Laurels too late

When Jack Goldstein hanged himself last March, his death was both predictable and surprising to his family and friends.

The painter, who had been an influential student at CalArts and a star of the New York art scene in the 1980s, was known to be struggling with addictions to drugs and alcohol. Though his photographically derived canvases of lightning storms and World War II battlefield explosions had sold for $50,000 and up, at the time of his suicide he was unemployed and living without a telephone in a trailer behind his parents’ house in San Bernardino. He had long suffered from depression and held little hope for his future apart from a single element: a forthcoming book about his life, “Jack Goldstein and the CalArts Mafia,” written by Richard Hertz.

Hertz had met Goldstein a decade before the artist’s death, when as chair of the liberal studies and graduate programs at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, he hired him to teach a class. At the time, Goldstein was considered an important figure in a group of artists who were using photography to help create their work, among them David Salle, James Welling and Troy Brauntuch.

All were CalArts graduates who had moved to New York and gained critical recognition and some financial success during the 1980s. Hertz was pleased to have someone of Goldstein’s stature to teach at the school, but at the end of one semester, the artist “disappeared,” leaving neither a phone number nor a forwarding address.

In 2000, Hertz finally heard from Goldstein, who was looking for a job. Hertz had no idea that the artist’s escalating addictions had eroded his finances and fame. He hired him to teach two classes. Then, over lunch one day, Goldstein told Hertz his uncensored version of his days at CalArts and of the New York art scene, with an emphasis on drug-laden parties and fast-flowing cash. Hertz, who had been at Art Center for more than 20 years, wanted to pursue writing. He suggested to Goldstein that they collaborate on a book about him and the era.

In 2001, Hertz took a two-year sabbatical from Art Center and compiled a series of oral histories with Goldstein and the artists and dealers who had been his friends and lovers. Goldstein contributed startlingly uncensored accounts, and Hertz dutifully sent the interviews to their subjects to check their veracity.

What emerges from the now-published book, brought out by Hertz’s own Minneola Press, is a frank insiders’ perspective on the making of a moment in contemporary art history and on one artist’s brief but bright place in it. The accounts are variously insightful, amusing, painful, shocking and poignant.

Interviews in Chinatown

Seated in the living room of his Santa Monica bungalow, Hertz recalls that Goldstein “was not a self-reflective person. He wasn’t especially good at being able to put his story together in a cohesive fashion. I took his memories and shaped them. He read everything I did and made adjustments. He was an insecure person and wanted to be revered. He was upset when people were critical of him, but he didn’t take any of that out.”

Once every three weeks at Full House restaurant in Chinatown, Hertz taped interviews with Goldstein about growing up in L.A., his violent father and his years at Hamilton High and at Chouinard Art Institute from 1966 to 1969, when it began its evolution into CalArts.

It was then that Goldstein entered the graduate program of what was to become a radically new form of art school, one that he said “changed the course of my life.” As a performance piece there, Goldstein had himself buried alive with a breathing tube for air and a stethoscope measuring his heartbeat. Artist John Baldessari, who was teaching “Post Studio” art, calls it “one of the most risky pieces I have ever seen” but had little idea how prophetic it was. Goldstein was an artist on the edge, even in the company of students like Salle, Matt Mullican, Welling, Erich Fischl and Ross Bleckner, all of whom went on to success in New York.

Hertz was fascinated by Goldstein’s accounts of his own life but realized they were not sufficiently detailed or accurate to make a book. With the artist’s permission, he started interviewing Goldstein’s friends and colleagues, among them Richard Longo, Baldessari, Mullican, Welling and writers Rosetta Brooks and Jean Fisher. Many did not want to cooperate. They included his immediate family and his art dealers, three of whom had been his lovers: Helene Winer, co-founder of Metro Pictures in New York; Mary Boone, also in New York; and Rebecca Donelson, his dealer in Chicago. Yet even without their cooperation, the book reveals how he was aided and influenced by these powerful women.

Goldstein was considered handsome and had the charismatic sex appeal of a rock star. Winer met him when she was director of the Pomona College art gallery and gave him a joint show with Bill Leavitt. Goldstein moved to New York after Winer went there in 1974 to run the alternative gallery Artists Space, where he showed his work in 1976. She then opened Metro Pictures to show the conceptual or photo-based art produced by many of the CalArts graduates, including Goldstein. He and Winer lived together until she discovered he was having an affair. After their breakup, he seems to have become more involved with drugs.

Goldstein also had an affair with Boone. He said it went on for 2 1/2 years, but she told Hertz that at most it lasted three weeks. Hertz believes that Goldstein did not intentionally mislead but that 20 years of drug-taking had affected not only his memory but his concept of time.

Donelson, for her part, was in a relationship with Goldstein for 10 years, and Hertz says her comments about him, though not in the book, show that “she had better insight into him than he had into himself.” It was Donelson who persuaded Goldstein to go into rehab, financing the treatment by selling his paintings -- after which he went back to using drugs. In the book, Goldstein expresses his gratitude to her, and he made her executor of his estate.

Many of those who were close to Goldstein viewed him as an artists’ artist, uncompromising in everything he did. Baldessari points out that students with talent are fairly common. But to make it, he says, an artist has to be obsessed with his or her work, and “Jack was obsessed.”

‘Let him talk’

Hertz, who has a PhD and has edited two books on contemporary art theory, could easily have approached the unruly Goldstein from a safe critical perspective. But after decades on the academic side of the art world, including teaching at CalArts from 1974 to 1979 before he took the full-time position at Art Center (he has now resigned), he wanted to do something more immediate and personal.

He explains: “I think what’s interesting about this book is that the multiple perspectives enlarge the portrait we have of Jack. I have qualms about writing a biography, interpreting a person’s life with my own values and paradigms. It was more interesting to let him talk about his life and let others talk about his life.

“I could have done something more academic, but I was influenced by my studies of Wittgenstein: Don’t ask for the meaning, ask for the use. In other words, don’t ask about what people say about art. See how they live their lives and put these principles into action. This is not a theoretical tome. I’m sick of theory after all these years. This book is more a picture of the art world as I know it.”

Before Goldstein died, news of the book in the works did catch the attention of the art world. In 2001, L.A. dealer Brian Butler of the 1301 PE gallery contacted the painter, who was no longer represented by any New York gallery, and showed his early work. A 2002 survey of Goldstein’s paintings from the ‘80s at the Luckman Gallery, Cal State L.A., was well received.

“He was very excited about the book and anxious for it to come out,” says Hertz, who will be reading from it Jan. 30 at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in Hollywood. “His career was being rebuilt. He was chosen to be in the Whitney Biennial this spring. That is why I was surprised that he killed himself. But he was so mentally tormented, he didn’t allow himself to believe it.”