Diana Zlotnick arranging artworks at home, accompanied by her family Photo: Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive, Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA
A voracious collector, community builder, and champion of emergent contemporary artists, Diana Zlotnick tapped into the Los Angeles art world at a particularly charged moment of post-war creative ferment. Today, the art milieu of the late 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s Los Angeles has taken on nearly mythic qualities, conjuring Bohemian fetes in canyons, the experimental openness of CalArts, Venice Beach warehouse studios, and, broadly, an explosion of material and conceptual inquiry through performance, sculpture, video, painting, publication, and more. Zlotnick immersed herself wholeheartedly in this atmosphere, led by fearless curiosity, dedication, and deeply felt connections to the works that she brought home.
Collect art that cancels out the rest of the world…—Diana Zlotnick, Newsletter on the Arts, 2013
Born in 1927 and raised in Los Angeles, Diana Zlotnick (née Shirley) attended Fairfax High School and would later support herself as a schoolteacher. She met Harry Zlotnick at a USO dance, and, after a whirlwind romance, the couple married on July 3, 1955. Being a schoolteacher was decidedly not Ms. Zlotnick’s calling, nor was being a dental hygienist (she flunked the program). Encouraged by her husband, who was able to support the family as a veterinarian, Zlotnick stopped working—and started collecting. With determination, savvy, and a healthy dose of chutzpah, she went on to amass an extensive collection from major artists as their stars were rising – among those who most captivated her were Wallace Berman, Chris Burden, Llyn Foulkes, George Herms, Channa Horwitz, Gloria Kisch, Ed Ruscha, and Richard and Shirley Pettibone.
Zlotnick herself marked her beginning as a “serious” collector” with the purchase of a John Altoon painting from Ferus Gallery in the late 1950s. Shortly thereafter, she would acquire assemblage works from Daniel LaRue Johnson and George Herms and, in 1963, she bought her first Ed Ruscha at an auction for $30. The Studio City house that the Zlotnicks purchased in the mid-1960s was to become not only a home, but alternately a museum, gallery, and salon, with artists and art aficionados frequently passing through. Diana paid little mind to what “the neighbors might think” in the well-to-do community of Laurelwood – the couple’s younger daughter Marianne recalls coming home from high school one day to discover Timothy Leary as a guest. When room to hang artwork became scarce, Zlotnick patched over the dining room windows to make more wallspace. At one point, she encouraged her older daughter Bonnie and her friends to express themselves by drawing directly on their bedroom walls as they pleased. Her husband was even known to treat artists’ animals – Marianne recalls a postcard from Wallace Berman thanking Harry for “the medicine for Rover.”
Diana Zlotnick with works from her collection
Nowhere, perhaps, is Diana Zlotnick’s enthusiasm, curiosity, and zeal more apparent than within the pages of Newsletter on the Arts (NOTA), which she wrote, published, and disseminated on a sometimes monthly, sometimes seasonal, basis from 1971–2019. In its earliest incarnation, the typewritten missive was simply headlined “What’s Up?,” a nod to her boots-on-the-ground style of observing and absorbing the city’s burbling art scene. Through Zlotnick’s idiosyncratic and frequently diaristic chronicling, Newsletter on the Arts shared not only exhibitions and performances in Los Angeles, as well as LA artists working in New York and abroad, but also births, marriage announcements, and obituaries, grant recipients and Guggenheim fellowships, acquittals, forthcoming publications, wanted ads, investment advice, personal invitations, and – significantly – her own art criticism.
The picture that emerges is one of an art lover writing herself into history from a place of pure passion, undaunted by any trappings of art world exclusivity.
As her confidence and collection grew, Zlotnick continued to carve out a space for her own reflections on the art she saw, including pointed contradictions to the more formal critiques printed in the LA Times and elsewhere. “The Los Angeles Times Does It Again,” Zlotnick wrote in the Spring 1978 issue of NOTA, “Critics Suzanne Muchnic and William Wilson failed to understand and enjoy the geometric forms of Channa Horwitz that bend, flow, expand, and diminish within a linear matrix.” Her ability to articulate her thinking on the works she loved did not stay confined to NOTA, either. She wrote a catalog essay for the 1986 show Southern California Assemblage: Past and Present, hosted events in her Studio City home, took a curatorial role in helping to organize exhibitions, and led classes and seminars including at the University of Southern California. The picture that emerges is one of an art lover writing herself into history from a place of pure passion, undaunted by any trappings of art world exclusivity.
To engage with Diana Zlotnick and the works that she loved is to glimpse a truly unique collector, one who cast herself not merely as a benefactor, but as a co-conspirator. She worked hard and thought hard; as her daughter Marianne put it, “Aside from her children and grandchildren, art was her life to the end.” Indeed, prior to her passing in 2021, she brought Ed Ruscha’s Thirty-four Parking Lots when she went for her Covid vaccine at Dodger Stadium – in order to point out Ruscha’s photograph of the same parking lot, taken decades earlier.
Diana Zlotnick’s legacy as a collector lives on in the myriad institutions to which she gifted works, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Orange County Museum of Art, the Laguna Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. LA Modern Auctions is proud to be a part of this legacy, and to celebrate the world of Diana Zlotnick and the historic milieu that she fervently bolstered as a collector and connector.
There aren't many collectors like Diana Zlotnick, though there ought to be...Not content to play the passive art consumer, she quickly began circumventing the gallery system, approaching artists directly — visiting studios, exploring work in depth and developing real relationships.
Bruce Conner was born in McPherson, Kansas in 1933 and died (by his own account) several times, after spending fifty years creating one of the most idiosyncratic and interesting bodies of work of the latter half of the twentieth century. Never content to work in one medium or mode, Conner explored moments of chaos and order, grief and ecstasy, our private and collective experiences, through assemblage, photography, film, collage, drawing and conceptual vagaries.
Conner once called Kansas “a place to be from,” and, like many young creative people of his generation, he was eventually drawn to the west coast. He studied literature and art at several schools, including Kansas Art Institute, Wichita University, University of Nebraska and briefly, Brooklyn Museum School. He later admitted his perpetual enrollment was largely to avoid the horror of being drafted. Painting was the first medium he explored seriously, citing Modigliani, Paul Klee and the ethos of Dada as early influences. Though he was painting at the height of abstract expressionism, and in an abstract mode, he found very little kinship with the style, its disciples and New York, calling the city “a rat maze, going from one little box to another little box … to get from one safe haven to another.”
In 1957, Conner and his wife moved to San Francisco, where he became part of a small, tight-knit artist community that included poet Michael McClure, whom he had known since grade school, Joan and Bill Brown, Jay DeFeo, George Herms and Wallace Berman. Unlike New York, there was no established market and galleries were fluid sites that were largely community nexus points for arists, rather than venues to sell work to collectors. During this time, Conner had already begun to work in his diverse and prolific manner, creating assemblages, paintings, collages and his first film, A Movie in 1958, with found footage before he even owned a camera.
Throughout the next decade, as pop art and social unrest dominated people’s attention, Conner was quietly creating an extensive, obsessive and singular body of work, driven by, among many other things, a perpetual fear of being “pinned down” by a recognizable style. While he resolutely operated outside of the mainstream, even “retiring” from the art world for a time in the late 1960s and early 1970s, much of Conner’s work is responsive to the countercultural currents of the era. His assemblages of the late 1950s and early 1960s speak to postwar anxieties, the shock of the atom bomb, the tension of private and public expressions of sexuality and rising consumer culture. Films like Vivian and Cosmic Ray are quick-cut found footage assemblages that tell of the advent of music videos and short attention spans and deconstruct the formal qualities of film. Intricate all-over drawings from the 1970s are meditative, obsessive, influenced equally by the rise of hippie and drug culture and the popularization of eastern philosophies in the west. His collages made from eighteenth century engravings are dense, lyrical and surreal. He photographed the San Francisco punk scene of the 1970s, made celestial photograms of angels, inkblot drawings that speak through symbols and pulled off a good deal of conceptual pranks and fits. Conner’s body of work is stunning in its range, its unwavering commitment to artistic integrity and unending search for new challenges and mysteries. He has been described as a "cosmological artist," creating “indecipherable missives from a self-contained universe.” (Hatch, Looking for Bruce Conner)
Conner’s work was the subject of major retrospectives at Walker Art Center, 2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story Part II in 1999 and, after his death in 2008, at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Bruce Conner: It’s All True in 2016.
