Like most of the handful of people who had even heard of John Altoon, for a long time I was under the impression that he was merely a footnote figure in the history of the legendary Ferus Gallery stable that produced such 1960s L.A. art stars as Ed Ruscha, Larry Bell, and Ed Moses. He lived large, drank, chased the ladies, met Picasso, got committed to a mental hospital, and died young of a massive heart attack. He was on the cover of Lawrence Lipton’s Venice Beach beatnik exposé, The Holy Barbarians. He made cartoonishly explicit Pop art paintings and drawings, chock-full of genitalia, but was left in the dust by his arguably more talented and ambitious comrades.
As more attention gets paid to his work, though—culminating in his first major retrospective, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through September 14 (traveling to the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in October), and the simultaneous publication of two substantial catalogues—it has come to light that Altoon was, in fact, the linchpin of the Ferus scene, the bigger-than-life artist whom all the others emulated; whose untimely escape-aroo was also the death knell of a utopian—if dysfunctional—pocket of artistic autonomy. And he was a better painter than most of them.
In the wake of a series of shows at the Box, Nyehaus, Luise Ross, and Mary Boone in New York, public perception of Altoon’s artistic range has expanded exponentially. Until recently, two bodies of work—his elegantly cartoonish pen-and-ink erotic scenarios and his proto-slacker biomorphic abstract paintings—have claimed most of the scant attention directed toward the L.A. native’s oeuvre. As persuasive and prescient as these works are, they become all the more remarkable in light of two other phases of his aesthetic evolution: his masterful and utterly sincere abstract expressionist period and his perversely compelling illustrational figurative works, which emerged from his on-again, off-again career in advertising.
Born in 1925 to Armenian immigrant parents, Altoon earned a scholarship to the Otis College of Art and Design with his prodigious drawing chops, but his education was interrupted by World War II and a stint as a U.S. Navy radar technician. On his repatriation, he studied commercial illustration at the Art Center School on the G.I. Bill, then transferred to the fine art program at the Chouinard Art Institute (later CalArts). In the early ’50s, he moved to New York to pursue commercial illustration and fell in with the Ab-Ex crowd (Gorky and de Kooning seem to have made big impressions), who pushed him to explore areas outside the comfort zone of his consummate draftsmanship.
While few works survive from his NYC sojourn (he was in the habit of destroying large swaths of his copious output), Altoon’s Ab-Ex period lasted until about 1960, and the paintings that survive are revelatory. Mother and Child, 1954—the second-oldest painting in the LACMA show—is an exquisite, umber-toned homage to de Kooning that rivals the master, from a time when that actually meant something. The ghost of Marsden Hartley and foreshadowings of early Georg Baselitz animate the cascading striped shingle-explosion of hisUntitled, 1960. LACMA curator Carol Eliel notes the connection to Duchamp’s Nude Descendinga Staircase in her catalogue essay, a lineage that resurfaces under more uncanny circumstances later in Altoon’s career.
After a few years in the Big Apple, Altoon was awarded a grant that enabled him to travel to Spain and devote himself to his painting. It was here, on Majorca, that he claimed to have encountered Picasso, who is said to have anointed Altoon’s precocious drawing skills, but not his painting. I’d always heard that Picasso never returned to Spain after Franco took over in 1939, but it’s the myth here that counts (Altoon’s later, erotically charged work has frequently been compared to Picasso’s late sex-crazed outpourings), years after their alleged encounter. And time and space have a way of warping in the presence of schizophrenia.
Whatever else actually transpired in Europe, Altoon eventually experienced some sort of mental breakdown and had to be escorted home to recover in his parent’s house in L.A. He found his feet quickly—landing a teaching gig at Art Center, hooking up with Kienholz and Walter Hopps, and soon finding himself the poster boy for the quirky DIY era of the original Ferus Gallery of the late ’50s. It is from this period that most of his stunning Ab-Ex pieces survive. But his mental health and the twin creeping menaces of Pop art and the sexual revolution shifted his paradigm for good.
In 1962 Altoon split up with his Hollywood-starlet wife, Fay Spain, and started hearing the voice of God telling him to “destroy all art on the face of the earth,” according to his psychoanalyst, Milton Wexler. He was then to “teach little children how to create art that was genuinely fine and noble.” Wexler took Altoon on as a patient after the troubled genius tried to put his calling into action in the gallery row along La Cienega Boulevard. Luckily, his posse subdued him before he could smash things up. Then, in 1963, in a fit of paranoia, he locked himself in his studio. He was committed to the State Mental Hospital in Camarillo, where he is said to have been given electroshock treatment.
Altoon and Wexler had daily sessions for many years, and much of the psychosexual content of the artist’s best-known work can be traced to the psychotherapeutic process. But as the comprehensive exhibition and catalogue—as well as the massive new book deriving from the 2010 Nyehaus survey show, which includes bound-in facsimiles of several historical publications—attest, his work had already begun mutating away from the serious formalism of his abstract oils. As early as 1959 we see him exploring mythological and sexual imagery in his large ink drawings, and by 1960 he has begun his “trip series,” which initiated his strategy of assembling rebuslike sequences of ambiguous biomorphic shapes floating or piled up in blank white spaces.
But 1962–63 seems to have been the year Altoon kicked into high gear on all fronts, including his “Ocean Park” and “Hyperion” series of mixed-media abstractions and the beginning of blurred boundaries between his commercial illustration and his fine art. Altoon was renowned for his rapid-fire drawing skills, knocking out stylish renderings of swinging consumers living the good life. When he turned this same skill set to lay bare the hidden persuaders at work in advertising, he produced one of the most idiosyncratic and provocative bodies of work of the Pop era.
Untitled (F-8), 1962–63, is a prime example. From the waist up, all is as it should be: a stylish, soft-focus model type in a pumpkin-orange ensemble swivels away from her southern gentleman friend, who’s lighting up a White owl–brand cigar from a prominently displayed box hovering between them. All that’s missing is the slogan (usually lettered on commission by Ed Ruscha) and some generic ad copy and it would be camera-ready. Below the belt, all hell breaks loose. Not only are both of our young professionals buck naked, but their genitals are full and frontal! The rug is pulled out from under the gauzy dream of consumer heaven, and we see that sometimes a cigar isn’t just a cigar after all. And when Altoon got hold of an airbrush, it only got sicker.
These works—and his output as a whole—are hard to contextualize art historically. Affinities abound; Gorky and Picasso are frequently cited. Homeboys Sam Francis and Craig Kauffman. The perverted airbrush advertising imagery has the queasy softness of Richard Hamilton’s concurrent domestic pastiches, while the lighthearted bacchanalian tableaux conjure the improbable specter of late Renoir. Altoon’s biomorphic abstractions have the paradoxical funny-page solidity of Peter Saul and Philip Guston when rendered in oils; the pen and airbrush versions often bring Sigmar Polke’s drawing style to mind.
Altoon’s final innovation came as his tumultuous life seemed to be settling down under the influence of his second wife, Babs. While the former prodigy’s elegant penmanship had played an important part in his work all along, in 1966 he embarked on the overdrive production of ink drawings straight from his id: hilariously monstrous cartoons of human-animal hybrids engaged in all manner of sexual escapades; a giant penis on a roller skate proffering a bouquet to a despondent naked lady; a sexually indeterminate figure roasting a shish kebab over the flame-engulfed lower torso of a naked lady in a bathtub—the stuff that dreams are made of.
Even more remarkable is the fact that they were rendered in a sophisticated modern cartooning style, fully informed by the erudite traditions of Saul, Steinberg et al, but exhibiting a sexual frankness that was only just percolating in the nascent underground comix scene in San Francisco. This explicitness began to leak into Altoon’s other work, particularly the ongoing series of goofy, candy-colored organic pile-ups on white grounds that now began to enclose small rectangular frames—like windows or video monitors—containing erotic figurative ink drawings. Several of these have an eerie similarity to the reclining nude in Duchamp’s final work, Etant donnés, which wouldn’t be made public until July 1969—five months after Altoon’s death from a massive coronary.
It was also one of these hybrid portals that made a fan out of a young Paul McCarthy, who saw it reproduced in Art in America in 1966 (and who has recently been doing his own nightmare variations on Etant donnés). “It was,” he recalls, “‘Wow!’ Altoon was, all of a sudden, one of my favorite artists.” McCarthy’s ongoing enthusiasm has been a major factor in Altoon’s revival, and the former’s 1996 installation Yahoo Town, featuring roboticized Western-themed mannequins (with a few animal-headed grotesqueries for good measure), is clearly a curdled theme-park homage to the original L.A. bad-boy artist’s late suite of erotic Cowboys-and-Indians drawings.
Still, there’s something strangely untransgressive about Altoon’s work, no matter how kinky it gets—and it gets pretty kinky! Ultimately, the artist’s unrestrained eroticism reaches back to invigorate even his purely formalist abstractions, testifying to an inherent sensual continuity between the language of color and shape and the pictorial representation of flesh; between the creative act and the voyeur’s gaze—a concept with which Duchamp was all too familiar.
In one of several brief artists’ essays included in the LACMA catalogue, Monica Majoli observes that Altoon’s work “hints that at the base of the creative impulse is an artist’s sexual pleasure [that] intimates a continuum between sexual gratification, sensuality, and artistic fecundity.... in sexualizing both the making and the looking at an image, Altoon implicates himself and foists his viewer into the discomfiting role of conspirator.” Discomfiting perhaps, but there’s a disarming innocence to his indiscriminate eroticism that validates the entire world with the undifferentiated libidinous enthusiasm of a newborn. What’s not to love?
A version of this article appears in the June 2014 issue of Modern Painters magazine.
