Billy Al Bengston

Buster, 1962, San Diego MOCA

Billy Al Bengston--former stuntman, surfer, motorcycle racer and bon vivant who appeared at black-tie events in Hawaiian-print pants--was a central figure of L.A.’s 1960s Cool School, the Ferus Gallery art bros who put SoCal on the American art map. Appropriating the aesthetics, materials, and attitude of Californian “Kustom Kar” and motorcycle culture (celebrated by Tom Wolfe in a 1963 Esquire magazine article), Bengston used high-gloss spray paint and lacquer on gleaming aluminum or slick Masonite—even Formica--to create mesmerizing, psychedelically colored works. He frequently placed an image, mandala-like, in the direct center of his paintings, a cardinal sin according to standard art school teaching.

But nonconformism was the ism of the Sixties. Bengston’s new fighting stance was to combine the two anti-Abstraction tendencies of the 1960s, Pop and Minimalism, in hard-edged abstractions that reflected the air and colors of California and the gasoline-fueled machismo of Los Angeles. Instead of consumer products, Bengston chose symbols, often a chevron, motorcycle part, or an iris flower. His characteristic set of sergeant’s stripes was inspired by Jasper Johns’ use of target and flag imagery.

Bengston’s first show was held at the Ferus Gallery when he was 24; he had four more by 1963. In 1965, he began denting, hammering, folding, crumpling, and even puncturing aluminum sheets before spray-painting them, creating a series he called “dentos.” Travel in Mexico and Hawaii suggested new approaches. But he never wanted to go to New York.

Born in Dodge City, Kansas, Bengston moved to Los Angeles where he attended Manuel Arts High School, which had a flourishing arts curriculum. Turned off by the process-oriented painting of Richard Diebenkorn at the California College of Arts and Crafts, he returned to L.A. where he connected with the hyper-masculine, larger than life members of the Cool School. An early Ferus success, a rule-breaking all-Payne’s Grey painting, was bought by LACMA for $100.

Throughout a seven-decade career that included one of the first National Endowment for the Arts grants in 1967 and dozens of group and solo exhibitions, Bengston remained an L.A. guy, doing his own thing and defying expectations. He continued to put forms in the center, despite receiving continual criticism for doing so. As he said, “Is there any place else, other than the center, to put the form? I don’t dive on the edges of the pool, if I can help it. You go for the sweet center.”