Art dealer Irving Blum remembers walking into Leo Castelli’s New York gallery in 1965 and being taken by a Roy Lichtenstein painting of a composition book, as he himself had carried it all through grade school.
Blum called Lichtenstein, a friend of his, and said he needed to see the Pop artist. “He said, ‘How urgent?'” Blum recalled. “I said, ‘Life or death.’ He said, ‘Come on.'”
At Lichtenstein’s studio, Blum told him that he was determined to buy the painting. But it has since been sold to dealer Ileana Sonnabend, Castelli’s wife. “I said, ‘Roy, I’ve got it: I’ll marry Ileana. I just have to have that painting.’”
Two months later, a crate arrived at Blum’s gallery with a duplicate version of the composition book and a note from Lichtenstein: “Dear Irving, Not needed to marry Ileana. Best, Roy.’”
“I really admire him,” Blum said in a recent interview in his spacious, art-filled Bel Air home, which he shares with his wife, Jackie. “I love the job, and I bought a few things for myself.”
The dealer, now 92 and long retired, drew on his warm memories of the artist when preparing the exhibition, “Lichtenstein remembered,” which includes about 20 sculptures that have never been shown as a group.
The three-dimensional works — mostly painted in bronze, some of which will be sold — are like Lichtenstein paintings brought to life, with bold lines of black, yellow, white and blue. “The colors and the palette are related to the colors in many of his paintings, but he really finds a way to make a sculpture that stands on its own,” said dealer Larry Gagosian, adding that Blum “has a long history with Roy and Dorothy.”
The artist’s widow, Dorothy Lichtenstein, publishes a comprehensive catalog raisonné on Lichtenstein’s birthday in October, said sculpture is central to his practice. “Whether he was doing surrealism or German abstractionism, he always made sculpture to go with that,” he says. “It’s funny. It’s with intelligence and love.”
Lichtenstein liked to explore the idea of solidity, Dorothy said, which is why she was drawn to making water pictures. “The freezing of a brush stroke – which is such a free thing – and conceptualizing it, I think intrigued him,” he said. “Water represents something flowing, but also solid in copper. Or the smoke from a coffee cup rising. He played with those images over and over again.”
Dorothy said she asked Blum to curate the show because she “really knew Roy’s work from the beginning as a Pop artist” and that she and her husband complemented each other. “Irving was very outgoing, and Roy was pretty quiet,” he said. “They had the same sense of humor and irony.”
Lichtenstein exhibited with the famous dealer Castelli, whom Blum sought to emulate when in 1958 he bought the artist Edward Kienholzpart of Ferus Gallery on North La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles for $500. Blum ran Ferus with its other founders, Walter and Shirley Hopps, until Walter left in 1960 to become curator at the Pasadena Art Museum in California (now the 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 Los Angeles platform in Ferus. “He was a huge influence,” Blum said. “Whenever I go to New York – I can’t afford to go more than a few times a year – that’s my first job: to see Leo and talk about what he’s doing.”
It was Castelli who introduced him to Andy Warhol, whom Blum met in the artist’s New York studio, while viewing his unfinished cartoon paintings. “I liked him, but I thought what he was doing was very mystifying,” Blum said. “I have no way of tracking it.”
When Blum visited again, six months later, he saw three at Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Can canvases on the floor leaning against the wall. Warhol told him he would 32 of them. “I said, ‘How about that?'” Blum recalled. “He said, ‘Well, there are 32 varieties, so I’ll make them all.'”
Blum says he persuaded Warhol to let him show all 32 of them in Los Angeles in 1962 by telling the artist, “the movie stars are coming into the gallery.”
Five of the soup cans were sold, but then Blum had the idea to keep all the paintings together and the buyers agreed to sell them back, without ever picking them up. (Only the actor Dennis Hopper initially resisted, Blum said.) Blum then bought the set for $1,000, paid Warhol $100 a month for 10 months, and in 1996, moved them to the Museum of Modern Art in a transaction that is part gift, part $15 million sale.
“Irving made it possible for us to buy a work of art, pure and simple,” said Glenn D. Lowry, MoMA’s longtime director. “It really gave us the arc we needed to properly represent Warhol.”
Blum also donated other works to institutions, including Ellsworth Kellyneither”Spectrum IV“at MoMA, Warhol’s”Ten Foot Flower” acrylic and silk-screen ink on linen at the Met, and Frank Stella’s “Ctesiphon 1” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
Blum was a late arrival to the art world. Born on December 1, 1930, in New York, where his father owned furniture stores, Blum moved to Phoenix when he was 10 years old.
After attending college in Tucson, he served in the Air Force and then went to New York, where he met Hans Knoll, the German-born furniture maker, who offered him a job at Knoll in Midtown Manhattan. Blum met collectors who visited 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 to them and visiting and chatting. A guy called Sam Kootz has a great gallery and is available in a way that dealers aren’t today.”
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 was on his way. Then in 1956 the gallerist David Herbert Blum was hired to meet Ellsworth Kelly.
“That was the beginning of a relationship that went on for 50 years,” said Blum, who bought a small black-and-white painting from Kelly that day for $75 that currently hangs in his home. (He also has an apartment on Park Avenue.)
Blum remembers climbing onto the roof of Kelly’s home on Coenties Slip — a street in Lower Manhattan inhabited by struggling artists — where a barbecue gathering included painters Jasper Johns, Agnes Martin and James Rosenquist .
“It’s a hotbed of artistic activity,” Blum said.
In Los Angeles — where Pop Art was not yet a common term — Blum was a bridge to West Coast diversity, showing Billy Al Bengston, Robert Irwin and Ed Ruscha. He put on his first Lichtenstein show in 1963. In an essay for the Gagosian exhibition catalog, actor and collector Steve Martin described touring the Ferus gallery in the 1960s and buying a Ruscha print for $125 from Blum — “the upbeat, astute, proselytizing champion of the new art.”
From 1957 to 1966, Blum’s Ferus gallery was the center of the Los Angeles scene, presenting the first solo shows of Ken Price, Larry Bell and Frank Stella.
“Ferus represented the pluralism of American art as well as — if not better than — any New York gallery of its time,” Roberta Smith wrote in The New York Times in 2002.
In Amy Newman’s oral history, “Challenging Art: Artforum, 1962-1974,” Philip Leider, the founding editor of Artforum magazine, said: “Without Ferus, there was nothing,” adding, “Irving was the scene.”
“He spoke well, not too deep, but very intelligent,” continued Leider, “as a dealer should be.”
In 1973, Blum moved to the Blum-Helman Gallery in New York, where he spent 20 years.
Sitting at her dining room table recently, Blum gestured to one of her favorite Lichtenstein paintings, which dominates her entry foyer, “Two Paintings: Dagwood, 1983,” featuring a comic-strip character and two other images separated by vertical lines.
Blum recounts his experience with the painting through a conversation he had with Lichtenstein: “He said, ‘How are you reading this?’” Blum recalled. “I said, ‘I read this as a picture of Dagwood.’ He said, ‘It’s more complicated. This is 20th century art history: On the left side is Expressionism, in the middle Formalism and at the end Pop.’”
“He said it covers all of this,” Blum continued. “And I said, ‘I’ll buy it.’”
Lichtenstein remembered
Sept. 9-Oct. 21, Gagosian, 980 Madison Avenue, Manhattan; 212-744-2313, gagosian.com.
