SANTA BARBARA
“1957” at Sullivan Goss

While the choices illustrated by museum exhibitions staged around historical milestones are notoriously difficult to justify, galleries are blessed with the built-in parameter of a limited inventory. Sullivan Goss made productive use of such limitations in the gallery’s recent show “1957,” which avoided the ungainly master narratives so commonly found in institutional histories and instead focused on highlights from the gallery’s collection. The brochure set up “1957” as an exploration of the time period during which Walter Hopps and Ed Kienholz founded Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles and Leo Castelli opened his eponymous gallery in New York. Drawing from the gallery’s holdings, the show ably highlighted works by canonical masters like Ed Kienholz and Richard Diebenkorn, while simultaneously situating them among other artists of the period, both established and lesser-known. The diversity of works on view further testified to the fact that during this period multiple styles were in competition to receive the torch of modernism.
Diebenkorn’s jewel-toned oil-on-canvas still life entitled Newspaper (1957-1962) and John Bernhardt’s mixed-media assemblage Mercury (1961) were standouts in the show. Constructed from discarded iron and wooden machine parts, and studded with porcelain knobs, the 51⁄2 foot tall Mercury was both menacing and jocular, seemingly reflective of the rapidly changing relationship that Americans had with new technologies in the 1950s. Evidence of a persistent fascination with technology was found also in Bernhardt’s colorfully abstract Radio Still Life (1956) and Edgar Ewing’s American Engine (1958). The Cubist works of Howard Warshaw and Channing Peake were also well represented. These one-time Santa Barbara-based artists painted scenes predominantly of the American West, in stark contrast to the hard-edge abstraction of Karl Benjamin’s Untitled Mondrian (1957) or the passionate abstract expressionist Autumn (1957) by Hans Burkhardt.
Although, contrary to the title, the works in the show spanned nearly a decade, overall, “1957” painted a vibrant portrait of the period. The show skillfully embraced the subjectivity of the gallery’s inventory, highlighting the differences that thrived during the late 1950s rather than hammering them down into a simple art historical narrative.