A Brief History of Curating. Hans Ulrich Obrist
291 Gallery as a source of inspiration for your exhibitions.
WH Yes. I knew a little bit about what had gone on at 291. Stieglitz was the first person to show both Picasso and Matisse in America. Even before the Armory Show, you know.
HUO So before Arensberg.
WH Yes. Arensberg’s collection really began in 1913, at the time of the Armory Show. Several collections start then: Duncan and Marjorie Phillips’ collection in Washington begins then; and Arensberg’s began. Katherine Dreier was crucial. She, with Duchamp and Man Ray, had the first modern museum in America. And it was actually called the Modern Museum, although it was mostly known as the Société Anonyme.
HUO The year 1913 leads us somehow back to the discussion we had during lunch, when you gave 1924 as a second very important date.
WH Oh, yes. Nothing really happened in museums until around 1924. It took that long. Then in New York and San Francisco, a little bit in Los Angeles, a little bit in Chicago—among certain collectors within those museums—things began to happen. Soon after Arensberg moved to Southern California, he had the idea of founding a modern art museum with his collection out there—combining some other collections with his. But it was fated not to happen. There were not enough collectors of modern art to support such a project in Southern California.
HUO So 1924 is also the year he left New York?
WH Yes. To me, the Arensbergs coming to Southern California gave it the cachet, the license, to do anything, even though the public and the officials were so contrary about contemporary art. Even during my time, right after World War II—in the late 1940s and early 1950s—the politics of the McCarthy era were very hard on art in the institutions in Southern California. Picasso and even Magritte—Magritte, who had no politics, who was, if anything, a kind of patron of the royalists—had their work taken down as being subversive and communistic in the one museum we had in Los Angeles. There was plenty of weak contemporary art in Southern California. The whole school of Rico Lebrun. There were all these Picasso-like people and lots of insipid variations on Matisse; it just made you sick. There was more authenticity and soul in some of the landscape painters.
But things slowly began to creep in. In Southern California, the hard-edge painters, like John McLaughlin, began to be accepted in exhibitions. The public didn’t like it, but they would be hung by the museums, for example by James B. Byrnes, the first curator of Modern art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. San Francisco was the other place in the United States where great Abstract Expressionist art was beginning to be shown seriously, like Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko, as presented by a brilliant and pioneering curator of Modern art, Jermayne MacAgy.
HUO Was Richard Diebenkorn shown?
WH Diebenkorn was their student. He also began to be shown, as well as David Park and others.
HUO Could you talk about the emergence of the assemblage artists of your generation? What were their sources?
WH Wallace Berman was fascinating—he had a great touch, and great insights about Surrealist art, but he never became some thin carbon copy of Surrealist form, which many artists did. He was crucial to the Beat sensibility. He was one of the serious people. He introduced me to the writings of William Burroughs. And he published his own little journal, Semina.
One of the slightly older intellectuals that affected Beat culture so much on the West Coast was Kenneth Rexroth. He was a very intelligent man, and he was a great translator of some fascinating Chinese poetry. At the same time, he was something of a mentor to people like Ginsberg and Kerouac. So was Philip Whalen.
But the cultures of San Francisco and Los Angeles were quite distant: the patronage, the infrastructure. The patrons who would spend money were mostly living in Southern California, and most, though not all, of the really interesting art was being created in the north. It was a difficult dialogue, and I felt it was crucial to unite the art from the north and the south.
HUO In Los Angeles and the West Coast in general the artistic and intellectual circles seem to have been relatively open at the time, not dogmatic but inclusive.
WH Absolutely. You didn’t have to make allegiances the way you would if you were in New York. Ed Kienholz could love Clyfford Still’s work and that of his circle—Diebenkorn was fine; he liked Frank Lobdell even better, because he was dark and brooding. But he also liked de Kooning. He had no problem with that. In the world of the New York School, it was very difficult—Greenberg became the champion of all the color-field people; Rosenberg became the champion of de Kooning and Franz Kline. The artists took up their allegiances, also. But on the West Coast, someone like Kienholz could love both de Kooning and Still.
HUO And Kienholz was linked to Wallace Berman and then to the Beat generation as well?
WH Kienholz and Berman knew each other, but there was a schism between them. Kienholz was a private, tough realist. Berman was very spiritual, with a kind of cabalistic Judaism and regard for Christianity. Kienholz would not berate him, but he didn’t want to have anything to do with him either. They were very different. Both are represented near one another in the massive Beat Culture show curated by Lisa Phillips at the Whitney Museum in New York. Currently I’m working on a full-scale retrospective of the work of both Ed Kienholz and Nancy Reddin Kienholz, to be presented later this year at the Whitney. Ed’s work was considered very controversial, even into the 1960s when he had his first retrospective. Today I suspect much less controversy, but you never know. With this exhibition I hope to reveal the continuity as well as the power of his art and both its origins in an American sense of West Coast culture and its wide range of vital subject matter.
HUO To come back to the issue of curating: in an earlier interview you mentioned a small list of American curators and conductors you consider to be important predecessors.
WH Willem Mengelberg was a conductor of the New York Philharmonic, who imported the grand Germanic tradition of running an orchestra and conducting. So I mention Mengelberg not so much for his style, but for his unrelenting rigor. No matter what, he’d make the orchestra perform. Fine curating of an artist’s work—that is, presenting it in an exhibition—requires as broad and sensitive an understanding of an artist’s work as a curator can possibly muster. This knowledge needs to go well beyond what is actually put in the exhibition. Likewise, as far as conducting goes, a thorough knowledge of the full body of Mozart’s music underlies a fine conductor’s approach to, say, the Jupiter Symphony. Mengelberg was the sort of conductor who had a broad knowledge of any composer he addressed.
Of the curators, I admired Katherine Dreier enormously, with her exhibitions and activities, because she, more than any other collector or impresario I knew, felt she should facilitate what they actually wanted to do, to the greatest extent possible.
HUO So you could say she was the artist’s accomplice.
WH Exactly. She didn’t have other rich people on her board. She had Man Ray and Duchamp—having artists in this capacity is nothing but trouble, conventionally.
HUO You also mentioned Alfred Barr and James Johnson Sweeney.
WH Yes. Barr, who came from a Protestant Yankee family, might have become a Lutheran minister. Instead he became a great director and curator with an institution that had all the resources the Rockefellers, and others, could provide at the time. There was a kind of moral imperative behind Barr. He preached that Modern art was good for people, that the populace could somehow become inculcated with the new Modernism and it would improve their lives. It’s very close to a Bauhaus idea.
Sweeney was more complicated and romantic. I don’t think he would have argued that art per se was necessarily morally good for you, but I don’t think he made a big