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Out of Sight: The Los Angeles Art Scene of the Sixties
A social and cultural history of Los Angeles and its emerging art scene in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s
The history of modern art typically begins in Paris and ends in New York. Los Angeles was out of sight and out of mind, viewed as the apotheosis of popular culture, not a center for serious art.
Out of Sight chronicles the rapid-fire rise, fall, and rebirth of L.A.’s art scene, from the emergence of a small bohemian community in the 1950s to the founding of the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1980. Included are some of the most influential artists of our painters Edward Ruscha and Vija Celmins, sculptors Ed Kienholz and Ken Price, and many others.
A book about the city as much as it is about the art, Out of Sight is a social and cultural history that illuminates the ways mid-century Los Angeles shaped its emerging art scene—and how that art scene helped remake the city.
The history of modern art typically begins in Paris and ends in New York. Los Angeles was out of sight and out of mind, viewed as the apotheosis of popular culture, not a center for serious art.
Out of Sight chronicles the rapid-fire rise, fall, and rebirth of L.A.’s art scene, from the emergence of a small bohemian community in the 1950s to the founding of the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1980. Included are some of the most influential artists of our painters Edward Ruscha and Vija Celmins, sculptors Ed Kienholz and Ken Price, and many others.
A book about the city as much as it is about the art, Out of Sight is a social and cultural history that illuminates the ways mid-century Los Angeles shaped its emerging art scene—and how that art scene helped remake the city.
- GenresArtNonfictionHistory
320 pages, Hardcover
First published January 22, 2013
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
April 6, 2015
It is odd but I rarely read books about the Los Angeles art scene - mostly due that my father, Wallace Berman, is a big part of the narrative. Nothing to do with the writers or historians, but I have a hard time to pick up a book and read things about Wallace. I have read essays/manuscripts, just to give my two cents into the mix, and that is out of family duty than anything else. That I think will change, and reading William Hackman's book on the Los Angeles art world of the 1960s is a very interesting history. For me, who have spent his life in galleries (especially as a child) I can never understand the difference between New York and Los Angeles. The arguments always seemed false or pointless to me. In my eyes, Los Angeles was and is always a leading light in culture. This is not saying New York is second or first or anything of that sort. New York exists and so does Los Angeles - and personally I can't make a huge difference between the two cities - except for style, and of course visuals. There are certain artists that yell out Southern California to me - for example Ed Ruscha and of course the artists who use light as an aesthetic - truly Los Angeles has it's own sense of light - that I think is very unique and special. It's a perfect landscape for someone in the visual world - including film as well of course.
Hackman covers the basics in a very well-written mode. I had a hard time putting this book down, and in fact, I went to Pasadena to not only buy records (at the swap meet) but also to read this book on the bus. I was disappointed when I reached my destination - and was quite happy to get back on the bus to read more - and finish the book. The one personality that always come through the Los Angeles art world narrative is Walter Hopps. I knew him and he was truly a magnetic figure one is drawn to - he just had that "it" quality. Like all 'it' personalities he tended to disappear when you needed to talk to him - but alas, that was also part of his personality. One didn't have a choice but to accept it - and "Out of Sight" does convey his over-all importance to the Los Angeles world. The 60s in the art world - both Los Angeles and New York, was quite magnificent. In my mind the key show of that era in Los Angeles was an outside artist of the area - Marcel Duchamp. That retrospective really put a stamp on Los Angeles (actually Pasadena) where i think all the creative people made physical contact with a then current historical figure. It was a really beautiful series of moments. Hackman also captures the origins of The Los Angeles County Museum of Art as well as the importance of art schools of that (and this) time as well. Business and art are sometimes a great couple, but it seems not to last a long time. Perhaps that is the nature of the creative world being forced to be defined by an institution. There will always be that tension between the two worlds.
Hackman's book is a great introduction, but of course, not the full-story. I don't think there can be one book that tells the whole narrative, but "Out of Sight" is a good start - and again, I couldn't put it down. And this is not a book of art explaining or theory - but the social world that made up the galleries (Ferus for example) and how these people put their stamp or identity on the landscape that is Los Angeles. OK, now I'll read the rest.
Hackman covers the basics in a very well-written mode. I had a hard time putting this book down, and in fact, I went to Pasadena to not only buy records (at the swap meet) but also to read this book on the bus. I was disappointed when I reached my destination - and was quite happy to get back on the bus to read more - and finish the book. The one personality that always come through the Los Angeles art world narrative is Walter Hopps. I knew him and he was truly a magnetic figure one is drawn to - he just had that "it" quality. Like all 'it' personalities he tended to disappear when you needed to talk to him - but alas, that was also part of his personality. One didn't have a choice but to accept it - and "Out of Sight" does convey his over-all importance to the Los Angeles world. The 60s in the art world - both Los Angeles and New York, was quite magnificent. In my mind the key show of that era in Los Angeles was an outside artist of the area - Marcel Duchamp. That retrospective really put a stamp on Los Angeles (actually Pasadena) where i think all the creative people made physical contact with a then current historical figure. It was a really beautiful series of moments. Hackman also captures the origins of The Los Angeles County Museum of Art as well as the importance of art schools of that (and this) time as well. Business and art are sometimes a great couple, but it seems not to last a long time. Perhaps that is the nature of the creative world being forced to be defined by an institution. There will always be that tension between the two worlds.
Hackman's book is a great introduction, but of course, not the full-story. I don't think there can be one book that tells the whole narrative, but "Out of Sight" is a good start - and again, I couldn't put it down. And this is not a book of art explaining or theory - but the social world that made up the galleries (Ferus for example) and how these people put their stamp or identity on the landscape that is Los Angeles. OK, now I'll read the rest.
April 27, 2015
I received Out of Sight
An overview of the Los Angeles art scene, from its postwar beginnings to the foundation of the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1980. Long unfavorably compared (or not compared at all) to New York as an artistic hub, Hackman posits that Los Angeles was indeed a pressure cooker of creative talent, but a talent that was fundamentally different than that which dominated the established markets in Europe and New York.
To preface: I'm not an art historian. I knew some of the names thrown around, most notably Judy Chicago, but first and foremost I'm an arts and cultural administrator, and that's the lens through which I enjoyed this book. I found the politics of various boards, museums, schools, and galleries fascinating, even though I didn't know the personalities involved, and being a 20-something Midwesterner with brief stints in the northeast, I wasn't aware LA was considered such a cultural wasteland as recently as the 1950s. While it was clear that there were artists of significant talent taking innovative approaches in the area, the book was a little difficult because it was so full of strife. It's clear that, even at the conclusion, LA's position was on the rise but far from certain.
If there was an area that I would critique, it would be that there was very little discussion of art created by various minorities. There was a brief discussion of CalArts' Feminist Art program towards the end, but essentially no profiling of non-white artists. A follow-up from 1980 to the present would be a fascinating companion to this intriguing volume.
An overview of the Los Angeles art scene, from its postwar beginnings to the foundation of the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1980. Long unfavorably compared (or not compared at all) to New York as an artistic hub, Hackman posits that Los Angeles was indeed a pressure cooker of creative talent, but a talent that was fundamentally different than that which dominated the established markets in Europe and New York.
To preface: I'm not an art historian. I knew some of the names thrown around, most notably Judy Chicago, but first and foremost I'm an arts and cultural administrator, and that's the lens through which I enjoyed this book. I found the politics of various boards, museums, schools, and galleries fascinating, even though I didn't know the personalities involved, and being a 20-something Midwesterner with brief stints in the northeast, I wasn't aware LA was considered such a cultural wasteland as recently as the 1950s. While it was clear that there were artists of significant talent taking innovative approaches in the area, the book was a little difficult because it was so full of strife. It's clear that, even at the conclusion, LA's position was on the rise but far from certain.
If there was an area that I would critique, it would be that there was very little discussion of art created by various minorities. There was a brief discussion of CalArts' Feminist Art program towards the end, but essentially no profiling of non-white artists. A follow-up from 1980 to the present would be a fascinating companion to this intriguing volume.
July 25, 2015
In his Acknowledgments, Hackman writes, "My goal has not been to present a comprehensive survey of L.A. art and artists during the period I examine... I have, often reluctantly, sacrificed breadth for the sake of depth, passing over interesting developments and fascinating artists in order to focus on themes and characters that emerged as central to me."
In my eyes, this decision is the great strength of "Out of Sight." The book reads like an actual story rather than a typical art history resource (which is to say, a textbook in the driest, worst sense of the word). Hackman follows a limited cast of characters. He explores how they develop and influence one another over more than a decade. And through them, he allows Los Angeles's dramatic cultural evolution -- and equally dramatic growing pains -- to actually register in a memorable way instead of dissipating into the vague impressions left behind by a flood.
I wouldn't just recommend "Out of Sight" to other people in the art industry. I would recommend it just as readily to nonfiction readers interested in either the visual arts generally or the city of Los Angeles specifically. Coming from a populist heathen like me, that's the highest praise I can offer.
In my eyes, this decision is the great strength of "Out of Sight." The book reads like an actual story rather than a typical art history resource (which is to say, a textbook in the driest, worst sense of the word). Hackman follows a limited cast of characters. He explores how they develop and influence one another over more than a decade. And through them, he allows Los Angeles's dramatic cultural evolution -- and equally dramatic growing pains -- to actually register in a memorable way instead of dissipating into the vague impressions left behind by a flood.
I wouldn't just recommend "Out of Sight" to other people in the art industry. I would recommend it just as readily to nonfiction readers interested in either the visual arts generally or the city of Los Angeles specifically. Coming from a populist heathen like me, that's the highest praise I can offer.
August 20, 2015
Hackman, William. Out of Sight: The Los Angeles Art Scene of the Sixties, Other Press, New York, 2015 (308pp.$27.95)
A forty thousand year continuum separates the Cro-Magnon shaman painting ochre-and-earth pigment aurochs on the walls of Lascaux cave from the billionaire collector purchasing a mediocre hundred million dollar Picasso at an auction in London conducted by Sotheby’s. For the shaman, animal images represented, most likely, a deeply held sense of magical superstition exorcised by individual imagination, both in service to a hunting ritual geared to the worship of natural and invisible spiritual forces. And while Picasso probably shared some important aspects of sensibility with the shaman, the billionaire collector is almost certainly a Veblenesque show-off. A book like William Hackman’s “Out of Sight: The Los Angeles Art Scene of the Sixties”, with its entertaining and insightful investigation of “art sources and methods”, its engaging discussion of personalities and movements, and its perceptive analysis of commerce and promotion, provides the reader with what can only be called a “natural history” of modern art on the West Coast.
Like Paris and New York, Los Angeles at the beginning of the twentieth century was a large city. Unlike either Paris or New York, Los Angeles was, in the words of urban planner Kevin Lynch, “hard to conceptualize as a whole; it was, for all intents and purposes, illegible.” At the turn of the century, Los Angeles, a collection of dusty provincial towns full of Midwestern pilgrims, was a sprawl of de-centered un-geographical geography, a semiotic riot of disparate parts with no visible architectural coherence and no public awareness beyond boosterism. No unique public buildings graced a central core; its homes were copies of the Victorians of New England. A provincial mob of rich nabobs controlled the politics, business, and police and of the place, and its art patrons were society ladies in Pasadena for whom art consisted of lacy portraits and frontier landscapes. And while Los Angeles had a museum—the Los Angeles County Museum, the museum showcased only low brow western art and dinosaur bones.
William Hackman, a former managing editor at the J. Paul Getty Trust and longtime art, music and theater critic, shows how Los Angeles got its artistic swagger beginning around 1962, a year Hackman calls the “annus mirabilis” for LA art. It is true that LA had the semblance of an art scene in the 1920s and 1930s, when the Bauhaus aesthetic paid a visit as various European emigrants came calling on the run from Nazis. But it took a while for LA’s essence to form and sink far enough into the sensibilities of individual artists that a true “art scene” could emerge by 1952, when a young man named Walter Hopps plunged headlong into the “murky depths of modern art”. Hopps, it turns out, became an art entrepreneur, co-founder of the famous Ferus Gallery, and sponsor of Ed Keinholz’s scandalous assemblage installations. Assemblage became the way that LA finally rejected New York’s dominant abstract expressionism and began to stand on its own two feet.
Anyone who’s been in LA enough can understand the city’s “illegibility” as the core source of its semiotic power. The wide boulevards and impressive historical heft of Paris and the massive drive and awe-inspiring might of New York point towards art scenes with weighty consequences. LA’s landscape blazes not with power, but with a mysterious yellow light, a territory consequent in blue, gold and lavender. Not for nothing did LA draw, during the 20s and 30s, a gaggle of spiritualists, yoga enthusiasts, drug advocates and theosophists. It was both groovy and kookie, the perfect kitsch antidote to the profundities of New York’s abstract expressionism.
LA seemed the right place to first show a young advertising executive named Andy Warhol and his delightfully whimsical soup cans. It seemed the right place for Ed Ruscha to paint his works dominated by a repeating loop of signifiers that seemed to lead in a circle back to a starting place in the Western landscape that blazed with the un-nameable. In Hartman’s words, the LA art scene hovered somewhere “in a place situated, however precariously, between suburbia and the sublime.” This was the place where service stations, shopping malls, palm trees, blue oceans and barren hills became what skyscrapers were to New York, what ballerinas were to Paris. When, in 1965, the city built the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, something was definitely up in La-La Land.
LA artists didn’t wear smocks and hang around in cafes. Light and Art sculptor Robert Irwin came from hot-rod culture. Painter Billy Al Bengston rode and raced motorcycles, while sculptor Ken Price surfed. Actually, most of them surfed. Ed Keinholz, the self-described “constructionist” had no formal art training. Many were interested in technology, plastics and, like Wallace Berman, Zen. The LA scene also included some true Beatniks, like assemblage artist George Herms and collector Dennis Hopper. Most openings featured a smattering of movie stars like collector Vincent Price (a true connoisseur), Russ Tamblyn, and Rolling Stone Brian Jones. LA produced art that New York couldn’t: mirrored plastic or Plexiglas boxes throbbing with inner light, rectangular landscapes full of translucent or shimmering emptiness, a Texaco sign pointing towards transcendence. Even the smog connoted mystery.
LA’s art scene demonstrated that “the deepest kinship between the Light and Space movement and contemporaneous trends within LA was with such artists as (Vijia) Clemins, (Joe) Goode, and (Ed) Ruscha and the ways they responded to the distinctive light and wide-open spaces of Southern California.” There is, really, no place in the world like LA and its art scene, so influenced by suburbia’s tacky symbolism, dry desert air suffused with brilliant yellow light, a vast freeway system as rigorous as a prison, and its haunting canyons and late summer wildfires. As Hackman concludes about LA’s 60’s art scene, “It won’t happen again. You had a big city that was largely disconnected from the global cultural world, and a critical mass of things came together at exactly the right moment.”
Hackman’s fine book “Out of Sight” documents a cultural movement of great American moment. If you wish, take a look at the iconic album cover of the Beatles’ classic “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” There, directly above John Lennon, two rows up,
one finds the transformational Beat Generation figure Wallace Berman, who was god-father to the LA scene. He’s right next to Tony Curtis. Not pictured is the Lascaux shaman.
A forty thousand year continuum separates the Cro-Magnon shaman painting ochre-and-earth pigment aurochs on the walls of Lascaux cave from the billionaire collector purchasing a mediocre hundred million dollar Picasso at an auction in London conducted by Sotheby’s. For the shaman, animal images represented, most likely, a deeply held sense of magical superstition exorcised by individual imagination, both in service to a hunting ritual geared to the worship of natural and invisible spiritual forces. And while Picasso probably shared some important aspects of sensibility with the shaman, the billionaire collector is almost certainly a Veblenesque show-off. A book like William Hackman’s “Out of Sight: The Los Angeles Art Scene of the Sixties”, with its entertaining and insightful investigation of “art sources and methods”, its engaging discussion of personalities and movements, and its perceptive analysis of commerce and promotion, provides the reader with what can only be called a “natural history” of modern art on the West Coast.
Like Paris and New York, Los Angeles at the beginning of the twentieth century was a large city. Unlike either Paris or New York, Los Angeles was, in the words of urban planner Kevin Lynch, “hard to conceptualize as a whole; it was, for all intents and purposes, illegible.” At the turn of the century, Los Angeles, a collection of dusty provincial towns full of Midwestern pilgrims, was a sprawl of de-centered un-geographical geography, a semiotic riot of disparate parts with no visible architectural coherence and no public awareness beyond boosterism. No unique public buildings graced a central core; its homes were copies of the Victorians of New England. A provincial mob of rich nabobs controlled the politics, business, and police and of the place, and its art patrons were society ladies in Pasadena for whom art consisted of lacy portraits and frontier landscapes. And while Los Angeles had a museum—the Los Angeles County Museum, the museum showcased only low brow western art and dinosaur bones.
William Hackman, a former managing editor at the J. Paul Getty Trust and longtime art, music and theater critic, shows how Los Angeles got its artistic swagger beginning around 1962, a year Hackman calls the “annus mirabilis” for LA art. It is true that LA had the semblance of an art scene in the 1920s and 1930s, when the Bauhaus aesthetic paid a visit as various European emigrants came calling on the run from Nazis. But it took a while for LA’s essence to form and sink far enough into the sensibilities of individual artists that a true “art scene” could emerge by 1952, when a young man named Walter Hopps plunged headlong into the “murky depths of modern art”. Hopps, it turns out, became an art entrepreneur, co-founder of the famous Ferus Gallery, and sponsor of Ed Keinholz’s scandalous assemblage installations. Assemblage became the way that LA finally rejected New York’s dominant abstract expressionism and began to stand on its own two feet.
Anyone who’s been in LA enough can understand the city’s “illegibility” as the core source of its semiotic power. The wide boulevards and impressive historical heft of Paris and the massive drive and awe-inspiring might of New York point towards art scenes with weighty consequences. LA’s landscape blazes not with power, but with a mysterious yellow light, a territory consequent in blue, gold and lavender. Not for nothing did LA draw, during the 20s and 30s, a gaggle of spiritualists, yoga enthusiasts, drug advocates and theosophists. It was both groovy and kookie, the perfect kitsch antidote to the profundities of New York’s abstract expressionism.
LA seemed the right place to first show a young advertising executive named Andy Warhol and his delightfully whimsical soup cans. It seemed the right place for Ed Ruscha to paint his works dominated by a repeating loop of signifiers that seemed to lead in a circle back to a starting place in the Western landscape that blazed with the un-nameable. In Hartman’s words, the LA art scene hovered somewhere “in a place situated, however precariously, between suburbia and the sublime.” This was the place where service stations, shopping malls, palm trees, blue oceans and barren hills became what skyscrapers were to New York, what ballerinas were to Paris. When, in 1965, the city built the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, something was definitely up in La-La Land.
LA artists didn’t wear smocks and hang around in cafes. Light and Art sculptor Robert Irwin came from hot-rod culture. Painter Billy Al Bengston rode and raced motorcycles, while sculptor Ken Price surfed. Actually, most of them surfed. Ed Keinholz, the self-described “constructionist” had no formal art training. Many were interested in technology, plastics and, like Wallace Berman, Zen. The LA scene also included some true Beatniks, like assemblage artist George Herms and collector Dennis Hopper. Most openings featured a smattering of movie stars like collector Vincent Price (a true connoisseur), Russ Tamblyn, and Rolling Stone Brian Jones. LA produced art that New York couldn’t: mirrored plastic or Plexiglas boxes throbbing with inner light, rectangular landscapes full of translucent or shimmering emptiness, a Texaco sign pointing towards transcendence. Even the smog connoted mystery.
LA’s art scene demonstrated that “the deepest kinship between the Light and Space movement and contemporaneous trends within LA was with such artists as (Vijia) Clemins, (Joe) Goode, and (Ed) Ruscha and the ways they responded to the distinctive light and wide-open spaces of Southern California.” There is, really, no place in the world like LA and its art scene, so influenced by suburbia’s tacky symbolism, dry desert air suffused with brilliant yellow light, a vast freeway system as rigorous as a prison, and its haunting canyons and late summer wildfires. As Hackman concludes about LA’s 60’s art scene, “It won’t happen again. You had a big city that was largely disconnected from the global cultural world, and a critical mass of things came together at exactly the right moment.”
Hackman’s fine book “Out of Sight” documents a cultural movement of great American moment. If you wish, take a look at the iconic album cover of the Beatles’ classic “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” There, directly above John Lennon, two rows up,
one finds the transformational Beat Generation figure Wallace Berman, who was god-father to the LA scene. He’s right next to Tony Curtis. Not pictured is the Lascaux shaman.
November 25, 2023
It always takes me forever to read historical non-fiction. Not because it's not engaging but because page after page I find fascinating information that needs to be annotated and I spend a good amount stuck on looking deeper into the topic, thus hurdling myself into the art Scene of Los Angeles and how it all started. I found my experience to understand the art scene of LA when you've truly explored LA and become a local- it takes time to navigate and it's a place like no other.
Hackman narrates the story well, rather than spewing out just facts and numbers, I'm guided by his storytelling and how LA slowly embodied its artistic characteristic for its art scene frontier today. There's something I think most people in LA realize- the sunlight in LA shines different.
Hackman narrates the story well, rather than spewing out just facts and numbers, I'm guided by his storytelling and how LA slowly embodied its artistic characteristic for its art scene frontier today. There's something I think most people in LA realize- the sunlight in LA shines different.
July 2, 2023
I would give this book six stars out of five if I could. It provides a vivid rendition of the powerbrokers and the various art initiatives at the time, which turned LA into an art powerhouse. The writing is clear and the references abundant. An honest and engaging look at the LA art scene 50 years ago. Includes both black-and-white and color photographs. A treasure.
August 15, 2023
Turns out I think modern art is kind of stupid, and historical context doesn't change that. One extra star for some cool LA history woven in and the UCLA respect
February 28, 2024
This was a great read! Definitely super insightful into the LA art scene and I would recommend to anyone living in LA or with an interest in art/art history.
August 15, 2015
Disclaimer: I have known Bill Hackman since the 1990s and knew that he was working on this book, having visited with him about it. This being said, one never knows how a book will be until you read it.
There have been numerous books and exhibitions which examine the nascent period of modern art in Los Angeles. The Getty funded the ambitious Pacific Standard Time project that involved the participation of many institutions with a myriad of points of view, but many other books and exhibitions preceded it. This became the time to bring Los Angeles to the fore, or at least argue that there was plenty going on that should not be ignored.
Walter Hopps, Ed Kienholz, Irving Blum and the Ferus Gallery, which ran from 1957-1966, were considered to be the forerunners of things to come, but many other galleries, institutions, artists and collectors contributed to the development of this period and deserve acknowledgement. Hackman brings attention to these entities which were not as well known, but played important parts in the making of the L.A. art scene. His story places them within the broader context of a changing city during the postwar years.
I have not yet figured out the appropriate adjectives to describe Walter Hopps, the legendary curator, who I knew for over thirty years, and was a part of his support system for ten. The 1950s-60s were his heydays, where things fell together or apart depending upon the circumstances. There is an abundance of stories surrounding Walter, and this book does a good job of telling some of them.
There have been numerous books and exhibitions which examine the nascent period of modern art in Los Angeles. The Getty funded the ambitious Pacific Standard Time project that involved the participation of many institutions with a myriad of points of view, but many other books and exhibitions preceded it. This became the time to bring Los Angeles to the fore, or at least argue that there was plenty going on that should not be ignored.
Walter Hopps, Ed Kienholz, Irving Blum and the Ferus Gallery, which ran from 1957-1966, were considered to be the forerunners of things to come, but many other galleries, institutions, artists and collectors contributed to the development of this period and deserve acknowledgement. Hackman brings attention to these entities which were not as well known, but played important parts in the making of the L.A. art scene. His story places them within the broader context of a changing city during the postwar years.
I have not yet figured out the appropriate adjectives to describe Walter Hopps, the legendary curator, who I knew for over thirty years, and was a part of his support system for ten. The 1950s-60s were his heydays, where things fell together or apart depending upon the circumstances. There is an abundance of stories surrounding Walter, and this book does a good job of telling some of them.
March 16, 2016
Enjoyable read.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews