An intriguing tale crops up in oral history interviews conducted with Los Angeles artists and curators of the 1950s. Recounted by the curator Walter Hopps, the artist Craig Kauffman, and the gallerist Jim Newman, it concerns a Midwestern farmer, who, in the early hours of a morning in the early 1950s, stepped in front of a truck on a quiet rural road and was killed. Hopps locates the incident in Nebraska in 1952, Kauffman in Ohio in 1954, and Newman in Indiana in 1953. Despite these discrepancies, all agree on one thing: the name of the unlucky farmer was Maurice Syndell. In 1954, when Hopps opened the doors of his gallery in Brentwood, Los Angeles, he christened the space after the farmer, whose ignominious death had been witnessed by the young Newman. The first gallery venture undertaken by Hopps, who would become known as a founder of the Ferus Gallery, curator of the Pasadena Art Museum, director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and founding director of the Menil Collection, was thus Syndell Studio.
For a time the elusive figure of Maurice Syndell has loomed legendary in the minds of historians of postwar Los Angeles art; some even began to suspect that the farmer might be a figment of Hopps’s fertile imagination. Recent research, however, has uncovered in the archives of the Ohio Historical Society the death record of one Maurice Sindel, who was killed on a public highway in Williams County, Ohio, on June 6, 1953. Newman was a student at Oberlin College at that time, so the identification seems plausible, laying to rest any creeping doubts as to the veracity of the story. More intriguing than this confirmation of the farmer’s identity, however, is the posthumous role that he played in the development of an art scene several thousand miles from his home, in a state that he never visited. The phenomenon of Maurice Syndell (with revised spelling) reveals much about the dynamics of the Los Angeles avant-garde in the 1950s, and points toward a new understanding of radical art practice in the postwar years.
The building at 11756 Gorham Avenue that housed Syndell Studio no longer exists, but it is documented in a series of photographs taken by Hopps’s friend, the photographer Charles Brittin. The gallery was housed in an unusual building constructed from used pier pilings and changing-room doors from a demolished Santa Monica beach club, in what was then a relatively undeveloped neighborhood. By selling his stamp collection and cashing in some war bonds, Hopps raised the rent of $75 a month, and he and his wife Shirley Nielson temporarily lived in the back room. Later, Newman took up abode there. The gallery was open for only a short time—it most likely closed by the end of 1956—but it rapidly gained an impressive reputation as a place of artistic experimentation that showed works by Bay Area artists such as Roy De Forest, Sonia Gechtoff, and Julius Wasserstein, as well as young local talent such as Gilbert Henderson, Kauffman, Edward Kienholz, and Paul Sarkisian. “For a glimpse of avant-garde art in Los Angeles,” concluded the critic Jules Langsner in the Los Angeles Times in 1956, “the place to go is Syndell Studios [sic].”
Among the most significant solo exhibitions that Hopps organized at Syndell Studio were one devoted to the Abstract Expressionist-style paintings of Arthur Richer and another to Kienholz’s wooden relief constructions. The only sale made at the gallery, Hopps later recalled, was a painting by Richer, although the artist was reluctant to let it go, breaking into the gallery and stealing it back. Nonetheless, both these exhibitions represented the straightforward display of works of art. Alongside them, however, Hopps undertook other more playful and conceptually complex gestures of display. Included in at least one of the group exhibitions that he organized was the work of his gallery’s eponymous artist: in 1956, work attributed to Syndell was included in the [Action Squared] exhibition that was organized jointly with Kienholz’s Now Gallery, where it was installed. Syndell, both the gallery and the artist, also appeared (the latter albeit briefly) in the annual Los Angeles All-City Outdoor Art Festival at Barnsdall Park, which Hopps and Kienholz had been (somewhat surprisingly) contracted to organize. In addition to the usual juried exhibitions, Hopps introduced a section for commercial galleries, inserting both Syndell Studio and the Now Gallery into the proceedings alongside more recognizable establishments. He also put forward a “semi-abstract female nude” under the name Maurice Syndell, although the work was censored by the city administrators, who also demanded the removal of four other works from the show. Despite this setback, Hopps would later recall that “in those years, art publicly attributed to Syndell, a deranged and institutionalized man in the Midwest, was made in a consistent style by a variety of Southern Californian artists.” These may have included the poet Ben Bartosh and his wife Elizabeth Brunt, the poet-mathematician Michael Scoles, and the poet and printmaker Robert Alexander, as well as Newman, Kienholz, and possibly even Hopps himself (although Kauffman apparently wanted no part of the group’s Syndell shenanigans).
Thus Syndell was reconfigured from farmer to artist. Hopps’s choice to name his gallery after Syndell is in part an act that speaks of memory and memorial. “It’s just too absurd,” Hopps explained, “that this man dies in obscurity. We’re going to make him an artist. We’re going to create work for him. . . . We’re going to put him in group shows. We’re going to name our place after him, as though it had been his studio.” A similar gesture is found in the example of the more famous Ferus Gallery, founded in 1957, and named, in part at least, for Jim Feris, a deceased art student at Eagle Rock High School, where Hopps and Kauffman had both studied. (Alexander suggested a change in spelling to bring the name in line with the Latin word for wild or untamed.) But Hopps was quick to negate the earnestness with which such an act of memorializing might be associated, explaining in an interview in 1975 that “there was as much deliberate irony as there was a genuine kind of memorial. It was two-edged, something very involved about what we felt was living art and how it would be named after someone who was no longer alive.”
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