In 1956, New York and Paris were the world’s two great art hubs, brimming with galleries, critics, collectors and colour: if you weren’t there, as John Baldessari told his students, then you weren’t going to make it.

But two men, with their partnership ‘in art’ penned on the back of a hotdog wrapper, shook the US art scene. Achieving what was thought to be impossible, installation artist Ed Kienholz and uni drop-out Walter Hopps began an entire art scene from scratch and diverted all eyes from New York to a tiny shop-front gallery on LA’s La Cienega Boulevard ‘ the soon-to-be legendary Ferus Gallery.

From there, they found and groomed a then-mismatched group of beatniks - Ed Ruscha; Craig Kauffman; Wallace Berman; Ed Moses; and Robert Irwin - into focused and competitive Pop Artists and Abstract Expressionists. Suddenly all eyes were on a west coast gallery prepared to give New York a run for its money and Baldessari was telling his students to stick around.

‘All of a sudden, it’s there! The lights are on, the camera’s rolling, the sound is cool, and somebody says, ‘Okay guys, you’re on!’’’ Ed Bereal.

Solidifying its reputation, later under the smooth-as-silk Irving Blum, the gallery was first to take a gamble on 32 varieties of Campbell’s soup cans. In 1962, Blum payed $1,000 for Andy Warhol’s series and offering the grandfather of Pop Art his first-ever solo exhibition. Before Ferus closed, ten years later in 1966, it consolidated many other of New York’s biggest talents, including Roy Lichtenstein, Donald Judd, Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

Narrated by Jeff ‘the dude’ Bridges, The Cool School tells the fairy tale story of the tiny Ferus Gallery’s big time success and of the remarkable role its vision and nurturing played in the careers of some of America’s greatest contemporary artists.

 

 

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