Ed Kienholz’s Legend Grows

Hope artist Nancy Reddin Kienholz sits to the right of a tableaux of her husband in their studio. Except for the fiberglass resin enclosing a photograph of his head, this full-sized Ed Kienholz looks ready to discuss their next collaborative project.

Although it was “so difficult to work on,” Nancy admits, she created this piece from a 1991 plaster cast of her now-deceased husband that was “just sitting around.”

The model of Ed sits at a square wooden table. He wears pants and a shirt and not the trademark underwear in which he often worked. As for the beautiful turquoise bracelet, Nancy says, “Craig Dillard in Pullman made a copy of the one that Ed always wore. Always. There was a big crisis in the hospital because Ed wouldn’t let them take the bracelet off.”

On Oct. 10, 1927, Ed burst into a pre-Depression world in a farmhouse in Fairfield, Wash., 40 miles south of Spokane. On June 10, 1994, he suffered a massive heart attack and died at Bonner General Hospital in Sandpoint. Family and loyal staff and friends buried him, still wearing his bracelet, in his 1940 Packard Coupe at the Kienholz hunting camp on Howe Mountain, between Hope and Clark Fork.

“He lived life to the max,” says Nancy. “He did everything to the extreme. He did art to the extreme. He ate to the extreme. He drank to the extreme. He smoked to the extreme. Whatever it was. And it was just him.”

Ed’s exuberance often created mayhem. At home, he bulldozed a neighbor’s dock, which he maintained had been built contrary to agreements governing the community beach.

And early in his career as an artist, the County Board of Supervisors tried to close an exhibition of his work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The controversy surrounded “Roxy’s,” a tableaux of a brothel in which grotesque women are juxtaposed with a homey 1940s-style living room, and “Back Seat Dodge ‘38,” where a young couple sharing one caged head make out in the back seat. The Los Angeles show attracted record-breaking crowds in 1966 as did this year’s retrospective shown from Feb. 29 to June 2 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in new York City.

The Kienholz subjects include not only prostitution but also war, child abuse, religion, loneliness, neglect, ignorance, mental illness and the American preoccupation with image. Although Ed and Nancy were passionate frequenters of flea markets, garage sales, and garbage dumps, their work is definitely not second hand.

“Sometimes you go out looking for specific things,” says Nancy, “or other times you look for magic.”

Furnishings and other details for one of their most poignant pieces, “Sollie 17,” came from the Pedicord Hotel in Spokane.

“Louis Ray, a demolition guy, helped us for years,” says Nancy.

He owned the apartments and before tearing them down, let the Kienholz team save what they wanted from several rooms.

“I can still remember Jeannie Post prying off the baseboard, and the cockroaches were running across the floor and through her hair,” recalls Nancy with a laugh.

The works constructed with material from the apartments became known as The Spokane Series. One of them, “The Jesus Corner,” is owned by the Cheney Cowles Museum in Spokane.

Now the Kienholz Retrospective, including “Roxy’s” and “Back Seat Dodge ‘38,” wings its way via two 747s to the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art where it will be shown from June 30 to Nov. 3. From there it flies to the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, where it will be on display from February 14 to April 20, 1997. Smaller exhibits are being featured in galleries and museums throughout the world. The Kienholz legend, which started with such furor and created so much excitement and comment in Hope and elsewhere, lives on.

MEMO: Susan Saxton D’Aoust is a freelance writer and author who lives in Clark Fork. Panhandle Pieces appears every Saturday, and is shared among several North Idaho writers.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Susan Saxton D’Aoust Correspondent