One of the central themes in Irving Blum's life— one of the themes that most interested us in the Oral History Program when we approached him to participate in our Los Angeles art community project—the theme of a life played out in the tensions between the coasts, was a leitmotiv established in his youth. Born in 1930 in New York City, he moved with his parents to Phoenix in the early 1940s (a change of scene necessitated by his father's acute arthritis). The contrast in the climate, in the sense of space, and in the pace of living struck him almost immediately, and these were issues to which he returned repeatedly during our conversations. He loved the openness of the West, but he also thrived under the intensity of the East and came sorely to miss "that sense of urgency" during the fifteen years he eventually spent as an art dealer in L.A. And yet, ironi¬cally, it was precisely his injection of some of that Eastern urgency into the laid-back Los Angeles gallery scene of the late fifties that characterized one of his principal contributions to the history of contemporary art in Southern California.
That, and his sense of drama. Of enthusiasm. He had counted on becoming an actor, ever since his days in a Phoenix high school when a drama coach singled out his particular talents. He had majored in drama and English during three years at the University of Arizona and then signed on for a three-year stint with the U.S. Air Force, where he "majored" in Armed Forces Radio. Following his discharge at the age of twenty-three, he returned to New York and spent the next six months trying to catch the attention of Broadway theater producers.
Instead he caught the attention of Hans Knoll, the distinguished Madison Avenue dealer in contemporary European furniture, who represented, among others, Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier. Following lunch and a hard-sell siege, Knoll managed to convince the young would-be actor to give interior design a year's trial run. Blum ended up staying with Knoll Associates for three years, working with Knoll's wife, Florence (a former classmate of Charles and Ray Eames), and becoming increasingly absorbed in the New York art scene (the paintings and the sculpture that were to complement the company's furniture in many of its prestigious design commissions, such as the newly completed Seagram's Building). Blum's art interests ranged from Ben Shahn to Josef Albers; he began collecting in a modest way and spent hours visiting the studios and garrets of the city's newest generation of artists: Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana, Jack Youngerman, Agnes Martin, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg.
Early in 1958 Hans Knoll was killed in a car crash, and within six months Blum decided to leave the company. The spirit of the place had changed, and besides he was begin¬ning to miss the West and to desire a gallery situation of his own. He came out to Los Angeles, spent a few weeks looking around, and very quickly ascertained that only one gallery in town remotely matched his aspirations. This was the remarkable Ferus Gallery, founded a year earlier by artist Ed Kienholz and a budding art impresario named Walter Hopps, The two of them were supervising a fairly raucous, bohemian cooperative uniting many of the most promising young artists in California, including Wallace Berman, Craig Kauffman, John Altoon, Kienholz himself, and several dozen others.
The scene around Ferus at the time was both ambitious and diffuse; the artists were fiercely committed to their work but at the same time astonishingly naive with regard to the work of others, notably their peers in New York. The space itself, slotted into a room behind Streeter Blair's antique shop on La Cienega, was hopelessly ramshackle by New York standards. Still, there was no question but that Ferus was the focus, the matrix for vanguard art in Southern California, and Blum soon joined on, buying out Ed Kienholz for a reputed one hundred dollars (and a legacy of bad feelings).
Almost immediately Blum and Hopps began to streamline the operation. They moved the gallery across the street into a clean, white space that looked for all the world as if it had fallen right out of a Fifty-seventh Street sky¬scraper, They secured the patronage of a silent partner, Sayde Moss, whose modest financial backing afforded crucial latitude for experimentation. They pared back "the stable, " trimming their initial list of artists to a mere twelve, on whose behalf they now redoubled their efforts. They began to nurture a community of informed collectors who were willing to buy.
This, then, is the story that makes up the core of the present oral history: Blum's recollections of such Ferus artists as Altoon, Kauffman, Kienholz, Robert Irwin, Billy Al Bengston, Ed Moses, Peter Voulkos, John Mason, Ken Price, and Larry Bell; and his account of the transforma¬tion they wrought in the once backwater reaches of the L.A. art outback. It is the story of a gallery's rise, its triumph, and its eventual decline, partly owing to the atomizing pressures brought on by its own considerable success.
Ferus closed in 1966, its artists dispersing to other galleries, some of them to other places, some of them indeed to New York. Some, however, stayed on with Blum, who now opened his own gallery, the Irving Blum Gallery, which persisted in L.A. through 1973. Increasingly, however, Blum focused on the L. A, exhibition of his friends from the early- days in New York, artists such as Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, who had in the meantime become blue-chip performers. Increasingly, Blum was becoming disillusioned nevertheless with the L.A. scene, with the failure of the burgeoning promise of the early sixties (the artists, the collectors, the support institutions) to consolidate into a thriving, self-regenerating center with anything approaching New York's importance.
In 1973 Blum decided to close shop and return to New York. During the next decade he teamed with Joseph Helman, and the two of them opened a new gallery (first located on East Seventy-fifth Street, near the Whitney Museum, and now transplanted to expanded quarters on Fifty-seventh Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues). The BlumHelman Gallery represents some of the most important artists showing in New York today, including Ellsworth Kelly, Richard Serra, Richard Tuttle, and Robert Ryman, as well as such younger artists as Donald Sultan and Bryan Hunt.
These interviews were conducted in 1978 and 1979, but their processing is only completed this year, in 19 83. A few days ago, I visited Blum at his gallery. From the ceiling hovered colorful painted-wood constructions of Steve Keister, while the walls, in stark contrast, were lined with Donald Sultan's haunting, huge, charcoal-on-paper Black Tulip drawings. Presently the two of us went out for lunch, where our conversation turned to recent developments on the art front back in L.A. Dozens of artists and several galleries have moved downtown, arid the level of community interest seems to be picking up. The J. Paul Getty Museum has in the years since our initial conversations become the most lavishly endowed art institution in the world; the L.A. County Museum is about to open a new modern art wing; and perhaps most auspiciously, the artists, collectors, and civic planners of L.A. have at last joined forces to found the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), which will soon form the centerpiece of a billion-dollar-plus urban redevelopment complex in Bunker Hill, In the meantime, MOCA's directors have launched the Temporary Contemporary, transforming two large warehouses in Little Tokyo into an exceptional viewing complex. Blum had just returned from the opening of the museum's first show, a dazzling exhibition comprising highlights from private collections of postwar painting and sculpture. I asked him whether his attitude toward L.A. might not be changing.
"Well," he sighed, palming his Perrier, "I'll tell you. When I first arrived in L.A., back in 1958, I remember thinking, how extraordinary, how remarkable, what astonishing possibilities. Fifteen years later, I woke up one morning, looked outside, thought, how extraordinary, how remarkable, what astonishing possibilities—and I packed up my bags that very afternoon. And that's the thing about L.A. —it's still all in the future. Five years from now, we'll see, maybe something will have happened. But as of now, it's still a downtown that shuts down tight at 5 p.m., and it's still a collecting community that comes to New York when it wants to get serious about buying."
Our conversation continued along these lines until, just as we were getting set to leave, for a moment Blum seemed to revert. "I must say, though," he commented, "that I still long to go back and settle there. I feel it after every visit: that lure, the sense that that would be a place to live. New York is becoming so expensive. Who's going to be able to afford to live here in a few years? The middle is being squeezed out'. It's going to be a city of millionaires and bag ladies. Artists certainly won't be able to live here.
"L.A.," he concluded, as we were picking up our coats, "I can see myself going back to settle there. That's my eventual ambition."
—Lawrence Weschler December 1983