I walked down the block to see Frank Gehry’s incredible Disney Hall. By day it’s a sparkling, almost blinding, symphony of reflective metal sculpted shapes. By night, however it has an entirely different appearance — almost a sleeping giant. It’s such a great addition to the landscape of downtown and I am told the acoustics are unbelievably warm and tonal.

I got back to New York in time to go to Bing Wright’s first show (through November 27th) at Paula Cooper’s gallery on 21st Street in Chelsea on Saturday night. The exhibit presents several large-scale photo series created by Wright from the late 1980s to the present. They looked particularly good in the Cooper space where the room’s dimensions suited his photos of Wet Windows; Still Lives of dead insects magnified to gargantuan proportions; Fly Disasters, and finally his most recent series Newsprint Falling.

One of Bing Wright's Wet Windows at Paula Cooper

Wright is from a very artistic family — his parents Bagley and Jinny Wright are the great Seattle art patrons. His brother Charles is the former director of DIA and is now about to start a poetry publishing endeavor. Bing and Charles are married to sisters Migs and Barbara respectively. Bing’s wife Migs is one of the key people behind the excellent PBS series Art/21 that focuses on contemporary artists and is now in its third season.

After the opening, a couple dozen of Bing’s nearest and dearest gathered down the street at La Luncheonette for a delicious dinner: I got there just as Migs and Cooper’s director Steven Henry were sorting out the dinner place cards. I got to sit next to Jinny Wright and across from daughter Merrill. Also saw Pace Wildenstein’s Susan Dunne, DIA’s Terry Bell and Costco founder Jeff and Susan Brotman, Paula Cooper with husband book publisher Jack Macrea with whom she founded 192 Books in Chelsea last year.

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