Ceeje Revisited
Ceeje-- The Gallery, The Artists, The Art;
Fidel Danieli
Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery
April 10- May 13, 1984
Foreword and Acknowledgment
The sum total of Ceeje Gallery's contribution to the Los Angeles art
situation is probably inestimable. Like many other enterprises in the
retail sales of local art, it opened its doors for business, gave it a
fair go, survived less than a decade and closed. It created a ripple of
sorts by being a controversial center of non-mainstream art, but
beyond that it had a different kind of spirit from the other galleries
of the 1960's in every area. Located at the north end of La Cienega
Boulevard's "gallery row," it was isolated blocks beyond the
clustered dealers closer to Melrose. It definitely had a different kind
of look- an inviting manner. No blank or intimidating facade, no
rabbit warren arrangement of rooms, no indifferent secretary to
screen out the hoi polloi, no secret blue chip stock in the shrouded
back rooms. There were no solemn veiled mysteries of art only for
the connoisseur, no slick salesperson or world weary entrepreneur
speaking only with the truly anointed. The look-better yet the feelof Ceeje was of direct, enthusiastic freshness. An open, uncovered
front window decorated with an artist's major work or specially
executed mural welcomed in the southwestern sun and permitted
the visitor a preview glimpse. The room was a spacious long one,
lined on one side by a built-in bench that encouraged
contemplation and conversation. The dealers' desk was screened
only by a partition dividing the space into two areas. Moreover, the
owners, Cecil Hedrick and Jerry Jerome, were almost always there to
share their faith in their artists.
The Ceeje gallery was opened as a crafts gallery in 1959 and was an
outgrowth of Cecil Hedrick's ceramic work in the area of
architectural commissions. Hedrick's background included a BA
degree and postgraduate work in fine arts at the University of
California, Los Angeles and several years of teaching. Jerry Jerome
was involved in television and was a theater arts major at UCLA. It
was a friend in public relations, Florence Mullen, who suggested the
joining of their first initials for the gallery's unique name. Another
associate was Eleanor Neil (Coppola), whose contacts led to support
of several of the artists who became the most widely recognized.
Despite the knowledge that few local galleries concentrated on
Southern California art in preference to safer, tested European and
East Coast examples, and that most major collectors bought in New
York, they committed themselves to a core group of artists who
came to exemplify the identifiable Ceeje image. This art was
figurative with a tendency toward the expressionist and the surreal;
it possessed an enormous degree of visual excitement and energy,
and was most certainly not in vogue or fashion. They admired
artists who, as they describe themselves, "were their own people,
renegades and mavericks," and who were "their own mainstreams."
They concentrated on artists who were free spirits, as free as
themselves. From their own experiences in art and theater they
admired directed spontaneity and unplanned discipline. the
improvisational, the varied and the diverse, the non-limited were
their ideals.
Ceeje's dedication to their artists and their belief in Los Angeles art
is exemplified by their exhibition record vis a vis New York. Few
East Coast artists were shown- Philip Pearlman's first two West
Coast shows being notable exceptions. On the other hand, they did
expand and operated a New York branch for several years (196567) and drew intrigued recognition and approval of their efforts
from notable New York dealers. Then the bloom of the scene faded,
the market slumped, the artists became discouraged. In 1967 the
dealers, feeling "we had made our mark," closed the New York
branch of Ceeje Gallery. They had, however, promised and delivered
exposure and promotion. They intuited what was unique about the
L.A. art situation, gambled and waited. A quarter century later this
exhibition validates many of their choices, both in their belief in the
talent of their artists and their total commitment to expressive
figurative styles.
The majority of their artists were young, and enrolled in the
masters' program at UCLA. This in an era when the tacit standards
of gallery representation indicated that one should at least be in his
mid-thirties and have a string of juried show acceptances and a
grant or award or two on his record. It is easy to forget that into the
1970s the general opinion was held that artists had to prove
themselves elsewhere before even thinking they might someday be
part of a local gallery's stable. The number of the university's
painters who had their inaugural solo show or subsequent second
or third exhibits at Ceeje is impressive and includes Les Biller,
Eduardo Carrillo, Roberto Chavez, Charles Garabedian, Marvin
Harden, Louis Lunetta, joan Maffei, Lance Richbourg, Ben
Sakoguchi, Jim Urmston and several others. It must be noted,
however, that vigor, whether youthful or more senior, was the
dealers' criterion. Artists at mid-career or even older were also
displayed and later on many members of the UCLA faculty were
included. And though the emphasis was on painting, sculptors,
assemblage artists and photographers such as Barbara Morgan and
Edmund Teske also had their turn.
In contrast to the certified products and serial images of other
galleries, the shows here most often included diverse media and
wildly divergent sizes. Drawings, prints, painted reliefs, threedimensional constructions, small and monumental paintings all
jostled for attention in one-person and group theme shows. The
formality of aesthetic distance was destroyed further by
presentation. Framing was appropriately eclectic and probably
determined by relative poverty. Rude and handsome trim contrasted
with kitschy charity store frames. One would not be surprised to
find that works were painted on found scraps or made to fit frames
that were readymade or from the dime store. No limits on what was
saleable seemed to have been set; no holds were barred in
wrestling for the audience's attention. Even such ephemera as
exhibit announcements were totally personal, as opposed to the
standardized format imposed on mailers and brochures sent out by
other dealers. No formality here. Announcements varied from
outsized type on colored paper to the reproduction of the handlettered and freely brushed, with an occasional archly posed and
humorous photographed setup.
No clearer example of these dealers' open approach (given their
stylistic dedication to UCLA and the figurative) is evidenced by the
ethnicity of their artists. Long before equal opportunity became a
major issue and a legal mandate, their stable included artists whose
heritages spanned the Mediterranean to Armenia, Hispanics, a
Black, an Asian. Women artists , too, played a regular role in solo
and group exhibitions. There was no decision to maintain a balance
or ratio of minorities and women, it was, they explain, simply a
matter of developing associations wherein the artists, their kin and
their families (to a lesser or greater degree) became part of the
Ceeje "family." For Hedrick and Jerome there was no boundaries;
they did not think that way.
The lineage of New York mainstream art runs in a series of links
and twists that most acknowledge. European modernism gave rise
to Abstract Expressionism; then came the opening provided by
Rivers, Johns, Rauschenburg and Kaprow in the mid-to late-1950's.
There followed the multiplication of styles in the 1960's as Pop,
Geometric, Post-Painterly. Optical, Minimal, Environmental, New
Realism and Photo realism, Conceptual,etc. To these, Los Angeles
proponents and propagandists asserted adding expressive
ceramic,ic work, repeated series of hard edged or geometric styles
in nearly identical works, and a careful attention to surfaces and
detail using industrial materials and hand- polished craft. Evidently
only for local consumption would be any continuation of the
rendering of traditional subjects. Still lives, interiors, portraits,
figurative works in any non-academic style seemed a dead end or
an exhausted vein. The irony is that around 1960 a group of
Southern California art students emerged and coalesced around the
Ceeje Gallery, and 20 years ahead of its current acceptance by the
European and New york art world, they would turn the figurative
tradition back in the direction of the personally symbolic. the
intimate and autobiographical, the anecdotal and narrative, the
mythic. They ransacked art history, as have more recently Germans,
Italians and Americans, and turned their attention to the perennial
image-making power of emotional illusionism. Their all-consuming
interests ran the range from direct naiveté and primitivism of
sophisticated ethnic and folk art to the obstinate delineations of
Rousseau and the loving care of early Flemish masters. Attractive,
too, seemed to be the make believe realism of Uccello and the
horrors of Bosch. Pre- Columbian and African sculpture were no
strange manifestations. Their surrealism was the mysterious and
compulsively hypnotic sort drawn from the synthetic worlds of
medieval art, De Chirico and Magritte. Those favoring a painterly
attack were inspired by the German Expressionists with both the
bold dislocations and heavy outline of Beckmann a clear favorite.
Those attracted to full volume drew on everyone, from cowboy
artists like Remington and Russell to the mechano-men of Leger
and the bombastics of the '20's Mexican muralists, Rivera and
Siqueiros. They were willfully awkward or private, purposely clumsy
or unabashedly direct. If Ferus Gallery was the "cutting edge" of LA
modernism, Ceeje was the ragged edge and several of the artists
could parody their own situation and bill themselves as the "rear
guard."
Hedrick and Jerome felt they were being avant guard in espousing
these young radicals and it has taken over a decade-more like twoto prove that their vision was right. Their feelings were honest and
true.