Background
Kienholz, Edward was born in 1927 in Fairfield, Washington, District of Columbia, United States.
(Catalog of the exhibition organized by the Los Angeles Co...)
Catalog of the exhibition organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in collaboration with the Museum's Contemporary Art Council, Lytton Gallery, 30 March to 15 May 1966. Text by Maurice Tuchman. Exhibitions, bibliography, catalog of works. Ill. black and white, and a table folded. Edward Kienholz (1927 - 1994) was an American installation artist and assemblage sculptor whose work was highly critical of aspects of modern life. Art critic Brian Sewell called Edward Kienholz "the least known, most neglected and forgotten American artist of Jack Kerouac's Beat Generation of the 1950s, a contemporary of the writers Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Norman Mailer, his visual imagery at least as grim, gritty, sordid and depressing as their literary vocabulary". In 1956, Kienholz opened the NOW Gallery, for which Michael Bowen designed the sign; that year he met grad student Walter Hopps, who owned the Syndell Gallery. They co-organized the All-City Art Festival, then in 1957, with poet Bob Alexander, they opened the Ferus Gallery on North La Cienega Boulevard. The Ferus Gallery soon became a focus of Avant Garde art and culture in the Los Angeles area. This 1966 show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) drew considerable controversy over his assemblage, Back Seat Dodge '38 (1964). The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors called it "revolting, pornographic and blasphemous" and threatened to withhold financing for the museum unless the tableau was removed from view. A compromise was reached under which the sculpture's car door would remain closed and guarded, to be opened only on the request of a museum patron who was over 18, and only if no children were present in the gallery. The uproar led to more than 200 people lining up to see the work the day the show opened. Ever since, Back Seat Dodge '38 has drawn crowds. LACMA did not formally acquire the work until 1986.
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Kienholz, Edward was born in 1927 in Fairfield, Washington, District of Columbia, United States.
Student, State College, 1945.
(Catalog of the exhibition organized by the Los Angeles Co...)
Married Nancy Reddin.