The art dealer Irving Blum recalls walking into Leo Castelli’s gallery in New York in 1965 and being captivated by Roy Lichtenstein’s painting of a composition book, having carried one himself throughout grade school.
Blum called Lichtenstein, a friend of his, and told him to see the pop artist. “He said, ‘How urgent?'” Blum recalled. “I said, ‘Life or death.’ He said, ‘Come over.’”
At Lichtenstein’s studio, Blum told him he was determined to buy the painting. But it had already been sold to the dealer Ileana Sonnabend, Castelli’s wife. “I said, ‘Roy, I got it: I’m going to marry Ileana. I just have to have that painting.’”
Two months later, a crate arrived at Blum’s gallery containing a double copy of the composition book and a note from Lichtenstein: ‘Dear Irving, it is not necessary to marry Ileana. All the best, Roy. ”
“I really adored him,” Blum said in an interview recently at his spacious, art-filled home in Bel Air, which he shares with his wife, Jackie. “I like the job and I bought several things for myself.”
The dealer, now 92 and long retired, drew on his fond memories of the artist as he prepared the ‘Lichtenstein Remembered’ exhibition, featuring about twenty sculptures never before shown as a group.
The three-dimensional works – largely of painted bronze, some of which will be for sale – resemble Lichtenstein paintings brought to life, with bold lines in black, yellow, white and blue. “The colors and palette relate to the colors in a lot of his paintings, but he really found a way to create sculptures that stand on their own,” said dealer Larry Gagosian, adding that Blum “has a long history with Roy and Dorothy. .”
The artist’s widow, Dorothy Lichtenstein, who publishes the extensive catalog raisonné on Lichtenstein’s birthday in October, said sculpture was an integral part of his practice. “Whether he was into Surrealism or German Abstractionism, he always made sculptures for that,” she said. “It’s erratic. It has humor and affection.
Lichtenstein liked to explore the idea of solidity, Dorothy said, which is why he was drawn to creating images of water. “Freezing a brushstroke – which is so free – and conceptualizing it, I think intrigued him,” she said. “Water represented something that flows, but also something solid in bronze. Or the smoke of a cup of coffee rising. He always played back and forth with those images.”
Dorothy said she asked Blum to host the show because “he really knows Roy’s work as a pop artist from the start” and he and her husband complemented each other. “Irving is very outgoing, and Roy was quite reserved,” she said. “They had the same sense of humor and irony.”
Lichtenstein exhibited with famed dealer Castelli, who tried to emulate Blum when he bought artist Edward Kienholz’s share of the Ferus Gallery on North La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles for $500 in 1958. Blum ran Ferus along with his other founders, Walter and Shirley Hopps, until Walter left in 1960 to become a curator at the Pasadena Art Museum in California (now Norton Simon). After that, Blum ran Ferus alone until it closed in 1966.
“It was hard at first,” Blum said. “Not much business.”
Blum gave Castelli’s artists a platform in Los Angeles at Ferus. “He was a big influence,” Blum said. “Every time I went to New York — I couldn’t afford to go more than a few times a year — that was my first job: seeing Leo and talking about what he did.”
It was Castelli who introduced him to Andy Warhol, who met Blum at the artist’s New York studio, where he was viewing his unfinished cartoon paintings. “I liked him, but I just thought what he was doing was too puzzling,” Blum said. “I couldn’t follow it.”
When Blum visited again six months later, he saw three of Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Can canvases on the floor, leaning against the wall. Warhol told him he was going to make 32. “I said, ‘How come?'” Blum recalled. “He said, ‘Well, there are 32 varieties, so I’m going to do them all.'”
Blum said he persuaded Warhol to show him all 32 films in Los Angeles in 1962 by telling the artist, “movie stars enter the gallery.”
Five of the soup cans were sold, but then Blum came up with the idea of keeping all the paintings together and the buyers agreed to sell them back, as they hadn’t picked them up yet. (Only the actor Dennis Hopper initially resisted, Blum said.) Blum then bought the set for $1,000, paid Warhol $100 a month for ten months, and turned it over to the Museum of Modern Art in 1996 in a transaction that was partly was a gift. share $15 million sale.
“Irving made it possible for us to buy that artwork, pure and simple,” said Glenn D. Lowry, MoMA’s longtime director. “It really gave us the arc we needed to represent Warhol well.”
Blum has also donated other works to institutions, including Ellsworth Kelly’s “Spectrum IV” to MoMA, Warhol’s “Ten-Foot Flowers” acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen to the Met, and Frank Stella’s “Ctesiphon 1” to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
Blum was a late arrival to the art world. Blum was born on December 1, 1930 in New York, where his father owned furniture stores, and moved to Phoenix at the age of 10.
After attending college in Tucson, he served in the Air Force, then went to New York where he met Hans Knoll, the German-born cabinetmaker, who offered him a job at Knoll in Midtown Manhattan. Blum met the collectors who came to visit galleries in the area.
“Betty Parsons, Sidney Janis, Eleanor Ward of the Stable Gallery, Martha Jackson — they were all within walking distance,” he said. “I started going up to them, visiting and chatting. A man named Sam Kootz had a wonderful gallery and was available in a way that dealers are not available now.
The architect and designer Florence Knoll asked Blum to help her find art to decorate a life insurance office in Connecticut. Blum returned with a painting by Josef Albers—a pioneer of color in abstract art—and he was on his way. Then, in 1956, gallery owner David Herbert took Blum to meet Ellsworth Kelly.
“That was the beginning of a relationship that lasted 50 years,” says Blum, who bought a small black-and-white painting of Kelly that day for $75 that currently hangs in his home. (He also has an apartment on Park Avenue.)
Blum recalls going to the roof of Kelly’s home in Coenties Slip—a lower Manhattan street populated by struggling artists—where a barbecue gathering was held with painters Jasper Johns, Agnes Martin, and James Rosenquist.
“It was a hotbed of artistic activity,” Blum said.
In Los Angeles – where Pop Art had not yet become a common term – Blum was a bridge to the West Coast variety, with Billy Al Bengston, Robert Irwin and Ed Ruscha. In 1963 he organized his first exhibition in Lichtenstein. In an essay for the catalog of the Gagosian exhibition, actor and collector Steve Martin describes how he walked into the Ferus gallery in the 1960s and bought a $125 Ruscha print from Blum – “the cheerful, sharp-witted, proselytizing champion of the new art.”
From 1957 to 1966, Blum’s Ferus Gallery was the heart of the Los Angeles scene, showcasing the first solo shows by Ken Price, Larry Bell, and Frank Stella.
“Ferrus represented the pluralism of American art and—if not better than—any New York gallery of its time,” wrote Roberta Smith in 2002 in DailyExpertNews.
In Amy Newman’s oral history, “Challenging Art: Artforum, 1962-1974,” Philip Leider, the founder and editor of Artforum magazine, said, “Without Ferus there was nothing,” adding, “Irving was the stage .’
“He spoke brilliantly, not very deeply, but brilliantly,” Leider continued, “as a dealer should.”
In 1973, Blum moved to the Blum-Helman Gallery in New York, where he spent twenty years.
While sitting at his dining room table recently, Blum gestured to one of his favorite Lichtenstein paintings, which dominates his entryway, “Two Paintings: Dagwood, 1983,” with the cartoon character and two other images separated by vertical lines.
Blum related his experience with the painting through his dialogue with Lichtenstein: “He said, ‘How do you read it?'” Blum recalled. “I said, ‘I read it like a portrait of Dagwood.’ He said, ‘It’s more complicated. It is art history in the 20th century: expressionism on the left, formalism in the middle and pop at the end.’”
“He said it encompasses everything,” Blum continued. “And I said, ‘I’m buying it.'”
Lichtenstein remembered
September 9-October. 21, Gagosian, 980 Madison Avenue, Manhattan; 212-744-2313, gagosian.com.
