Ascension through Art
“Bob was my first major ‘supporter’ as a photographer. He was always encouraging me to take his photographs, saying my photos had a happy feeling. Bob influenced me more than anybody in my life, as far as how he lived his life. I regularly find myself either thinking or doing something that I then realize, ‘That’s what Bob would have said or done.’”
—Sidney Felsen on Robert Rauschenberg
“Deeper than that was a way of life that Sidney taught me: how to love, how to enjoy life, how to work hard and how to live that whole life with a form of grace.”
—Julie Mehretu on Sidney Felsen
Richard Serra during the proofing of his series Rounds in the Gemini artist studio, 1998, Sidney B. Felsen.
It all started with a hat. Or rather, with a rule and an exception. The rule was Café Boulud’s: no hats allowed. The exception came in the form of Sidney B. Felsen, then eighty years young. Circa 2005, when Bret Csencsitz was maître d’ at the famed Café, Sidney entered in “uniform,” fedora on top, bowtie and scarf at the neck, and suited in pinstripes out from which poked a knockout pair of shoes. His comparably stylish wife Joni—his junior by about 30 years and partner of almost 50—would be color-coordinated sartorially or via a choice accessory. Both blinked with cufflinks, earrings, rings, and other jewels by Sidney’s daughter Suzanne Felsen. They were quite the match. As for Sidney’s hat? Bret relented in the name of style.
The writing of this article finds Sidney’s centennial being celebrated by L.A.’s Getty Center in “First Came a Friendship,” running since February and with just a few weeks left before closing on July 7. The exhibition has pulled from Sidney’s body of work, some 70K photos taken of artists at Gemini G.E.L., the Los Angeles artists' workshop and publisher of limited-edition prints and sculpture he co-founded in 1966. Last weekend I finally got to see “Friendship” during what turned out to be—unexpectedly despite Sidney’s almost 100 years—the last hours of his life. After learning he was in hospice and that we would not be seeing him or Joni as planned, Bret stayed back in NYC. He had gotten to host them at Gotham as recently as May 11, with Sidney in fine form before his health took a turn. Unable to see our friend again myself, I felt an even deeper need to witness the Getty’s recognition of his existence.
Solemn with the awareness that Sidney was fading by the hour, my ascent to the Getty campus took on a divine aspect. I had no foreknowledge of the .75 mile, 900-foot incline necessary to reach the Center and will never forget it. For a few suspended minutes the tram lifted us gently through the mansion-marked Santa Monica Mountains and deposited us in what felt like, in my heightened emotional state, some version of heaven.
The immense grounds of cloud-colored travertine stone from Rome blazed with sun, showcasing the architectural vision of Richard Meier, whose Getty is a Los Angeles landmark that blends the urban and natural environs to triumphant effect. The sum is celestial, a monumental declaration that art is important, Olympic, worth the carving and climbing of mountains. With sky-high banners bearing exhibition names, one nods with recognition that artmakers are gods and we guests their choir.
“Sidney's lens is part of his presence. He always carries a camera…Yet Sidney never made us feel self-conscious. We took notice, but we never felt pried upon. I prefer to think of Sidney as a muse rather than a producer; the assimilation of his aura a stimulant to the process ... [and] taking photographs is Sidney’s way of watching over us, not watching us.”
—Richard Serra
Then I began to see signs, the word FRIENDSHIP writ large, evoking all that polysemic word can mean and tightening my throat. The Getty was celebrating Sidney’s life and work in high style, communicating the primacy of friendship and artistic stewardship at the heart of Gemini G.E.L. The exhibition explores the ardor and arduousness of the creative process, chronicling friendships with artists including John Baldessari, Vija Celmins, Tacita Dean, Frank Gehry, Ann Hamilton, David Hockey, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Julie Mehretu, Malcolm Morley, Elizabeth Murray, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, Susan Rothenberg, Robert Rauschenberg, Analia Saban, Richard Serra, Joel Shapiro, Richard Tuttle, and Terry Winters, among others. Having missed the February opening, it was the conversation between curator Naoko Takahatake and Julie Mehretu, one of Sidney and Joni’s closest living artist-friends, that determined the timing of my visit.
Despite our familiarity with Sidney’s book, The Artist Observed, and a precious photo he once took of us, I had underrated the extent of his own artistry. Some of my favorite parts of the exhibition were new insights into the man who was already in his 80s when we met—playful envelopes filled with inspiration that he’d send to artists like Ann Hamilton, about which her postman said, “You get the darndest things in your mail,” and hilarious coverage of Ann Philbin surprising artists in the Hammer Museum men’s room over the years. That series is grown-up jubilance frozen in time; you can just hear them scheming, stifling laughter, then nailing—and capturing!—the gag.
“There’s a lot of tension in the workshop when proofing is going on, and I think humor eases that tension - the artist wants to get away from what they're concentrating on and just have some fun. These photographs appeal to me because they speak for the fact that a person is relaxed and willing to clown around in front of my camera. It’s some form of their acceptance of me as a photographer.”
—Sidney Felsen
“Collaborative.” “Space-making.” “Supportive.” These descriptors recurred during Mehretu and Takahatake’s talk, which became elegiac in feeling. But the talk was equally a love letter to printmaking, an impassioned crash course in the form that demystified much for me: the allure of working in reverse, the separation of color from form, the romance of 15th Century intaglio, a technology that hasn’t changed since Rembrandt, and the laborious editioning process that can take years.
In tribute, Mehretu and Takahatake emphasized the virtues of Sidney’s character, collaboration chief among them. A similarly generous disciple, Julie—now a bonafide superstar—spoke of the Gemini printmakers’ role in her work and the joy of collaboration that was Sidney’s raîson d’être. In the world of print, the artist is never a lone genius. It became clear that another house rule at Gemini G.E.L. is to leave your ego at the door.
Joni and Sidney, as well as Sidney’s daughter Suzanne and husband Kevin, exemplify this giving ethos in their lives. Bret and I always felt their largesse, granted the same attention as their many “startists” each time we were together. Whatever we were going through at the time, their example, their ennobling company always made me feel and want to be better.
David Hockney’s drawing of Sidney in his office.
As my excitement to watch Sidney turn 100 in September was transformed into reminiscence, I found myself recovering details about our times together. My favorite memories include his 90th birthday celebration, when he was feeling great and I was happily pregnant with Cordelia (then Winston, see that crazy story here). An earlier favorite is when I dragged Joni and Sidney to the theatre about five years prior when pregnant with William. If the galleries were their turf and the restaurants Bret’s, then the theatre was my contribution. The show was the 2010 revival of bobrauschenbergamerica, SITI Company’s production of Chuck Mee’s play, written to “take us on a wild road trip through the American landscape as Robert Rauschenberg might have conceived it had he been a playwright instead of a painter.” Owing to Joni and Sidney’s best friendship with Bob, who had passed away two years before, I felt strongly they should see it.
I cannot recall how much they seemed to enjoy the spectacle or recognize their friend in the show. It must have been strange to see a person and visual artist they knew so intimately incarnated in theatre. But we had a fine time together, and it was an honor for me to share a performing arts experience with them, the medium at the source of my marriage the way the studio was at the origin of theirs. I think Bob would have approved.
“I’ve always been attracted and tempted into nearly any situation where the final work was the result of more than one person’s doing. That’s why I like dance, music, theater, and that’s why I like printmaking, because none of these things can exist as solo endeavors.”
—Robert Rauschenberg
In 2015 our relationship with Joni and Sidney evolved from hospitality to co-curators with Gemini and Gotham’s first collaboration on an installation honoring Martin Friedman. Friedman was an upstairs neighbor we were especially proud to know as the longtime Director of Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center. He dined at Gotham daily and had become a friend. While the art world was mourning Friedman, Joni and Bret decided to celebrate him with a curation of relevant works from Gemini G.E.L. at Joni Moisant Weyl, the gallery representing Gemini’s editions in New York, established by Joni in 1984.”
This collaboration planted the seeds for our current Gotham Gallery upon Bret’s taking over the restaurant in 2020. All of Gotham’s former art having been sold (including a Warhol, Diane Arbus, and Vera Lutter, to name a few), along with our wine cellar and no small amount of our sanity, the walls would need to be filled for reopening. We would have been hopeless (or rather artless!) without Joni, her Director Chris Santa Maria, and their colleague Emily Santangelo. In the three years since, we’ve worked together to keep our room filled with an evolving gallery of art by established and emerging artists, an initiative they have supported most generously. If last week’s sale of a Dorothea Rockburne off the wall during dessert is any indication, our best is yet to come.
Monday morning I wrapped my time in La La Land with my first visit to Gemini G.E.L., the genesis of untold genius over its 58 years. They had an “Ed Ruscha at Gemini” retrospective downstairs to complement the wonderful exhibit now at LACMA following its MOMA run. I glimpsed thrilling new Mehretus through the workshop window, a preview of coming attractions. Upstairs there was an exhibition of recent Serras and his dedicated workshop. Having just died in March, his workspace had an afterlife feel, shades of his characters—gritty reapers, totemic in scale and shape—standing quite literally all around. So many projects underway gave the impression that he’d been interrupted and would be back soon.
A few hours later I left L.A. believing Sidney was still with us, so I was shocked by the finality of receiving his beautiful obituary from Bret while I was still in flight. He had passed away on Sunday. His team at Gemini might even have known during my tour, while I was chatting about him in the present tense. Moved by the same surreal feeling I had at the Getty, that Sidney was somehow in the air all around us now, I began changing the tense throughout this article, present to past, plural to singular. For I had always referred to Joni and Sidney as one “they,” the cleaving of which is a grammatical challenge I explored in poetry when my grandmother passed first. Mercifully we have decades more to love vibrant Joni, to help her mourn, and to keep celebrating the profound work of Gemini G.E.L. As for Sidney, to revisit Serra’s words, his watching over us continues, taking on new meaning now.
