Kienholz, Edward Ralph

(b. 23 October 1927 in Fairfield, Washington; d. 10 June 1994 in Sandpoint, Idaho), artist known for a highly personal form of sculptural installation art frequently characterized by complex and highly theatrical tableaux, typically involving found objects and mannequins and often exploring charged political and social themes.

Kienholz was the only son of Lawrence U. C. Kienholz, a farmer, and Ella Louise Eaton, a homemaker. In 1933 his parents adopted a girl, his only sibling. Growing up in rural Washington State, Kienholz learned carpentry, welding, and metalwork from his father. He attended high school in Fairfield, Washington, where he first showed an interest in art, often creating the sets for school plays. He graduated in 1945. Beginning in 1946, Kienholz traveled extensively for several years and held numerous odd jobs. He spent time in Montana, Oregon, Minnesota, Chicago, and Los Angeles, working variously as a used-car salesman, the manager of a dance band, a vacuum cleaner salesman, a builder, a window display designer, and an attendant at a mental hospital. Kienholz eventually returned to the Spokane, Washington, area. He briefly studied art at Whitworth College in Spokane and the Eastern Washington College of Education in nearby Cheney, Washington.

After another round of traveling during which he lived briefly in both Reno and Las Vegas, Nevada, Kienholz finally settled in Los Angeles in 1952; it was there that he made his name as an artist. Within a year Kienholz—who had continued to study and make art during his wanderings— began producing works in earnest, starting with wall-hanging painted reliefs to which he often applied color with a broom. His first one-man show took place in 1955 at Von’s Café Galleria in the Laurel Canyon area of Los Angeles, and soon thereafter he began to arrange exhibitions of other southern California artists, often at small galleries he set up in neighborhood theaters.

Kienholz’s increasing prominence as an artist and impresario in Los Angeles earned him an invitation in 1956 to serve as the producer of Los Angeles’s Fourth Annual All-City Art Festival. His collaborator on the project was a young gallery owner named Walter Hopps, who had opened a space called the Syndell Studio in Brentwood in 1954, while still a student at the University of California at Los Angeles. The two soon began working as a team, and in 1957 they opened the Ferus Gallery on La Cienega Boulevard, which was a pioneering supporter of the work of the then-burgeoning California avant-garde, showing not only Kienholz but also artists such as Billy Al Bengston, Jay DeFeo, Richard Diebenkorn, and Robert Irwin.

Kienholz built a studio in the back room of Ferus, where he worked until 1958, when he sold his share in the gallery to Hopps and moved his home and studio to Laurel Canyon. There the additional room allowed his increasingly elaborate relief constructions to evolve into the fully three-dimensional, found-object-based works for which he became famous. Over the next few years, Kienholz continued to develop his highly individual form of sculptural assemblage, gradually moving away from the wall-hanging form and toward totally freestanding arrangements of the kind first seen in works from 1959 like Mother Sterling, a dressmaker’s dummy perched atop a wire cage holding dismembered doll parts, and John Doe, a store display mannequin cut in half, decorated with paint and other small sculptural items, and affixed to a baby stroller.

In the first few years of the 1960s, the peripatetic Kienholz, who had already been married and divorced twice, began to settle into something of a more stable life. He and his third wife, Mary Lynch, had two children during this time. Kienholz had a solo exhibition, curated by Hopps, at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1961, and was included in a survey, the Art of Assemblage, mounted by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1962 the Ferus Gallery showed a revolutionary new work by Kienholz, an enormous walk-in installation called Roxy’s. Named after a Nevada brothel, the work represented a startling progression for Kienholz. Moving on from his now-established concept of life-size, freestanding sculptural works, often involving manipulated mannequins, Roxy’s is a fully formed environment. In its faithfully furnished rooms, viewers encounter the artist’s large cast of characters, constructed from doll parts, found objects, and bits of machinery. Roxy’s set the tone for one important strand of Kienholz’s mature work— a highly theatrical mode of large-scale sculptural installation, typically addressing emotional, often controversial, subject matter—seen in his most well-known works, such as The Beanery (1965), The State Hospital (1966), Sollie 17 (1979–1980), and The Pedicord Apts. (1982–1983).

During the remainder of the 1960s Kienholz’s reputation continued to grow. His 1966 solo retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art caused a sensation when the county board of supervisors unsuccessfully attempted to close the show because of the content of works such as Roxy’s and Back Seat Dodge ’38, another life-size tableau depicting a man and a woman copulating in the backseat of an automobile. And in 1970 the eminent curator Pontus Hulten organized an exhibition of Kienholz’s work, 11 + 11 Tableaux, which toured major museums throughout Europe.

In 1972 Kienholz was married for a fifth and final time, to Nancy Reddin, the Los Angeles—born daughter of the city’s chief of police and a real estate broker. Kienholz adopted her child. Reddin became Kienholz’s collaborator on his subsequent work, which by now often included figures produced by the time-consuming and arduous process of making plaster casts of live subjects. In fact, in 1981 Kienholz announced that all works from the date of their marriage forward would contain the signatures of both him and his wife. The last twenty years of Kienholz’s career was marked by almost continuous work and exhibitions. Splitting time after 1973 between Berlin and a summer home in Hope, Idaho, Kienholz and Reddin Kienholz received numerous solo shows at galleries and major museums around the world, including the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Louisiana Museum in Denmark, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Kienholz died of a heart attack at the Bonner General Hospital in Sandpoint, Idaho, at age sixty-six. He was buried at the top of nearby Howe Mountain in a 1940 Packard, with a dollar in his pocket, a deck of cards, a bottle of red wine, and the ashes of his beloved dog, Smash.

For all its success, Kienholz’s idiosyncratic and highly personal work has probably been influential more for its experimental spirit than its form. His highly particularized, walk-in installations remain almost unique in the history of twentieth-century art for their mixture of large-scale theatricality and careful attention to poignant detail, while his use of found objects expanded the then-developing terrain of appropriation for generations of later artists. Although his work has struck some commentators as too broad and didactic, Kienholz’s best pieces manage to strike a delicate balance between their often passionate political messages and their aesthetic qualities.

There are literally hundreds of catalogs, brochures, and articles related to the work of Kienholz. Although very few deal with the details of Kienholz’s life, Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz, Kienholz: A Retrospective —published in 1996 to accompany the full-scale retrospective mounted that year by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York—is by far the most comprehensive and includes a valuable biographical timeline compiled by the artist’s widow. The Whitney catalog also includes a comprehensive selected bibliography of articles. Among other sources are Robert L. Pincus, On a Scale That Competes with the World: The Art of Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz (1990), and Los Angeles Art Community: Group Portrait, Edward Kienholz. See also the journalist Lawrence Wechsler’s thirteen-hour interview with the artist for the Oral History Program at the University of California, Los Angeles, Edward Kienholz: Oral History Transcript, 2 vols. (1977). An obituary is in the New York Times (12 June 1994).

Jeffrey Kastner