George Rush and Joanna Molloy’s “SCANDAL: A Manual, The Inside Story of America’s Infamous Gossip Columnists” (Skyhorse/Norton) is the most fun read I’ve had all year — possibly in several years. It is a delicious look behind the curtain of New York’s gossip media industrial complex, the players and the played, and how rival columns and columnists at the Daily News and The New York Post do battle and have been forced to evolve in an Internet/ Matt Drudge/ Fox News/ and TMZ disrupted world.

 

A few disclaimers: Rush and I became friends while attending Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, and having birthdays a few days apart have shared many a celebration including our respective birthdays, our weddings to women better than we deserved, and shared life events related to our children about whom we are gobsmacked and who, on occasion, we have forced to visit each other and go on rides at Magic Mountain. I have appeared in Page Six items and in Rush and Molloy and have on more than one occasion been the source of information that appeared there.

 

All of which is to say that although I like George and love Joanna, I had every reason to hate their memoir of being gossip columnists because I just know too much. Instead, I thoroughly enjoyed it, couldn’t put it down and imagine it will take up prominent real estate on chaise longues this holiday season in St. Barth, Aspen, Maui and the Big Island. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Chateau Marmont and The Standard put copies on every bedside table.

 

If it’s true that there is honor among thieves, it is a greater surprise to learn that there are ethics among gossips: attempts at bribes are detailed and rejected; facts are checked, and apologies made, ending here and there with a promise “that I owe you one.” Brad Pitt comes off as a genuinely nice guy so does, contrary to his image, Harvey Weinstein. Sarah Jessica Parker and Bill O’Reilly, not so well. Julia Roberts and Gwyneth Paltrow deploy their considerable charm to great effect; while Sean Penn and Jessica Seinfeld are lacking in those skills. Donald Trump, Jamie Foxx prove that there’s no need to make up material, while Rush and Molloy give us the goods on how spin control professionals such as Howard Rubenstein, Marty Singer, Ken Sunshine and Dan Klores earn their keep.

 

What’s striking is the breadth of the territory they cover: Entertainment, Sports, and Politics, a heady mix that stretches from Paris Hilton’s peccadilloes to the political situation in Haiti and Myanmar — it is hard to think of other reporters with as wide a beat. Along the way, Rush and Molloy speak truth to power, break important news stories not only about Mariah Carey, Jennifer Lopez, Julia Roberts or the affairs of Tiger Woods, Woody Allen and Rudy Guiliani, the travails of the Kennedy tribe, and also the entanglements of Bill Clinton, John Edwards, Dewi Sukarno, Bernard-Henri- Levy and Rupert Murdoch.

 

There is a searing chapter on 9-11 which occurred on Rush and Molloy’s doorstep, and the bravery of those who offered aid as well as how they exposed those that tried to take advantage.

 

Rush and Molloy’s “Scandal: A Manual,” is neither scandalous in its own right, nor is it some kind of how-to or self-help guide for those who prefer their names writ in bold. Rather it is a vibrant history of our recent times, from the dawn of Page Six to Twitter’s IPO, filled with harlots and heroes high and low, a tale of the great, the near-great and the ingrate, the famous and the soon-forgotten all of whom would probably prefer their exploits were erased from the public record – but never will be because Rush and Molloy made it to deadline — and we get to read all about it!

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The Skirball Cultural Center, which stands at the crest of Sepulveda and Mulholland just west of the 405 Freeway, was built on a dump. Literally. Who knew? Before the Skirball acquired the land, it was a garbage dump. With its opening in 1996, architect Moshe Safdie, in his first commission in the United States, transformed the site into a campus of concrete and granite pavilions, set into the hills, following the curves of the river of traffic that runs through the Sepulveda Pass.

 

Designed to be built in phases, as visitors and needs arose (and as funds were raised), the Skirball has extended over the past three decades to the south with the additions of Winnick Hall and Noah’s Ark, and to the north with Ahmanson Hall, and now finds completion with the Herscher Hall and Guerin Pavilion, to be unveiled this fall. The design for the new buildings fits seamlessly with the older ones, as if it were always there just waiting to be built. Its walls of windows afford beautiful vistas of the hills, and, inside, it contains a 9,000-square-foot multiuse hall, a 4,000-square-foot kosher kitchen, and meeting rooms ready for a class, a screening or even a Korean tea ceremony.

 

While the completion of this fifth and final phase of Safdie’s Skirball campus is cause enough for celebration, the exhibition “Global Citizen: The Architecture of Moshe Safdie,”  which opens Oct. 22,  will excavate the singular career of the Israeli-born architect who holds passports from Israel, Canada and the United States. Perhaps best known for his design for Yad Vashem, Safdie’s name has been counted among the top of the list of the many great architects of our time, such as Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, Richard Meier and I.M. Pei.

 

The exhibition was originated at the National Gallery of Canada in 2010, organized by Donald Albrecht, curator of architecture and design at the Museum of the City of New York.

 

 

“The exhibition is called ‘Global Citizen’ not only because Safdie is a citizen of the United States, Canada and Israel,” Albrecht explained recently, “but because his architecture projects all over the world … bring diverse people together.” As Albrecht notes in the catalog, it is “Safdie’s intention to use architecture not only to express, but also to generate, open engagement in community life.”

 

Organized chronologically, the exhibition includes models of some of Safdie’s best-known works in Canada (Habitat 67 and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa), in the United States (the Skirball, the Salt Lake City Public Library, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art), in Israel (Yad Vashem, the Mamilla Alrov Center, a multiuse urban center near the Old City of Jerusalem, and Ben-Gurion Airport) and elsewhere (among others, the Khalsa Heritage Center of Sikh culture in Punjab, India, and the planned Jumilla Mosque in Dubai). The show also includes designs for projects and entries for architectural competitions that were never built, as well as films that will be screened in the galleries to give a sense of the experience of interacting with the three-dimensional built spaces.

 

The exhibition organizes Safdie’s career into several phases. To begin with, he was born in Haifa in 1938, and the mix there of cultures and religions, as well as the proliferation of modernist stacked housing on Mount Carmel, had a profound influence on him, all the more so because his family moved to Montreal in 1953. Memories of Haifa can be seen in Safdie’s groundbreaking undergraduate architecture thesis at McGill University, a design for a modular building system using prefabricated forms fashioned into stacks of individual homes with terraced gardens, which would become Montreal’s Habitat 67 (one of the prefab molded bathrooms is showcased in the exhibition). Meant to be scaled for a variety of locales (Manhattan, Puerto Rico and Tehran), Habitat never was built beyond its initial Montreal development. Indeed, in the years that immediately followed Habitat’s completion, Safdie’s work met with resistance, as can be seen with his unsuccessful submissions for the student union at San Francisco State University, and for Paris’ Centre Pomidou, both of which went to other architects.

 

Safdie returned to Israel following the Six-Day War to complete his military service, and in 1970 moved to Jerusalem, where he opened an office. This began the second phase of his career, notable for projects at the Hebrew Union College campus, the beginning of his work on the Mamilla complex and at Yad Vashem. In these, we see the emergence of the elements of Safdie’s distinctive architectural vocabulary, all profoundly influenced by Jerusalem’s Old City: his mixing of concrete, stone and granite, which allow the architecture to fade to the background, highlighting instead light-filled passageways, either open-air or skylight-enhanced, and a predominance of simple geometric forms in the buildings, as well as the walkways, plazas and gardens.

 

 

The third phase of Safdie’s career extends his work to North America, and can be seen in his consistent selection as designer of significant cultural centers, including the Skirball in Los Angeles; the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa; the Exploration Place Science Center in Wichita, Kansas; the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass.; the Salt Lake City Public Library in Utah; the United States Institute of Peace headquarters in Washington, D.C.; and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark. Striking in all these endeavors is how they all are designed to be enjoyed by a large and diverse stream of visitors. The other striking feature is that with the exception of the National Gallery of Canada, whose glass structure echoes Ottawa’s landmark towers, Safdie’s designs generally do not call attention to themselves. They continue, in this phase, his use of geometrical forms derived from nature but greatly abstracted (sometimes by benefit of computer design). The buildings harmonize with their surroundings rather than stand out, and they are not afraid to be grand, but are incomplete without the presence of people interacting with their spaces. And, it is important to note, Safdie’s public projects have been overwhelmingly popular. Salt Lake City’s library has been called “America’s unquietest library,” and the Crystal Bridges Museum, commissioned by Walmart heiress Alice Walton and opened in 2011,  has exceeded all projections for attendance.

 

The fourth and current phase of Safdie’s practice is an increasingly global one, with the Khalsa center in India, the Marina Bay Sands complex in Singapore (commissioned by Sheldon Adelson), and proposals for the Guangdong Science Center in China and the Palm Jumeirah Gateway Mosque in Dubai. These are monumental projects, and for them Safdie’s architectural statements, particular in the Khalsa center, are bolder. Yet they retain his trademark order and elegance — no Gehry-esque dissonant clash of squiggly lines for Safdie.

 

While some architects’ designs for museums and buildings make the outside more famous than what’s inside, Safdie’s work is different: His architecture often takes a back seat to its surroundings and to its purpose, whether residential, or public space, or multipurpose. Safdie aims to accommodate a jumble of people flowing smoothly through a variety of experiences.

 

What “Global Citizen: The Architecture of Moshe Safdie” does is make us appreciate his artfulness in doing so.

 

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In one version of our lives, childhood is a series of deprivations and desires whereby we want things we can’t have, some of which we grow out of or just forget. In my case, I was seized with heartache when I entered the newly opened 8,000-square-foot Leica store on Beverly Boulevard at Robertson in West Hollywood. Until then, I had forgotten how much I wanted to own a Leica.

Leica is the 100-year-old optics company founded by Ernst Leitz in Wetzlar, Germany, known originally as the Leitz Camera Co. (shortened to LEICA). The company became well known for making the first 35mm film camera, and for its rangefinder, variable lens system and for the quality of its lenses. The camera was the favorite of many professional photographers, such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Alfred Eisenstaedt, the latter of whom used a Leica to shoot his famous picture of a sailor kissing a girl in Times Square. Today, the company is based in Solms, Germany, and Andreas Kaufmann, a German national who resides in Austria, is the majority shareholder.

My own passion for photography and for cameras was kindled by a summer job, at 13,  in a midtown Manhattan camera store run by Hungarian Jewish émigrés. Back then, there was a hierarchy to everything, including desire. The serious young photographer graduated from taking snapshots to a single-lens reflex camera, such as a Mamiya Sekor (popular among my friends), or, if you were more affluent, a Pentax. From there you graduated to an Olympus, and then a Nikon. Professionals used professional versions of the Nikon — which were all black. For the truly discerning, however, the object of desire was the Leica.

The Leica felt solid and was fully manual (a plus to the camera geek), allowing for maximum choice, and therefore, maximum artistic control in each photo. It sat in your hand with a satisfying heft, a solidness that spoke to its seriousness of purpose. To me, it was the embodiment of the schwarzgerat (literally “the black device”), a finely tooled exemplar of German engineering so satisfying in its design and manufacture, so intelligently made, that its use gave pleasure and conferred status and excellence on the user. The reverence in which the schwarzgerat is held has been central to several contemporary classics such as the black monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 or the secret component in the searched-for rocket in Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow.” I aspired to the Leica, although I knew it was way out of my league.

Everything about it said “German,” which might have added to its forbidden-fruit status, as my parents, Holocaust memories ever fresh, didn’t buy German. However, just as the overwhelming quality of the product convinced some Jews to drive Mercedeses and BMWs, particularly after Israel accepted the wiedergutmachung — reparations from Germany — Leica was adopted by many Jewish photographers, among them Robert Capa and Cornell Capa.

Jewish guilt was further assuaged by an e-mail that has been making the rounds for the last several years (I’ve received it as least three times from three different sources), variously referred to as “Leica and the Jews” or “The Leica Freedom Train.” The e-mail tells of how, as the Nazis came to power, Ernst Leitz II, son of the founder, arranged for his Jewish employees to leave Germany. He strung Leicas over their necks and dubbed them Leica sales agents, allowing them to obtain travel visas when those were increasingly hard to get. The cameras themselves served as proof and were a valuable commodity upon arrival in a foreign land. In many cases, Leitz personally arranged introductions to photo businesses in the United States and other countries for his employees. This continued until 1939, when Germany closed its borders to all Jews. Even after that, Leitz’s daughter was involved in helping to smuggle Jews into Switzerland. As Protestants, Leitz said, it was just the right thing to do and he never sought any acclaim for his actions.

A spirit more truculent than mine might point out that Leica did not close its factories under the Reich, or move its operations to the United States or England — to the contrary, Leica optics were very valuable to the German war effort, and Leitz remained a Nazi party member. And although the company was never convicted of using slave labor, in 1988 it voluntarily paid into a fund set up for German companies to compensate former slave laborers. But this does not make what Leica did for its Jewish employees prior to 1939 any less true: Those “Leica Jews,” their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are alive because of the opportunity Leitz gave them.

As cameras became increasingly automated, Leica continued to focus on its manual attributes; as digital cameras entered the marketplace, Leica was slow to join the parade. However, in the past few years, they have introduced increasingly sophisticated digital products worthy of the Leica name, and the brand seems to be making a comeback.

For many years, though, Leica had been off my radar. Then  I walked into the Leica megastore, a gleaming cube, replete with an upstairs gallery space showing the works of celebrated portrait photographer Mary Ellen Mark, Seal (yes, the singer, who is a brand ambassador for the company, as well as an accomplished photographer with special access to nude models lying on hotel room beds) and Yariv Milchan, the landscape and celebrity photographer (whose Hollywood connection is genetic — his father is entertainment mogul Arnon Milchan). It also houses a bookstore selling rare and well-chosen photo books, curated by Martin Parr of Magnum. And, finally, there are the cameras.

There is much to lust for: The store sells the full range of Leicas, from point-and-shoot cameras that will fit in your pocket ($700-$800), to the legendary M series, featuring its M lens mount first introduced in 1954, to special collaborations with G-Star Raw Denim and Hermes leather, some of which cost as much as $7,500. There is even a monochrome digital camera for taking high-resolution images in black and white that would be a worthy addition to any serious photographer’s camera bag.

I met with James Agnew, the store’s general manager, and Annie Seaton, the gallery’s manager, and asked them, “Why a Leica store in L.A.? Why now?”

“It’s the right time for Leica, the right time for Los Angeles.” Agnew said, “Los Angeles is an increasingly important center for the arts. It is an exciting time for photography in Los Angeles.”

Seaton added: “I think of Los Angeles as the home of the moving image. Where else to start but in Hollywood?”

In some ways, one might think this would be the worst possible time to be selling expensive cameras.  In the last few years, images made using smartphones and iPhones posted on Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook have made everyone a photographer or a photodiarist of their meals, pets, friends and selves. Hasn’t digital and the Internet disrupted and leveled photography?

Agnew sees it differently. He believes the ubiquity of photos has created a backlash, and he believes there is “overall a return to the tradition of photography and a renewed call for quality cameras and images.” The Leica store is there not only to celebrate photography but also photographs: It will offer full printing services, in addition to repair service and sales.

What became clear from talking with Agnew — who prior to opening this new Leica store, worked for such luxury retailers as Giorgio Armani, Chanel and Van Cleef & Arpels — is that Leica is positioning itself as a luxury company. We live in a society where driving a Bentley rather than a Prius (or, rather, driving a Bentley in addition to a Prius) is a choice that the marketplace supports. So, for every 1,000 or 10,000 iPhone photo enthusiasts, there will be some who crave, or succumb to, the quality and the allure of a Leica.

And if they can’t afford one, then, like me, they can spend time at the beautiful new Leica megastore, lusting for excellence.

The Leica Store is located at 8783 Beverly Blvd. in West Hollywood. For more information, go to leicastorela.com.

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The exhibition “Hans Richter: Encounters” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is a curator’s dream:  retrospective of a somewhat obscure, multiplatform artist, who is equally adept (and revolutionary) in painting and film; whose life and career intersects with the major artists and artistic movements of the 20th century; and whose work, when organized didactically, continues to appear very of the moment, ready for reappraisal and for greater attention.

Although the show’s curator, Timothy O. Benson, had written about Richter in the 1990s, he was surprised when contacted about eight years ago by the curator of Richter’s estate, Erik de Bourbon-Parme, to work on a possible exhibition in cooperation with curators at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. During Richter’s lifetime (1888-1976), as described in his memoir “Encounters From Dada Till Today,” which LACMA has republished as an e-book, Richter managed in Zelig-like fashion to befriend a wide range of artists and filmmakers, including Hans Arp, Jean Cocteau, George Méliès, Joseph Cornell, Piet Mondrian, Sergei Eisenstein, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Federico Fellini, Fernand Léger, Alexander Calder, Kazimir Malevich and Fritz Lang, among many others whom he influenced and who influenced him. Benson wanted to honor Richter’s talents as an artist but also, in Benson’s words, as “innovator-director-collaborator-organizer-instigator-facilitator-transmitter–curator and chronicler.” This approach makes particular sense at LACMA, whose director, Michael Govan, has championed exhibitions that highlight the artistic dimension of filmmakers (Tim Burton and Stanley Kubrick, among them) as well as artists who have made films (Dali, and now Richter). 

At LACMA, “Hans Richter: Encounters,” whose installation has been designed by the architectural firm Frederick Fisher and Partners, the central core of Richter’s film work, projected on exhibit room walls, becomes the spine of the exhibition, from which emanate nine rooms of art and objects by Richter and other artists that give context to Richter’s work and influence.

Johannes Siegfried (Hans) Richter was born to a well-off German-Jewish family in 1888 (his mother was a Rothschild). He studied at the Academy of Art in Berlin and the Academy of Art in Weimar. As a teenager, he began drawing portraits of family members. Early exposure to the Blue Rider group of painters led by Franz Marc and the German Expressionists can be seen in these early works, some of which appeared in the Berlin avant-garde intellectual publications such as Die Aktion and Der Sturm.  With the advent of Cubism, Richter saw how abstract forms could express an artistic, or even utopian, vision.

In 1914, shortly after the outbreak of World War I, Richter was drafted and seriously wounded outside Vilnius, Lithuania. A younger brother died in the war, and another was wounded. Richter returned to Berlin with a greater commitment to political change, envisioning the power of art to be a force for radicalism. If the world war was meant to be “the war to end all wars,” Richter increasingly believed that a better world was possible, one without militarism where radical art could be a transformative force in society. For the rest of his life, Richter sought out the radical in his art.

As luck would have it, Richter was not alone in his views. At a café in Zurich, Switzerland, he was introduced by a friend to Tristan Tzara (Samy Rosenstock), with whom he would become involved in the Dada movement, through which Richter would make lifelong friends with Duchamp and Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky). Richter formed the Radical Artists Group after the Russian Revolution in 1917. Tzara introduced Richter to the Swedish artist Viking Eggeling, with whom Richter began to collaborate, creating visual scrolls that were “contrapuntal” and resembled musical scores, exploring notions of duality, of the power of opposites such as black and white, positive and negative, not only in drawings and painting but also particularly in experimental film. In 1921, Richter made what is considered one of the first abstract films, “Rhythmus 21.”

Rhythmus 21
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Richter knew many of the early film innovators, including Méliès and Eisenstein. But it was Richter’s status as an artist that set him apart as a filmmaker. When Kazimir Malevich, the Russian Suprematist painter, wanted to collaborate on a film, he chose Richter over Eisenstein because he felt Richter would be able to move the art of film forward. Richter very much saw his role as being part of the avant-garde, “Not to just roll up his sleeves and just make something, but to listen for the future. He felt like the future was something in formation that the artist could hear,” Benson said.

It may be hard to appreciate today, but abstract art and film were once revolutionary. To Richter, however, abstraction represented both the intellectual and the human side of art — a purity of form and design that transcended borders and could be accepted as a universal language. “I see him as an instigator and leader,” Benson said. 

In the 1920s, Richter launched the art journal Periodical G, whose full title was G: Materials for Elemental Form Creation. Inspired by Theo van Doesburg’s De Stijl, G gathered such diverse talents as artist El Lissitzky and designer Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, on architecture, industrial design, city planning, typography, painting and film. “I see him as the Miles Davis of the art world,” Benson said, “because he listens and he knows which people to put together to make something happen at a particular time.”  

In 1929, Richter was called upon to use his gregarious social talents to organize the “Film und Foto” exhibition that traveled throughout Europe, including to Stuttgart, Berlin, Zurich and Vienna, featuring the work of his friends and contemporaries, among them Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Hannah Höch, Léger, Ray and Duchamp. Nonetheless, during the 1930s it became increasingly clear that while Richter did not consider himself particularly Jewish, the Nazis did. Richter’s work was included in the infamous Nazi exhibition “Degenerate Art,” and the artist was forced to leave Germany in 1933 for the more hospitable environs of Southern France and Switzerland. As the 1930s came to end, he sought refuge in the United States but could not get a visa despite his friendships and contacts.  According to Benson, it was only through the intervention of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society that Richter was allowed into the United States, where he joined the faculty of the City University of New York to chair its film department. 

New York was awash in European émigré artists, and Richter found himself renewing old friendships with Duchamp and Ray, and making new ones with Jonas Mekas, Maya Deren, Joseph Cornell and John Cage. He returned to painting, making large scrolls that revisited old work and made the imagery new, adding elements of amorphous shapes as counterpoints and introducing elements of collage. He also made films, including the feature “Dreams That Money Can Buy.” In the 1960s, he adopted the format of working in series, using a variety of abstract forms and materials to explore his ideas. 

Richter died in 1976. However, as an art figure, his use of so many different media, his way of collaborative working, his publications such as G, make him seem very of the moment. As Benson explained, “Like many artists today, he moves from one medium to the next, almost effortlessly. … He often did things that are very short, 10-minute or a three-minute film sequence, and young people work that way now. He’s also a social-media person. He had his own social networks. Those aspects really make him of our time.” 

For Richter, an artist who always set himself at the cutting edge of his time, his sought-for future is now.

“Hans Richter: Encounters” continues at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through Sept. 2.

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“Here They Come II, Paris,” from the series “Big Nudes,” 1981. © Estate of Helmut Newton

 

Many years ago, on Jan. 23, 2004, to be precise, I was driving west on Sunset Boulevard when traffic stopped completely. There were police and an ambulance in front of the Chateau Marmont, where a car had crashed. I figured some celebrity-laden party had gotten out of hand, but later that night I learned that photographer Helmut Newton, the “King of Kink,” so-called for his shots of modern Valkyries posed like extras from Cavani’s “The Night Porter” or Sally Bowles’ co-workers at the Cabaret, had died, crashing his Cadillac into a wall across the street from the Chateau, the 83-year-old artist’s Los Angeles home base.

 

A retrospective of Newton’s work opens June 29 at the Annenberg Space for Photography, including his giant nudes, some featured in 8-by-8-foot prints made specifically for the exhibition.  As Wallis Annenberg, CEO, president and chairman of the board of the Annenberg Foundation said in a statement accompanying the exhibition: “Helmut Newton is one of the most powerful and influential photographers of the past century — the place where art and fashion and subversion and aspiration all collide.”

 

He was also one of a handful of photographers who transformed fashion photography, and fashion advertising, into artworks, greater than the products they were selling (Irving Penn and Richard Avedon also come to mind). But even among this notable group, Newton’s work stood apart — both easily identifiable and much-imitated for the way he cast his models, often tall, blond and frequently naked, as either out-of-reach goddesses or playthings to be dominated and fetishized. Newton had a way of making both his subjects and his viewers complicit in the images’ sexual innuendo, or as Annenberg put it: “If Newton’s work was controversial, I believe it’s because he expressed the contradictions within all of us, and particularly within the women he photographed so beautifully: empowerment mixed with vulnerability, sensuality tempered by depravity.”

 

Given the exploration of power and debauchery within his work, it may come as little surprise to discover that Newton was born Helmut Neustadter in Berlin in 1920 to a prosperous Jewish family; his father owned a button factory. At 12, Newton purchased his first camera, and by 16 he was an apprentice to Yva (Elise Simon), a photographer who specialized in covering the German theater. If one is to believe Newton’s 2003 autobiography, “Helmut Newton” (Random House), the Nazis’ rise to power and the passage of the anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws were merely an inconvenience to him, as Yva could no longer work (she would later be deported and murdered at Auschwitz), and because the beautiful blond girl he had a crush on rejected him. For his part, Newton went on to spend the rest of his life both idealizing Aryan blondes and making them submit to his will.

 

 

In 1938, following Kristallnacht, Newton’s father was briefly imprisoned in a concentration camp, forced to abandon the factory and flee with Newton’s mother to South America. Newton, then 18, could not get a visa and was sent instead to China.  He made it as far as Singapore, where, according to his autobiography, he became a gigolo, or, at least the kept boyfriend of a much-older divorcee. From Singapore, he made his way to Australia in 1942, where he was interned by the British as a German national. Released to serve in the Australian army, at war’s end in 1945, he took Australian citizenship and changed his name to Newton.

 

After the war, Newton started a photo portraiture business in Melbourne where he met the actress June Brown, who would become his wife and partner. Newton spent the 1950s shooting for Australian and then British Vogue. In the 1960s, he moved to Paris to work for French Vogue. By the ’70s, his work was being featured in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, as well as for Yves Saint Laurent.

 

Yet no matter where he was, Newton brought a 1920s Berlin sensibility to his work. His images, always in black and white, explored fetishes not seen in polite culture — such as scantily clad models in leg casts or wearing orthopedic braces; or in leather corsets, with whips. In the Annenberg show, photos from this era show women dressed as men, women kissing women, women on all fours wearing a saddle, women in garters, in high heels and stilettos and not much else — images meant to provoke, to incite and, most important, to hold one’s attention, as if giving us a peephole view into an unfolding narrative.

 

In addition to the more than 100 prints featured in the show, the Annenberg will also screen two films about the artist, both showing continuously in the galleries: “Helmut by June,” was directed by June Newton, wife of 56 years (also a professional photographer, working under the name Alice Springs), and in the film she goes behind the scenes at photo shoots and in their homes to discuss his work and their private life over the years. Also showing will be an original documentary commissioned by the Annenberg from Arclight Productions, including interviews with Newton’s models, stylists and fashion editors, as well as his assistants and friends.

 

After Newton’s death, fellow German fashion icon Karl Lagerfeld told The New York Times: “Berlin was him, he was Berlin. … He was a graphic artist with a sense of composition in his imagery, with Berlin’s silent movies and a whole history in his pictures. … He was the last artist who had that Jewish wit, the last link to a Germany that I did not know but that I can understand.” A Germany that was murdered out of existence, that Newton really didn’t know either — not the Jewish part — and whose decadence he could only observe, as a young apprentice, staring through a lens, wanting in.

 

 

“Rue Aubriot, Paris Collections,” from the series “White Women,” 1975. © Estate of Helmut Newton

 

“Helmut Newton: White Women…Sleepless Nights…Big Nudes” | June 29-Sept. 8, 2013 | The Annenberg Space for Photography

 

2000 Avenue of the Stars | Los Angeles, CA 90067 | Tel: 213.403.3000 | info@annenbergspaceforphotography.org | annenbergspaceforphotography.org

 

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Achinoam Nini, the Israeli singer-songwriter known to all simply as Noa, will perform on June 18 at  American Jewish University as part of the new Geller Festival of the Arts. Born in Tel Aviv in 1969, Noa moved to New York as a child and lived there with her family until she returned to Israel at 16. After her military service as part of an entertainment unit, Noa went on to Israel’s Rimon music school, where she met Gil Dor, now her longtime songwriting partner and musical accomplice; the 23-year collaborators will perform together in Los Angeles. Based in Israel, but a truly international artist, she performs in English, French, Italian, Spanish, Thai, Hindi, Arabic, Hebrew and the language of the Yemenite Jews, the last being her own heritage. Noa is also an outspoken peace activist and has performed (and spoken) at the Davos World Economic Forum, sung for Pope John Paul II, performed at LIVE 8 and was in the finals of the 2009 Eurovision contest performing with Israeli-Arab singer Mira Awad. She spoke by phone from her home in Israel, and the following is an edited version of the conversation:

Tom Teicholz: Will you be doing material from your most recent album, “The Israeli Songbook,” in your performance here?

Noa: First, a little background: I am a singer-songwriter, and most of my career has been based on original material in English and Hebrew. I grew up in the United States, so English is my first language. I write mostly in English, but I also write music to Hebrew poetry. … [However], two years ago, I did an album that pays homage to classic Hebrew songs that I called “The Israeli Songbook.”

TT: How would you describe these songs?

Noa: They’re songs that have had a great impact on the Israeli psyche and Israeli culture. What is beautiful about them is that they were written by mostly Western or Eastern European composers that came in the early waves of Zionism to then-Palestine. … They encountered the Eastern culture that existed here, the Arabic music and then the waves of [immigration], including the Yemenite immigrants, which my family were part of. And this East-West encounter gave birth to many beautiful songs that really reflected the emerging State of Israel and its state of mind.

Musically, the compositions are really beautiful, and the lyrics are the highest form of Hebrew poetry that exists. In that period, the Hebrew language was experiencing a renaissance. It was going from being a strictly biblical language to becoming a contemporary, vibrant, growing language. And these poets and composers were really exploring the depths of this beautiful language.

TT: But given that you were raised in the United States, were these songs you grew up with?

Noa: Actually, I did, because my parents are both Israelis, Yemenites. … I grew up with quite a mix of cultures, because not only did I have a very Israeli home, but I had my Yemenite grandmother who lived with us, and she raised us. … I grew up with these songs and Yemenite music. I also heard American music. The music of the ’60s, which was the music that I loved the most, even though I was born after it. I would have loved to live in that period and have worked in that period. … Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell were all a great influence on me. [Nonetheless,] this is the first time in my career that I decided to perform these songs. I really wanted to raise them on a pedestal and so we decided to collaborate with the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra. … We called it “The Israeli Songbook,” after the “Gershwin Songbook,” which Ella Fitzgerald did with Nelson Riddle and all these great arrangers. We’ve arranged it for quartets for this show, and it will be a featured part of this program. There will also be other [songs].

TT: Did you hesitate before recording these songs, which so many Israeli artists, such as Arik Einstein, have made famous?

Noa: Yes, there was one song, for example, that we did have a lot of hesitation, called “Hayu Leilot” (There Were Nights) which everyone in Israel knows. … We took another poem by Arhel, another very well-known poet of the time, put it to music and then wove the new song into the old song. We also took two very well-known children’s songs, put them together and created a classic operatic aria. One of the highlights of the show [is] a medley of songs that were written about the Yemenite emigration that is very vibrant and rhythmic with percussion. We did all kinds of things to give these songs a new life.

TT: Why these songs now? My theory is that with Israel’s 65th birthday, and all the societal changes that have been occurring in Israel, the time is right to remind Israeli society of songs that united them.

Noa: Yes — you can say that. Here we have the opportunity to shed light on a lesser-known corner of Israeli culture and diversity and beauty and depth. I’ve been performing [these songs] all over the world, and people are very intrigued by and fall in love with them.

TT: Having been a vocal peace activist in Israel and abroad, can you talk a bit about why you feel it is important to speak out as you do, and also why, as you’ve said elsewhere, you believe artists, even those who oppose the Israeli government, should perform in Israel rather than boycott it.

Noa: Israeli artists who perform abroad invariably carry a message of peace and of culture, and arts, above all. There are so many people in our country who believe in peace. Not everybody, maybe, but enough — not only in our country, but on the other side of the border. It’s the responsibility of every human being who wants to live in peace to work for it. You can’t expect people to do the work for you. … I’m a singer, so I sing for peace. I think whoever can do something, should.

As for artists boycotting Israel, I am absolutely against that. [Israel] is a pluralistic place, a diverse place.

As for artists boycotting Israel, I am absolutely against that. [Israel] is a pluralistic place, a diverse place. Turning your back on Israel and not playing here plays directly into the hands of the extremists, [because] people say, “You see, everybody hates us, nobody wants to come here. Let’s be more defensive. Let’s build more walls. Let’s be more protective of what we have.” Rather than [being] more embracing, more open to the international community and to international humanistic values. Not coming here is making the situation much, much worse. That’s one. Second, if you do have the balls to come here as an artist, then come and say what you think. Visit this country, then go to the Palestinians and visit them and see for yourself what’s going on. If you believe in peace, say it. Say it! And practice what you preach.

For tickets and more information, please visit: http://wcce.aju.edu.

A version of this article appeared in print.

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It’s back!

Remember long ago in those dark days of 2011, when “Pacific Standard Time,” the Getty-sponsored initiative, got more than 60 cultural organizations throughout Southern California to shine a light on the impact of Los Angeles’ art scene between 1945 and 1980? Well, given the success of that first effort, the Getty has now launched “Son of PST” (my name) or, as the Getty calls it, “Pacific Standard Time Presents,” a smaller-scale initiative of 11 affiliated shows about “modern architecture in L.A.” (visit pacificstandardtimepresents.org for complete details).

For its part, the J. Paul Getty Museum is offering “Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future 1940-1990” at the Getty Center through July 21. In truth, Wim de Wit, head of the Department of Architecture and Contemporary Art at the Getty Research Institute, along with curator Christopher Alexander, had been working for several years on this show, but the Getty saw an opportunity to launch the exhibition as part of a larger network of related shows and, in conjunction, to feature programming on the subject at institutions throughout Los Angeles.

Organized thematically, “Overdrive” features photographs, architectural drawings and models, films, digital displays and contemporary art, all organized around several themes, such as car culture (diners, drive-ins, auto design), urban networks (freeways, water and power buildings), engines of innovation (oil, aviation, aerospace industry buildings), higher education (UCLA, Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and UC Riverside among others), international commerce (LAX); and media and entertainment industries (studios and theme parks); community magnets (faith, culture, sports, shopping); and residential architecture (including designs and models for the Santa Monica homes of now-superstar architects Frank Gehry and Thom Mayne).

The concept may sound a little all over the place, but in truth the show is mostly about buildings, the dreams that inspired them, the plans their builders had for them, what got built as well as what didn’t, and the influences those buildings wrought — all meant, in the words of the exhibition’s introduction, to “highlight some of the region’s most ambitious urban experiments.”

Fitting for a show organized by the Research Institute, a library, “Overdrive,” is more conceptual and research-driven than a conventional image-centered museum exhibition. As such, it is part of a trend among some art museums to extend the scope of what’s shown in their galleries to include popular, historical, social and cultural artifacts. This has been the province of the Museum of Modern Art in New York since its founding in 1929, but otherwise was much more the province of non-art, history and humanities museums, such as the Grammy Museum or even the Autry National Center, but as Bob Dylan put it so long ago, “The times they are a-changin’.”

“With an architecture show, it’s really difficult to tell a story, and to tell a story in a visually compelling manner,” the Getty’s Rani Singh, one of the show’s co-curators, told me. “For us, the challenge was really to tell a very complicated story of the city of Los Angeles and how it developed,” she said. “To do that in a visually compelling and strong way was a real challenge.”

LAX Theme Building by Pereira & Luckman, Welton Becket & Associates, and Paul R. Williams, 1958, from the Alan E. Leib Collection, © Luckman Salas O’Brien.

There are nuggets of information to be mined throughout the exhibit. For example, did you know that the Googie-style architecture of the Norm’s coffee shops was designed to recall an automobile showroom? Or that LAX called itself “the first airport of the Jet Age”? That the Capitol Records building, the world’s first circular building, put its recording studios in the basement for better sound-proofing and features built-in sun shades for its windows; or that the needle on its tower used to broadcast “Hollywood” in Morse code — and a relative of Samuel Morse was the first person to broadcast that message from its antenna? That the pools of water outside the Department of Water and Power building are recirculated to cool the building, and that originally that building, designed by A.C. Martin and Associates, was meant to be illuminated 24 hours a day? The exhibition abounds with such fascinating minutiae.

The original drawings for Universal City are included, as well showing how it truly was intended to be citylike, including multifamily residential apartments mixed with hotels surrounding an entertainment street. There are even photos of Howard Hughes’ Spruce Goose, shown both out in the water and in its hangar. And images of the four-level interchange of freeways — under construction and completed — highlight their importance and strange architectural beauty (something now lost on most of us as we curse the traffic). In the section on community engagement, photos show Dodger Stadium being built, as well as the forcible evictions in the former site of Chavez Ravine.

Great film clips are embedded throughout the exhibit, such as one of Edward R. Murrow taking viewers on a tour of CBS’ Television City. In a case of saving the best for last, at the tail end of the exhibit, one can sit down and watch a selection of “oral histories” — produced interviews. These include the late Julius Schulman talking about the growth of Los Angeles, complete with all his much-missed boosterish egocentrism, and Frank Gehry explaining how being part of L.A.’s art scene with Wallace Berman, among others, forever influenced his work, and how his childhood study of Talmud sparked his disputatious spirit. David C. Martin talks of three generations of architects in Los Angeles, and in one interview, structural engineer Richard Bradshaw, talking about the construction of LAX, explains that an architect is, literally, as the title implies, the arch technician of a building project, an etymology I had never before considered.

What the Getty exhibition makes clear is that the Los Angeles urban landscape we now take for granted was built building by building. Photos of the Music Center under construction (including the famous Schulman image of the Mark Taper Forum), UCLA’s construction boom in the 1960s, and the impact of Disneyland on popular culture and theme parks all are here. The show also highlights how houses of worships in Los Angeles, such as the Sidney Eisenshtat-designed Sinai Temple, used, according to the catalog, “sculptural designs and bold forms to impact the streetscape.” And how the harmonious design of the First A.M.E. Church in Los Angeles matched the calming effect the church sought for its parishioners in the wake of the Rodney King verdict.

The Getty exhibition hopes to make us really see Los Angeles. “This is a city we all inhabit, we all drive though, we walk though, we live and breathe and eat in this city,” Singh said. “And these buildings become intimate in a way, and hopefully with our exhibition, one comes out with a different understanding and an appreciation for the city that we live in and the level of beauty here.”

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There’s an old saying that goes something like this: We spend the first half of our lives running away from home and the rest trying to get back. Consider Homer, way back in ancient Greece, who defined our notion of a life’s odyssey as a journey that begins and ends at home.

The same could be said of Gary Baseman, a Los Angeles artist whose career retrospective opens this weekend at the Skirball Cultural Center. Baseman organized the show thematically, inspired by the rooms of his childhood home — Living Room (Welcome), Dining Room (Celebration), Hallway (Journey), Kitchen (Feast), Bedroom (The Human Condition). All of the artworks are installed alongside actual furniture and artifacts from the house where he grew up, along with some objects from his relatives’ homes. Personal history is an ongoing inspiration for Baseman: He’s currently working on a new series titled “Journey to My Mythical Homeland.”

Baseman is a highly eclectic artist whose very personal iconography recalls such diverse traditions as Rudolph Dirks’ Sunday comic strips “The Katzenjammer Kids”; the underground artist R. Crumb and Raw comics; the haunting psychic landscapes of Picabia and Dali; and the multimedia and multiplatform work of such post-Warholian Pop artists as Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf and Takashi Murakami. Baseman does it all — paintings, prints, advertising, commercial illustration, TV series, animated film, toys, wallets, stickers, installations and performances — the sum total of which Baseman calls his “pervasive practice.”

His distinctive style has been consistent since childhood; it features anthropomorphized animals and invented creatures, as well as women and children, all of which are depicted in toy- or doll-like form or transformed into mythical creatures. Many of the images are shown traveling through crowded, dream-like landscapes. At the same time, the creatures and narratives of Baseman’s paintings and various series coincide metaphorically with the artist’s maturation as an artist and with the events of his personal life.

Baseman’s work has been exhibited in museums and galleries all over the world, however Los Angeles is his home, and at the Skirball he really wants to bring his audience into his world, to inspire each visitor to feel at home with all his artistic creations.

When I visited him recently at his Los Angeles studio and current home, Baseman welcomed me with Old World manners into his repository of obsessions and collections — a deluge of toys, photos and advertising artifacts from the 1930s and ’40s worthy of the Collyer brothers as well as a treasure trove of his art in various stages of completion. We talked for two-and-a-half hours, and the conversation easily could have lasted many hours more.

Baseman’s parents met in a displaced persons camp after World War II; both are originally from towns in what was then Poland (now Ukraine) outside of Rovno (Rivne). His father, Ben, escaped from his town, Berezne, into the nearby forests, and fought with a Russian partisan unit; Baseman’s mother, Naomi, survived because her city, Kostopol, fell under Soviet domination.

The artist was born in 1960 in Los Angeles; he’s a full decade younger than his siblings and the only native U.S. citizen in the family (his brother Morris was born in Austria, brother Sam and sister Netta in Canada). Baseman was, he said, his parents’ “American Dream” baby — the one who could grow up to become president. Although his parents and most of their friends were Holocaust survivors, they didn’t want to burden him with their past. Yet as he was told on childhood trips to Israel — one at age 4 with his mother, the other at 12 with his father — the reason his parents had survived so much, the reason they worked so hard and even the reason Israel was founded, was all for him.

He was the hope of the next generation. No pressure. All he had to do was excel and succeed.

His parents spoke English with thick accents and spoke Yiddish to one another and to other Holocaust survivors, a language as foreign yet as familiar to Baseman as the Spanish that surrounded him in the rest of his city. His father, an electrician, did not talk much, but when he did, it was of survival and sacrifice, and he inculcated Baseman with the mantra that if you work hard and are a good person, anything is possible. If there ever were a problem, he would say in his Yiddish-accented English, “The door is always open.” Those words became the title of the Skirball exhibition.

Baseman’s mother worked at the bakery counter of Canter’s Deli on Fairfax for more than 40 years, at a time when Canter’s was very much the epicenter of Fairfax’s Jewish district. The family lived in one unit of a four-plex on Curson Avenue, a half block from the old Pan Pacific Auditorium, the Streamline Moderne architectural gem that closed in 1972 and burned down in 1989, but which Baseman cites as having influenced his early aesthetic. When Baseman was 5, the family moved to another apartment a few blocks away, on Detroit Street.

Given that his parents worked long hours, Baseman was a latchkey kid, left mostly to his own devices. He attended area public schools: Third Street Elementary, John Burroughs Middle School — his bar mitzvah was at the Orthodox Shaarei Tefila on Beverly Boulevard — and Fairfax High School. Although he has never had any formal art training, Baseman knew early on that he wanted to be an artist. At 11, he twice won the monthly Bob’s Big Boy art contest, and in 1978 he won the Area E art contest judged by Sergio Aragones of Mad magazine and Stan Lee of Marvel Comics. From Fairfax High, he won the Distinguished Art Service award for illustrating the school newspaper and the yearbook.

He went on to UCLA, graduating from there as a communications major, magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. He says he was driven to be the “goodest” student, with perfect attendance, great grades — and the most moral, never breaking any rules, even to jaywalk or have a drink before his 21st birthday.

200 Tobys at “For the Love of Toby,” Billy Shire Fine Arts, Los Angeles, 2005. Photo by Gary Baseman

After graduation, Baseman felt the responsible thing to do was to pursue a commercial art career while continuing to make art, “on the side.” He did a short stint at an ad agency, but that did not really agree with him, so he began to pursue work as a commercial illustrator. An image he made for the cover of The New York Times Sunday Book Review put him on the map.

To make his American Dream come true, Baseman moved to New York in 1986. “The advertising and publishing and art world were all in New York,” he said. At the time, he believed, “Every major artist was in New York, and if you lived in L.A. you were a substandard regional artist. You had to go there.”

He became a successful commercial illustrator: “I did 12 to 20 assignments every month for 10 years,” Baseman said. “I didn’t take a lot of vacations; I was really there to work.” The New York Times assignment was followed by Time, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker and Entertainment Weekly. He also created commercial campaigns for Gatorade, Nike and Mercedes-Benz. Baseman won several illustration awards, including the prestigious Art Directors Club award. He was also realizing his own Ralph Lauren-esque transformation, marrying Mary Ellen Williges, a beautiful and stylish All-American girl, and settling in the suburbs.

At the same time, commercial work was increasingly being seen as art, while underground comics and graphic novels were going mainstream. Photographer Robert Mapplethorpe did commercial work, director Tim Burton was making live-action and animated feature films, cartoonist Art Spiegelman won a Pulitzer for “Maus,” and Spiegelman’s wife, Francoise Mouly, the former editor of Raw, became cartoon editor at The New Yorker. The outlaws were becoming the insiders. Illustrators such as William Joyce were doing Disney children shows, and Klasky Csupo’s “Rugrats” ruled Nickelodeon.

Baseman, whose art design is featured on the popular board game Cranium, saw the opportunity and began to pitch TV concepts. He made two pilots for Nickelodeon that never aired, however the experience gave him “the hunger to get a show on the air,” as well as the realization that for TV, “I need to be in L.A.” Which was just as well. Baseman found New York’s weather too severe and life there too harsh — there were some things he could not get over, such as “the smell of urine in the Broadway-Lafayette subway station.”

Los Angeles was more to his liking. He sold a show, “Teacher’s Pet,” which began airing on the Disney Channel in 2000 and became a great success, winning four Emmys, including an outstanding performer win for Nathan Lane. Baseman enjoyed the collaboration with other animation artists and with writers Bill and Cherie Steinkellner, as well as making the “Teacher’s Pet” movie in 2004. At the same time, Baseman was invited to show his art in a serious gallery, the Peter Mendenhall Gallery in Pasadena and to work with Kidrobot to create limited-edition designer toys. Baseman purchased a beautiful home for his wife and himself in Hancock Park.

The American Dream, indeed.

Yet Baseman’s work from this period, from 2000 to 2005, tells a different story. His creatures and landscapes of this period seem unresolved — childlike yet adult, infantile yet serious, at play and yet in danger. His images of females are idealized, asexual objects of veneration. It is an unreal world of arrested teenage development where everything appears OK — in turmoil but devoid of conflict, and where sex does not exist and desire is frightening and held in abeyance.

“I hid in my work,” Baseman said, explaining that there was “a sense of desire and longing and lust in my work, and I felt it was oozing out of me, in my pores, and in my characters … [such as] these ‘infinity girls,’ whose arms and legs entwine like the infinity sign but they are just out of reach. You can’t obtain them.” Baseman’s state of mind at that time is perhaps best revealed by his character “The Happy Idiot,” which, Baseman explains, is “the snowman who’s willing to sacrifice himself for the mermaid, melt himself down so she can live.”

In 2005, Baseman started painting forests and created a narrative about “running into the woods and this creature licking my wounds and bringing me back to life and then devouring me.” He didn’t make the connection at the time, but today he has come to recognize that the forest evokes the place into which his father escaped to survive the war.

Baseman had also created a series of piñata paintings beginning in 2002 in which the characters’ guts are laid bare, literally. These could be seen as showing how Baseman was being torn apart by his inner turmoil. Increasingly, his paintings told the story of a struggle between creatures of what he called “Creamy Goodness” and creatures of desire.

Sketchbook drawing by Gary Baseman, 2012 (Forest Sketch)

In 2005, Baseman introduced his now-signature character, Toby, who looks a bit like a Bizarro fez-wearing Mickey Mouse and whom Baseman claims is his alter ego. Toby began to appear in travel photos — at the Sistine Chapel, with Michelangelo, looking like he is holding up the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Baseman calls Toby “the keeper of the secrets.” Which begs the question, if Baseman was so “good,” what secrets did he have to hide?

Raised to be good and to always see good in the world, Baseman nevertheless had a clear view of hypocrisy, the unhappy lives of suburban America, the corruption of politicians and the deceit of evangelists. Even the Orthodox Jews his father held up as pious were often revealed in the media as having feet of clay. Baseman had come to realize that no one really cared that he had never skipped class in high school, and he found that whatever success he had achieved did not keep him from unhappiness; that suppressing his secret desires, longings and dreams or painting them did not make them go away.

Even harder for him to admit was that maybe these yearnings were good, not bad. Maybe the world wasn’t as his father raised him to view it. Baseman had a hard time admitting all this — or that he was unhappy in his marriage.

In a life where he succeeded at everything he worked at, Baseman couldn’t countenance a failed marriage. Even after separating from his wife in 2006, he couldn’t admit as much to his parents, who only learned of the impending divorce from his wife.

Baseman moved out of his Hancock Park home and into the ground-floor apartment of a Carthay Circle duplex. He continued to avoid confronting his reality by traveling and enjoying being newly single. He was, he now says, literally running away from himself. In his paintings from this era, about 2006 to 2009, his characters are shown traveling through a forest, sometimes carrying rifles. Into this environment appear the new characters, “Wild Girls,” who hold the promise of joy in the moment, without deeper commitment. They, in turn, are beset by little demons suggesting that pleasure is not without its danger.

In 2009, Baseman returned to Israel for the first time in 36 years to teach at the Bezalel Art Academy. While in Israel, Baseman also had a show of his work, which he called “The Sacrifice of Ooga” — ooga (sponge cake) being Baseman’s favorite Hebrew word as a child. His canvases were filled with his “Wild Girls,” who represented Baseman’s own sexual revolution, and other characters called “Chouchous,” who represented the still unattainable bliss and goodness that was complicated by all his demons. In contrast to these creatures representing Baseman’s id, he also created a dragon, his super-ego, a symbol for those parental demands that kept him even from jaywalking.

Baseman knew what had to happen: “I had to sacrifice that dragon, to kill it.” But he was surprised by what he did: “When I got there, I couldn’t slay it.” Baseman said, adding: “I tried in my art, but I’m still working on it [in my personal life].”

I suggested to Baseman that perhaps he could not slay the dragon and free himself of the inhibitions caused by his parents’ expectations because he discovered the dragon was not a creature apart from him — it was a part of him. To wit: In Israel, Baseman found he had come to the end of his running away. Baseman needed to make peace with his past and with himself. The journey, wherever it took him, was now as much inner- as it was outward-directed. It was time to return home.

Although Baseman had confronted the burden of his parents’ dreams, he nonetheless had to face their mortality. In 2010, his father, who’d always had a tremendous will to live, even recovering and thriving after diabetes-related leg amputations, died at the age of 93.

“When my father passed … I  realized that I was the keeper of his story, and if I didn’t tell his story, it would be lost forever.” While visiting with some distant cousins in Israel, Baseman learned of the existence of a yizkor (memorial) book from his father’s town that his father had never told him, or any of Baseman’s siblings, about. Baseman wondered why. After his father’s death, he found the book hidden in a container in a closet filled with bills and other papers. The book contained several pages describing his father’s heroism as a partisan.

 

Video by Eric Swenson

Baseman realized how little he knew about where his parents had come from. “To know those stories, I needed to go there and pay my respects.”

So, last year, Baseman received a Fulbright fellowship to teach at the Art Academy in Riga, Latvia. From there, through social media, he connected with two artist friends who lived in Lviv, Ukraine — Jana Brike and Aigars Bikse — who arranged for him to come to Lviv to speak to art students from all over Ukraine. They also offered to drive with him from Riga to Lviv, and then on to his parents’ towns, outside Rivne.

“It was very emotional … To travel through Warsaw and Lodz, going through Krakow and Auschwitz and going though Lviv and heading through Rovno, and even doing interviews on Ukraine National TV and Lviv local TV, telling my story and also visiting my parents’ towns,” he said.

Today, he said, his parents’ hometowns are very suburban, and there are few traces of the former Jewish life there. Baseman was able to find where his mother’s home once stood, and he walked along the path where her relatives were taken to be murdered and left in a mass grave. In his father’s town, he found the abandoned cemetery where his great-grandfather was buried, but the gravestones had all been taken for use in another building. There was a memorial at the mass grave of his paternal grandparents, and he paid his respects there.

As a personal art project, Baseman had his friends from Lviv print photos of his grandfather and frame them. They nailed them to trees in the cemetery where his grave should be. Baseman put on a costume he had made, of a giant magi with a cone-like head with one giant all-seeing eye, and wearing an apron with the Hebrew word for truth, emet, printed across his chest (emet is also the word that activates the golem). Baseman’s friends photographed him wearing the costume, not only in the cemeteries but also in his parents’ towns. “To let people know there and everywhere that you can’t hide the truth,” he said, and to remind them “that [there are] souls there.”

Which brings us back to the exhibition, organized by Skirball curators Doris Berger, Erin Clancey and Erin Curtis.

During his emotional trip to Eastern Europe, Baseman thought: “I’m going crazy, and this is what my parents were protecting me from. I opened up Pandora’s Box.” However, when he got home, he decided, “If anyone’s going to make sense of it, I’m going to.” So he told the Skirball: “I know what I want to do … I want to bring my home into the place … because every room represents a theme in my work.”

Last October, as Baseman was preparing for the show, going though all his archives and material, his mother died. She was in her early 90s. And Baseman said he misses her greatly, especially her cooking — particularly the homemade gefilte fish she served on holidays.

“Both my mom and dad were able to die in their home, at peace, with their family around,” he said. “With all they went through, and to show their kids that there’s nothing to be afraid from death. … Except, well, that I’m next, which did kind of freak me out.”

Baseman recognizes the irony that “I’m creating a show called ‘The Door Is Always Open’ and this is the first time that my parents’ actual door is not going to be open, because it’s gone.” As for the rest of us, however, we will all be able to visit Baseman’s home at the Skirball and see that, although he may still feel himself to be a work in progress, Baseman is finally at home in the world.

“Gary Baseman: The Door Is Always Open” continues at the Skirball Cultural Center through Aug. 18. For more information, visit www.skirball.org/exhibitions/gary-baseman.

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Sons of famous fathers rarely eclipse their parent. Although there are some notable exceptions (JFK and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes come to mind), the singularity of purpose, the ruthlessness that lead to lasting renown, as well as the perks and vicissitudes that come with fame, none of these reward excellent parenting nor allow children the same crucible to ignite a flame that might burn brighter than their parent’s. That children of the famous write memoirs is common; that they have insight is less so.

 

This comes to mind because on April 25, Writers Bloc presents “Saul Bellow & The Holocaust: Gregory Bellow With Rabbi David Wolpe,” on the occasion of the publication of “Saul Bellow’s Heart: A Son’s Memoir” (Bloomsbury). The event will take place at Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills.

 

Gregory Bellow (or Greg, as I’ll refer to him), lives in Redwood City, Calif., and has been a practicing therapist for some 40 years. In a recent phone conversation, he described himself as a “contemporary psychoanalytic therapist” who was much influenced by the work of psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut, who developed self-psychology. As he explained: “Most theories of the self seem to have two components: a more inner-directed and a more outer-directed self.”

 

His approach in writing his memoir was much the same: to reveal the inner Bellow, the one the public never saw, and contrast him with the public figure. “I was definitely attempting to write a narrative that was emanating from the inside out,” Greg said. “I try to understand myself and my father and our relationship as deeply as I could.”

 

The public Saul Bellow accomplished great things: Following his first two novels, “Dangling Man” and “The Victim,” Bellow burst forth with “The Adventures of Augie March,” which took the 19th century bildungsroman and rendered it in 20th century vernacular, its prose dancing to a Yiddish nigun in a distinctly American way. Before “Augie,” American Jews writing fiction were not considered worthy; Bellow opened the doors. Back then, Greg recalled, “Jews did not belong in the literary firmament. Saul and his brilliant friends proved them wrong.”

 

Bellow continued to produce vexing, challenging and wildly pleasurable novels throughout his long career; even his late novellas, such as “More Die of Heartbreak” and “Ravelstein,” had their pleasures.

 

But Saul Bellow, the man, was a more complex matter. Born into a Yiddish-speaking home and able at an early age to recite long passages from the Torah in Hebrew, he escaped getting his hands dirty, literally, in the family coal business, by writing. In his 20s and 30s, he was imbued with leftist politics (he actually paid his respects to Leon Trotsky’s body in a Mexican morgue) and distanced himself from Jewish observance and identity. He spent the 1940s so completely focused on his writing and his self that he paid little attention to the fate of the Jews in Europe, for which he expressed great guilt later in life.

 

However, after Israel’s Six-Day War, which he witnessed as a correspondent, Bellow reaffirmed his Jewish identity. In the years that followed, as the American far left abandoned Israel, Bellow became increasingly neoconservative in keeping with his fellow University of Chicago faculty, which included Milton Friedman and Allan Bloom.

 

“Going to see Israel and witnessing the war firsthand was absolutely pivotal,” Greg said, “When I speak in L.A., I’m going to embellish on that. I’m going to advance a hypothesis about what was going on or what may have been going on.” He promised “a literary psychological hypothesis that I’m going to keep in suspense until the event.”

 

Saul Bellow’s private life was equally complicated. He married five times, had numerous affairs, bore four children — each from a different wife (the youngest born when Saul was 84). Greg gives portraits of all of the women in his father’s life, but the pain his mother endured still reads fresh.

 

“Everything was secondary to writing in my father’s life,” Greg said. “And that was the way it was.”

 

In 1976, Saul Bellow was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first American to win since John Steinbeck in 1962, and the first -Jewish-American to receive the honor. After that, in Greg’s telling, his father was “thought of more by what he wrote than who he was.”

 

Nonetheless, at his father’s funeral in 2005, Greg was struck by all those who knew Bellow as a literary figure, but saw themselves as his son. The title of his memoir’s introductory chapter, “Awakened by a Grave Robbery,” explains how that made him feel. At a panel later that year, Greg spoke about his father and began to feel he had something to say. He was further encouraged by a “long heart-to-heart conversation” with Janna Malamud Smith, Bernard Malamud’s daughter, also a psychotherapist, who wrote a perceptive and well-received memoir of her father (“My Father Is a Book”) that, Greg said, “was pivotal in my decision.”

 

He said he wanted people to understand something “about my father’s complexity, his humanness,” adding, “and I don’t think anyone else is in a position to make that case but me because I knew him so long, and I knew him so intimately, and I knew him in the way that I knew him.”

 

Although the book reveals things that Greg is sure his father would not have wanted made public, Greg felt it was his turn to speak about the man so many others claimed as their own.

 

“My father was a very complicated man,” Greg concluded. “He was definitely difficult to live with at times. I make that very clear in the book. I make it very clear that it took a toll on me, but I don’t think I’m doing him any harm.” When he finished the memoir, Greg’ gave it to his wife to read. Her review: “The love comes through on every page.”

 

This love, however, in true Bellow fashion, is a most complex affair.

A version of this article appeared in print.

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