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Los Angeles in the 1950s.
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Contemporary art was more a curiosity
than a staple of cultural life.
One gallery owner called the city, Omaha, with a beach.
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In 1959, Virginia Duane, 28, was about to change that.
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Over the course of 11 years, Duane mounted 134 exhibitions.
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Abstract expressionism.
Pop art.
Minimalism.
Conceptual art.
And earthworks.
All made by artists she believed in.
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Virginia Duane was born in Minneapolis in 1931.
After a series of moves, her family settled in Southern California in 1948.
The granddaughter of one of the founders of the 3M Company,
she had deep pockets, large ambitions,
and a passionate commitment to art.
I think I was for many years in search of the elemental,
the basic.
Duane turned to the artist and asked them what they wanted to show,
what was important to them, because ultimately it was the best work.
As a dealer, I think I was very permissive and very supportive at the same time.
Duane started small.
She opened her first gallery in the LA neighborhood of Westwood,
near the campus of her alma mater, UCLA.
The gallery opened in 1959, the same year non-stop commercial jet flights
from New York to Los Angeles began.
Passengers and cargo, including artists and art,
crossed the country in half the time.
The jet age had begun, and Los Angeles was ready for the future.
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Many New York artists, tired of walk-up apartments and bleak cityscapes,
were ready for a change of scenery.
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You flew over some mountains, and you flew over some deserted areas,
and once you got there, you said, "Wow, this is something.
I've never seen anything like this before."
And it was very, very attractive, I think, to an artist,
to see the landscape and the whole feeling of California.
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The Duane Gallery's early shows introduced the work of New York artists
to Los Angeles.
Abstract expressionism drove the gallery's shows.
Fifteen of New York brought established artists,
including Willem de Kooning,
Franz Kline, and Philip Guston to LA.
The show was heavily attended and warmly received by the press.
The sales were slight, but the buzz had begun,
and Hollywood heard it.
The actor and artist Dennis Hopper, who became a regular visitor,
photographed Virginia.
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Virginia's openness and generosity appealed to artists.
Ed Keanholz became a good friend,
and they collaborated on a comic scene for a TV show about him.
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In February of 1961,
she mounted a show of works by Larry Rivers,
an abstract expressionist who would move towards pop art.
He covered the gallery's shopfront windows in paint
and plastered it with an announcement he designed.
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She had a beach house in Malibu and provided a studio there
for visiting artists, including Rivers.
After staying there, he presented her with a portrait,
dedicated to my great-dealer and her son and serf.
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Visiting artists, including the French painter, Eve Klein,
were beguiled by the beach house.
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Martin Sugaro stayed in that house as well as John Cage
and Bruce Cunningham's troops stayed in that house,
so it's seen a lot of people in the arts.
Eve did make, actually, a few of the works on the beach there
in Malibu, and I exhibited them.
Klein had been exploring richly colored monochrome paintings,
which caught Virginia's eye on a trip to Paris.
His work was so invasive that the blue in which came into you
and actually, infinity also came into your thinking and feeling.
All that sounds very strange, but that's what I felt with him.
And I was anxious to be around that work.
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Klein's one-man show at the Duane Gallery opened in May of 1961.
It included his all-blue, rose and gold paintings,
sponge reliefs, and his fire paintings,
created at a French testing center for gas.
And most shocking of all, two of his so-called living brush paintings
made from the imprints of nude models who covered their bodies in paint.
Critics and artists were perplexed by Duane's turn toward French art,
but Virginia never wavered and would go on to show several young French artists
that she met through Klein.
There was a certain chauvinism in the United States that American art was it,
and anything that happened in France was of no interest anymore.
I discovered Eve Klein and Armand and Jean Tingley and Nickiasson file myself race.
And they were new young people, and they were saying something quite different
than academic art of the past.
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Nicki de São Paulo electrified the art world.
By firing bullets at pouches of paint, she had placed inside an assemblage
of objects painted white.
She called the performance Tia, French for shooting.
A critic praised her for her conception of art as being about action
as much as a finished object.
Her companion, Jean Tungley joined the Duane Stable
and created a sculptural portrait of Virginia.
When Tungley returned to Los Angeles for his own show,
Ed Keanholz escorted him to hardware stores in search of materials
for his kinetic sculptures.
At one point Tingley showed up in front of me,
cradling one of the motors, and he said, "Can I get this?"
And I said, "Well, maybe, but it's bigger than the works."
And he said, "That doesn't matter." He liked it anyways.
Of course, when he built the pieces and we had them in the gallery,
they wanted to walk across the room because the motor, you know,
just had them jiggling along and had to be screwed down
to hold them in place.
By 1962, Virginia was looking for a larger space for the gallery.
Shortly after her last major show, devoted to the works of Robert Rauschenberg,
she moved to a new space in Westwood that suited her growing ambitions.
As you came in, you went through this tunnel, which was my hope,
would isolate people from their outside life and make them ready
for something else, for a new experience.
And so it was darkish in the tunnel and then opened up
as you came into the gallery with light and art everywhere.
Assemblages by the French artist Armant opened the second Duant Gallery.
One of the co-founders of the new realist movement, Armant and his colleague,
Marshall Race, pursued an art that embraced reality and then tampered with it.
Virginia's exhibitions were often controversial.
My Country Tis of Thee, a groundbreaking group show of pop artists,
opened in November of 1962.
Both playful and critical of America at that moment,
it brought the work of artists including Roy Lichtenstein,
Jasper Johns and Claus Oldenburg to Los Angeles.
Taking advantage of the expansive space,
Oldenburg showed some of his larger works the following year,
often giant sculptures of everyday objects.
Oldenburg, adopting the pseudonym Ray Gunn,
also arranged an evening performance event, Autobodies.
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The Los Angeles car was essential.
So I decided the automobile to be the theme of the,
whatever you want to call it, the happening, the performance.
And so I gathered a lot of automobiles from people.
I borrowed them from people.
And these automobiles were the major performers in the happening.
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Pushing the boundaries of art farther,
artists also pushed the boundaries of what could be shown in public.
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In 1964, Dwan's Ed Keeneholz exhibition included Backseat Dodge 38.
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After a complaint was registered,
the gallery closed for 12 hours while detectives from the Vice Squad
examined the work for evidence of ***********.
No charges were pressed,
and visitors were allowed to make up their own minds.
We were a little nervous about it because in the back seat of the car,
of the Dodge are wire figures that are making out,
you know, and beer bottles on the floor and so forth.
Until one day, some nuns showed up.
And I was a little bit in fear and trembling.
But it was pronounced as an interesting work, you know.
They absolutely did not deny the piece or complain about the piece
or say anything negative.
They thought it was well done.
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In late 1965, Dwan opened a second space in New York,
creating the first, truly, bi-coastal gallery.
To me, New York was the center of their world.
Well, actually it was.
Everybody agreed on that.
Maybe not the French, but it was definitely.
And to come here seemed to me like an important goal,
to be able to really compete with the big galleries
and show what I believed in.
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Dwan's first New York show brought Los Angeles to Manhattan,
a one-man, one-work show.
Ed Keene Holtz's "Beenery" is an unflinching group portrait
of the blue collar regulars and barflies
who frequented Barney's "Beenery," a West Hollywood dive bar.
Keene Holtz even piped in the smell of a bar room.
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In her first years in Manhattan, Virginia Dwan,
now in her mid-30s, was devoted to minimalism,
a movement that aimed at a pared-down aesthetic.
The groundbreaking "10" exhibition in the fall of 1966
showcased these loosely-associated artists.
Dwan described it as one of the most satisfying shows of her career.
For me, it was wonderful that they were cool, quiet,
still works that I felt very ease comfortable with.
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The minimal art that I showed and was so devoted to
was totemic in a way.
It sucked silently and held its own energy within it.
And I found that very satisfying and very helpful,
because I found the outside world exhausting and chaotic.
There were wars, there were uprisings,
there were all kinds of things going on.
Going into the gallery was a point of relief for me.
Dwan's introduction to minimalism came through the sculpture of Saul Lewitt.
He was a very interesting personality.
He was doing something very much his own,
very different from other artists that I had known.
And from then on, he was my artist, my friend,
and he was suggesting that I see so-and-so,
or bringing so-and-so around and so forth.
So I got to know some of the artists through him.
Lewitt showed at both Dwan galleries
and introduced Virginia to Carl Andre,
who became an important artist in the Dwan stable.
She supported his work and became a friend.
Four language shows at the Dwan Gallery in the late '60s
grew out of conceptual artists' sense
that ideas and therefore words were central to art.
A surge of works incorporating language in different ways
entered the gallery, words expressing concepts,
explaining artistic processes,
language meant to be first seen and then read as poetry,
and words as shapes and color.
In 1967, Virginia closed the LA Gallery to focus on New York.
Like many of her artists,
she had grown interested in possibilities for art
far beyond the gallery.
Land art intrigued her.
Massive art works fashioned with dynamite
and bulldozers in remote areas,
transforming the landscape and visitors' experience of it.
In October 1968, the Dwan Gallery presented Earth Works,
the first-ever Gallery exhibition of Land Art.
Piles of dirt and rocks from remote sites were accompanied
by photographs and drawings,
documenting projects in far-flung places.
Land art shifted Dwan's aesthetic focus from New York.
She purchased land from Michael Heiser,
who excavated two massive trenches straddling a natural canyon
in Nevada in 1969.
He called it double-negative,
a reference to what's gone, yet still present as a space,
after the artist removed an astonishing 240,000 tons of Earth.
Soon after, Dwan helped underwrite the first phase of city,
Heiser's monumental architectonic work,
which is still under construction.
Dwan leased land on the edge of Utah's Great Salt Lake
and financed the construction of Robert Smithson's
spiral jetty in 1970.
Using 6,000 tons of black basalt rock and Earth,
he formed a 1,500-foot-long sculptural coil
that winds counterclockwise off the shore and into the water.
Four years later, Dwan would underwrite Walter de Maria's
35-pole lightning field in the Arizona desert.
Designed to attract lightning,
the work was later expanded in New Mexico,
where the grid of 400 stainless steel poles
stretched one mile by one kilometer.
I think it's essential to experience the work
as a canandic phenomenon.
Part of it was the experience of the body moving through that space.
The gallery itself, in a sense, was out there.
The actual exhibition was taking place there.
By 1971, Virginia Dwan decided that it was time to close
the New York Gallery.
I was hoping to break even.
We never did.
And I wanted works to sell because I wanted people
to take them home and enjoy them,
and really live with them,
and the impact that that would have on the collectors.
But ultimately,
I was going ahead with what I wanted to do
and what the artists wanted to do.
Later that year, Dwan decided to support the construction
of Charles Ross's Star Axis,
a naked eye observatory and architectonic sculpture in New Mexico.
The Star Tunnel is precisely aligned with the Earth's Axis.
It points to Polaris,
the North Star prized by countless generations of navigators
in search of a way ahead.
I was doing some drawings of the Egyptian pyramids
because I was interested in how they aligned everything
with star geometry and with the geometry of space.
And I ran across precession,
which is this cycle where the Earth changes its alignment
to the stars over a 26,000-year period.
And I realized that it wasn't enough to know about that.
I wanted to make a place where you could stand in it and feel it
and have it as a whole body experience,
not just an intellectual experience.
Virginia Dwan's perception of art as a pathway to reflection
led her to approach Ross and the architect Lebann Wingert,
with her idea for the Dwan Light Sanctuary in Montezuma, New Mexico.
The prisms set in the windows of the sanctuary
turn the light into slowly moving rainbows,
an evocation of peace and a place for reflection.
Virginia Dwan's passionate commitment to art
and the people who make it stretches across 55 years,
expensive, perhaps, but in her eyes, priceless.
I think that what a great artist does is very significant.
And I want to see them have a place on Earth and recognition
and being cared for and supported that really is meaningful to me.
There were every one of them really great, significant artists
and people that made me feel at one in the world.
It made me feel that they were looking for things
the same way I was. They were on a similar search.
This film was made possible by the H.R.H. Foundation.
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