THE INFLUENTIAL AND coolly glamorous gallerist Virginia Dwan finally gets her due in Dwan Gallery: Los Angeles to New York, 1959–1971, an impressive exhibition catalogue celebrating her 2013 gift of 250 artworks to the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC). Most were acquired directly from the artists she featured in more than 130 shows in her galleries in Los Angeles, beginning in 1959, and New York, where she moved in 1964. Reflecting the era’s feverish pace of change, the art reproduced in the book’s excellent plate section shows a startling range of styles, from late AbEx and Nouveau Réalisme to Pop and Funk art, Minimalism, Conceptualism, and Earthworks. What distinguished Dwan from other collectors was her fierce commitment, personal and financial, to her artists; portraits of her by artists like Jean Tinguely and Edward Kienholz reflect their gratitude toward and affection for her. She opened her Malibu house to Yves Klein, who created blue and gold sponge paintings on the beach for a 1961 show that baffled or enraged many Angelenos. In New York, she made a home for Conceptual and Minimal art and, with the landmark exhibition “10” in 1966, advanced the careers of Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin, Robert Morris, Carl Andre, Robert Smithson, and Donald Judd. She was in the trenches (literally) with Michael Heizer for his renowned piece Double Negative, 1969, one of a series of Earthworks—Smithson’s Spiral Jetty of 1970 being the most famous—that she funded.
The book’s challenge is to make sense of this restless history. Curator and art historian James Meyer attempts this, in part, by emphasizing the mobility of Dwan and her artists, arguing that interstate highway systems and jet travel made site-specific art possible, and that the experience of place became crucial. Meyer opens his essay with an account of a trip Dwan made with Smithson and Nancy Holt to Mexico, where Smithson created the mirror artworks that illustrate his celebrated 1969 Artforum article “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan.” Dwan was an intrepid audience of one, witnessing the emergence of a new art form firsthand—one made to be photographed and filmed, tasks she happily took on. It’s a shame the book can’t accommodate moving images, as the exhibition grandly concludes with a film of Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. In an overhead shot filmed from a helicopter, the artist runs as if pursued—like a breathless Jean-Paul Belmondo—to the dead center of the spiral.
