Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University. It marks a departure for the 78-year-old Light-and-Space pioneer – an exploration of color rather than an emphasis on the reflective and transmittable qualities of glass, a substance that has come to define his oeuvre.
“Glass couldn’t be a more common material. You can buy it anywhere, it’s inexpensive, you can do just about anything you want with it. It’s got a shelf life of something like 3 million years and a piece of clear glass transmits, reflects and absorbs light all at the same time,” says Bell, who began creating glass cubes in the early sixties as a member of the ‘Cool School’ Ferus Gallery. “I always thought it was a magical material.”
Curated by Walter Hopps, (whose nickname for Bell was Ben Luxe, ‘son of light’), Ferus represented illustrious names like Ed Ruscha, Billy Al Bengston, Ed Moses and Ed Kienholz, to name a few. Bell identified with the “Light and Space” school, including artists like James Turrell, Bell’s Chouinard professor Robert Irwin and Craig Kauffman, minimalist sculptors who redefined the medium by making the manipulation of light central to their process. Most of them were broke, working in the studio or trading beers and picking up girls across the street at Barney’s Beanery in West Hollywood.
“There was great joy in hanging out with that group of people,” Bell reminisced about a bunch of old friends who occasionally still see each other. “The key to making things work was everyone had a sense of humor about how difficult it was and sort of celebrated that all the time. Somehow, if life is always a celebration, you make it through pretty good. The social part was fun. The studio activities were even more fun. But they were personal, in your own scene doing what you wanted to do.”
While Hopps had a visionary approach to the gallery, he also had a head for business, (compared to the rest, anyway). In 1963, he struck a major coup bringing the first Marcel Duchamp retrospective to the unlikeliest of venues, the Pasadena Art Museum. In the days before the opening, Bell recalled working in his studio when three men showed up at his door, claiming to be friends of Hopps. One of them spoke with an English accent, and the eldest of the trio spoke French. Born with partial hearing impairment, Bell didn’t catch their names until one referred to the other as Marcel. It was then he realized he was hosting Duchamp right there in his studio.
They two met again a year later for tea in New York, at the time of Bell’s show at the Sidney Janis Gallery, when his career began to take off. Duchamp was polite and Bell was awkward over milk and cookies in the parlor. “I asked if he was doing any more shows. He said he was working on a selection of early drawings,” Bell told “The Guardian” in 2016. “I asked him from what period. He says, ‘oh, when I was six and seven.’ He had an ironic, funny twist to his humor.”
Last January, Bell joined Ruscha, Bengston and Moses at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica to reminisce