Billy Al Benguston was a Kansas-born Californian painter who drew inspiration from the car and surf culture of mid-20th century Los Angeles and was part of a 1960s movement known as LA Cool Schools. The contemporary art center died on his October 8th at his home in Venice, California. He was 88 years old.
His wife, Wendy Al, confirmed the death of an unknown cause.
A surfer, motorcycle racer, and Hollywood stuntman, Benguston rose to prominence in the late 1950s as part of a new wave of Southern California artists working with pioneers. Fels Gallery in West Hollywood, founded by Walter Hopps and artist Ed Kienholz.
With his flamboyant dress and rugged wit, Benguston gained international attention alongside the likes of Ed Ruscha, Kenneth Price, Robert Irwin and Larry Bell, and became the birthplace of the 1960s counterculture. He was a central figure in the adventurous art scene. In a city at the time dominated by commerce, Hollywood and conservative politics.
Mr. Rusha once called him “something like the Pied Piper” for that scene. “One moment he was very serious and another moment he was like a cartoon or a clown,” he said.
Mr. Benguston was sometimes known for his heavily lacquered abstract paintings on industrial surfaces such as mesonite and dented aluminum sheets. He was elegantly minimalist, but also liked the airy, bright colors of the West. Emerging in the Pop Art era, his early paintings often featured images of motorcycles, sergeants’ striped chevrons, and hearts.
During that period he called finish fetish Employing new resins, paints and application techniques, such as spray painting borrowed from the automotive industry, he created glowing works that passionately reflected the petroleum-fueled consumer culture Southern California had come to symbolize.
“My soft stuff is a lot more serious than it looks, and there’s a lot of my serious stuff. more capricious‘” Benguston was quoted in the Los Angeles Times before a retrospective of his work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “It takes nerve to be easy-going. I know you’re into it.”
Still, a flirtatious opponent with a mischievous soul, Mr. Benston never allowed himself to be bound by any particular style or movement. It had an ever-evolving style, forever experimenting with materials and techniques, reflecting changing artistic and environmental influences. Puerto, Mexico in the 1970s, after he visited Escondido, he produced impressive watercolors. After traveling to Oahu, Hawaii to participate in grueling rough water swims, he began making paintings that reflected the islands’ vibrant colors and local flora and fauna.
“His work often challenges taste rather than confirms it, clearly declaring the free-spirited nature of the creative process,” art curator Karen Tsujimoto wrote in her 1988 I am writing to evaluate his work.
It also challenged the perception that Los Angeles has nothing more to offer culturally than summer blockbusters. “We wanted to be the bestit needed it,” Benguston reportedly said in a 2020 interview with Artworks magazine, referring to his art crew in Los Angeles. “None of us were going to paint like de Kooning – we weren’t.” .”
Billy Al Benguston was born on June 7, 1934 in Dodge City, Kansas during the Dust Bowl era. He was the youngest of his two sons, Raymond and Sylvia (Eland) Benguston. His mother was a trained opera singer and she sang in the church choir. His father was a former professional soccer player who owned a dry cleaner.
As a young man, Billy moved back and forth between Kansas and California as his parents sought work opportunities. “It’s very difficult to fit into a Kansas look.” you are in californiaand vice versa,” he recalled in a 2010 video interview.
A muscular athlete like his father, Benguston wasn’t pushy. While attending his Los Angeles Manual Arts High School, he became an avid surfer and gymnast. He also developed a love for pottery. The school had a thriving arts curriculum, including Nude His Life His drawing classes, the idea of which excited him. “I didn’t know they were all going to be like landslides,” he said.
After graduating, according to friends, Von Vivant, who loved fast bikes and women, received a half-baked higher education, attending Los Angeles City College and the Los Angeles County Art Institute (now Otis College of Art).・Art and Design) for a short stay. ), he studied pottery under master potter Peter Vorkos.
Fed up with the crafty overtones of art supplies, Mr. Benguston turned to painting. His fascination with Abstract Expressionists such as Franz Klein and Willem de Kooning came after he read It Is, an influential New York art publication, writes curator Tsujimoto. .
His own work, however, was less austere, evoking images of the natural world such as birds in flight. In 1958, he was 24 years old when Fels held his first solo exhibition at his gallery. His reputation spread nationally, especially after he had a solo exhibition in 1962 at Martha Jackson’s Gallery in New York.
A lifelong peacock who thought nothing of attending a black-tie art function in orange Hawaiian-print pants and a vintage couture jacket with a pocket square (his high school nickname was “Rainbow”). There is also Mr. Benston in his gallery show.for 10 years retrospective In his work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1968, he commissioned Frank Gehry to design the corrugated entrance to the exhibition and commissioned a life-size wax figure of himself from the Hollywood Wax Museum. did.
At the 2011 Venice Biennale, New York gallerist Tim Nye asked Benguston to promote an exhibition of Los Angeles artists called “Venice of Venice.”Benguston uses his sporting roots to drive a traditional black Venetian two of his gondolas. some kind of racing bike, Get your heart pumping with the red and yellow paint job that is typical of Ducati motorcycles.
“He liked the irony that Ducati was synonymous with speed and gondolas were the slowest way to travel,” Nye said in a phone interview.
According to Nye, Benston insisted on only candlelight for the exhibition of his work. Dentos A series painted with a high-gloss finish on a sheet of aluminum that he hammered with a ball peen hammer. “He was a mystery shrouded in paradoxes,” Nye said.
Along with his wife, Wendy Al (real name Kathryn Wendy Yuri Nakayama), she adopted the surname Al as a whimsical expression of cohesion after their marriage in 1995. her close friend’s name), from a brief marriage in the 1990s. and her granddaughter.
His wife said Bengston had recently experienced mild cognitive impairment, the early stages of dementia, but remained well.
“I gave him voice lessons as an early Christmas gift and he was crouching the day before he died,” she said. “He was in a Pilates class the day before.”
On Saturday night, marked by a bright moon, Al and her husband were cuddled up in bed watching TV. I feel bad about this. ‘ She tried to rub his back, but he immediately said, ‘Wendy, this is something else. and he was gone.
For all his success, Mr. Benguston always maintained a cynical view of success and the commercialization of the art world in general, despite the fact that he was profiting from it. “We really thought of ourselves as spiritual beings,” he once said of the Fels artists, in his typical unfiltered way. is.”
It was difficult to say whether he was disgusted or amused.