The Ferus Gallery was a contemporary art gallery which operated from 1957 to 1966. In 1957, the gallery was located at 736-A North La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles in the U.S. state of California. [1] In 1958, it was relocated across the street to 723 North La Cienega Boulevard where it remained until its closing in 1966. [2]
The gallery was founded in 1957 by the curator Walter Hopps, his wife Shirley Hopps, the artist Edward Kienholz on La Cienega Boulevard. [3] [4] Walter Hopps and Shirley Hopps ran the gallery. [5] [6]
They called the gallery “Ferus” to honor a person named James Farris who shot himself to death, and was possibly the friend of a friend of Hopps. [7] [8] They spelled the name "Ferus" because the man who designed the gallery's logo, Robert Alexander (a.k.a. “Baza”), a collage artist and poet, thought that spelling looked stronger on the page, and Hopps agreed. [7]
In 1958, Kienholz left to concentrate on producing art, and his stake in the gallery was replaced by Irving Blum. Also at this time, Sayde Moss, a wealthy widow, became a silent partner and with her support the gallery moved across the street to 723 N. La Cienega Boulevard. [9] [10]
Up until the autumn of 1958, the gallery held twenty shows, but had made hardly any sales. Blum persuaded Hopps to reduce the number of represented artists to fourteen (seven from San Francisco and seven from Los Angeles) and transformed the financial health of the gallery.
Under the directorship of Irving Blum from 1958, the gallery exhibited both the West Coast and New York art of the period. It was the first gallery on the West Coast to devote a solo show to Andy Warhol, whom Blum had first met in New York in 1961. Blum also ventured to show other East Coast artists, including Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, and Frank Stella. [11] Finish Fetish—a style that emphasized gleaming surfaces—and Light and Space—art about perception—were other Ferus-bred styles that allowed L.A. to distinguish itself from the rest of the art world. [12] Artist Ed Ruscha has likened the gallery to a jazz catalog "where there are a lot of different voices under the same record label. Each had a very distinctive take on the world and on his work, and so that made it a very vital place to aspire to and to be." [13]
From 1960 to 1964, art collector Marcia Simon Weisman hosted monthly proselytizing classes for novice collectors, taught by Blum and Hopps. [14] Committed local art collectors such as Robert Rowan, Edwin Janss, Betty Asher, and author Michael Blankfort were loyal clients. [13]
Hopps left in 1962 to become curator and, later, director of the Pasadena Art Museum. Ferus closed in 1967 when Blum sought "a financial leg up" by opening Ferus/Pace with Arne Glimcher, owner of New York's Pace Gallery. [13] That venture lasted less than two years. Blum operated the Irving Blum Gallery until his departure for New York City in 1972 where in partnership with Joseph Helman he opened the BlumHelman Gallery; he returned full-time to Los Angeles in 1998 as a private dealer. [13] From 1965, the offices of the art magazine Artforum were situated above the gallery, before moving to New York City in 1967.
The inaugural exhibition at the Ferus Gallery was Objects on the New Landscape Demanding of the Eye (March 15 – April 11, 1957), a group show including the work of Frank Lobdell, Jay DeFeo, Craig Kauffman, Richard Diebenkorn, John Altoon and Clyfford Still. Sonia Gechtoff was also in that show in addition to being the first artist to have a solo show at Ferus, in 1957. [15]
In 1957, the gallery was temporarily closed after LAPD officers arrested and charged Wallace Berman with obscenity over work in his exhibition. It was his first and last solo show.
In July 1962, Andy Warhol: Campbell's Soup Cans was Andy Warhol's first solo pop art exhibition and the first exhibition of the Soup Cans. Five of the canvases sold for $100 each, but Hopps and his then wife, Shirley Nielsen Blum cancelled some of the sales to keep the set intact. At least two sales were completed, with Warhol restoring the original set with other 'duplicate' paintings that he had already painted, with the gallery buying ownership of 32 paintings for $1000. [16] [17]
Los Angeles artists who had their first solo shows at the gallery included: Wallace Berman (1957), Billy Al Bengston (1958), Ed Moses (1958), Robert Irwin (1959), John Mason (1959), Kenneth Price (1960), Llyn Foulkes (1962), Larry Bell (1962) and Ed Ruscha (1963).
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art organized "Late Fifties at the Ferus" in 1968, and the Newport Harbor Art Museum organized "The Last Time I Saw Ferus" in 1976. In 2002, Gagosian Gallery, New York, mounted an exhibition of about 45 sculptures, paintings, drawings and other artworks by 22 artists shown at Ferus during its 10-year lifetime. Assembled by Irving Blum, the show also included Ferus Gallery exhibition announcements by Lichtenstein and others, several art scene photographs taken by Dennis Hopper, and an elaborate, 144-page catalog. [13] In 2007, "The Cool School" was released, a documentary film about the Ferus Gallery and its eccentric artists. [18]
In 2010, the Samuel Freeman gallery in Santa Monica created a replica of the Ferus within its own walls. The exhibition featured the original door that stood at the entrance of the Ferus plus a full-scale re-creation of the gallery's 1960 solo Bengston exhibition. [19] As well in January 2010 The Ferus Gallery reopened its doors at the original site at 723 N La Cienega in Los Angeles under the directorship of Tim Nye of Nyehaus and Franklin Parrasch Galleries with an exhibition entitled Ferus Gallery Greatest Hits Vol. 1. and featured many of the original stable of artists, including Craig Kauffman, Billy Al Bengston, Kenneth Price and Ed Ruscha. [20]
Events from the year 1962 in art.
Wallace "Wally" Berman was an American experimental filmmaker, assemblage, and collage artist and a crucial figure in the history of post-war California art.
Edward Ralph Kienholz was an American installation artist and assemblage sculptor whose work was highly critical of aspects of modern life. From 1972 onwards, he assembled much of his artwork in close collaboration with his artistic partner and fifth wife, Nancy Reddin Kienholz. Throughout much of their career, the work of the Kienholzes was more appreciated in Europe than in their native United States, though American museums have featured their art more prominently since the 1990s.
Edward Joseph Ruscha IV is an American artist associated with the pop art movement. He has worked in the media of painting, printmaking, drawing, photography, and film. He is also noted for creating several artist's books. Ruscha lives and works in Culver City, California.
The Gagosian Gallery is a modern and contemporary art gallery owned and directed by Larry Gagosian. The gallery exhibits some of the most well-known artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. As of 2024, Gagosian employs 300 people at 19 exhibition spaces – including New York City, London, Paris, Basel, Beverly Hills, San Francisco, Rome, Athens, Geneva, and Hong Kong – designed by architects such as Caruso St John, Richard Gluckman, Richard Meier, Jean Nouvel, and Annabelle Selldorf.
Walter "Chico" Hopps was an American museum director, gallerist, and curator of contemporary art. Hopps helped bring Los Angeles post-war artists to prominence during the 1960s, and later went on to redefine practices of curatorial installation internationally. He is known for contributing decisively to “the emergence of the museum as a place to show new art.”
John Altoon was an American artist. Born in Los Angeles to immigrant Armenian parents, from 1947 to 1949 he attended the Otis Art Institute, from 1947 to 1950 he also attended the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, and in 1950 the Chouinard Art Institute. Altoon was a prominent figure in the LA art scene in the 1950s and 1960s. Exhibitions of his work have been held at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Corcoran Gallery, Washington D.C, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, The Baxter Museum, Pasadena, and The Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
The exhibition "New Painting of Common Objects" at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1962 was the first museum survey of American pop art in the United States. The eight artists included were: Roy Lichtenstein, Jim Dine, Andy Warhol, Phillip Hefferton, Robert Dowd, Edward Ruscha, Joe Goode and Wayne Thiebaud. It was curated by Walter Hopps, who had given Andy Warhol his first solo show at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles the previous year. The show helped the pop art movement gain critical acceptance, preceding the Guggenheim Museum's 1963 pop art exhibition "Six Painters and the Object", curated by Lawrence Alloway.
Billy Al Bengston was an American visual artist and sculptor who lived and worked in Venice, California, and Honolulu, Hawaii. Bengston was probably best known for work he created that reflected California's "Kustom" car and motorcycle culture. He pioneered the use of sprayed layers of automobile lacquer in fine art and often used colors that were psychedelic and shapes that were mandala-like. ARTnews referred to Bengston as a "giant of Los Angeles's postwar art scene."
Nancy Reddin Kienholz was an American mixed media artist based in Hope, Idaho. She worked in installation art, assemblage, photography, and lenticular printing. She was most famous for her collaborations with her husband and creative partner Edward Kienholz, from their meeting in 1972 until his sudden death in 1994. She continued to produce her own artworks for the rest of her life.
Ed Moses was an American artist based in Los Angeles and a central figure of postwar West Coast art.
The Cool School is a 2008 American documentary film about the rise of the Los Angeles contemporary art scene. It was directed by Morgan Neville and narrated by Jeff Bridges. The documentary premièred at the Cleveland International Film Festival.
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The Huysman Gallery was an art gallery in Los Angeles, California that operated from December 1960 to summer 1961. It was located at 740 North La Cienega Boulevard, across the street from the noted Ferus Gallery. Curator Henry Hopkins, who founded the gallery, named it after the French decadent novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans. The gallery showcased the works of several young artists who later had great success, including Joe Goode, Ed Ruscha, and Larry Bell.
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Shirley Neilsen Blum, also known as Shirley Hopps is an American art historian, author, gallerist, and professor emeritus at the State University of New York, Purchase (1970–1989). She specializes in Northern Renaissance art, early Netherlandish art, and modern art. In the 1950s through the 1960s, she was active in the Los Angeles gallery scene, and she co-founded and co-ran Ferus Gallery.
the couple (Hopps), along with the artist Edward Kienholz founded the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1957.
34°05′04.8″N118°22′34.5″W / 34.084667°N 118.376250°W
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