Diana Zlotnick, as published in Newsletter on the Arts May 27, 1992
The search for a freshness, a vitality not duplicated by other experiences led me to Wallace Berman. Berman's lifestyle intrigued me. He lived in a 1 1/2 room cabin off Beverly Glen, devoting himself to art, with no outside job. Was it also that many people were clustering around him? No, it was the power of his work.
When the first verifax collage became part of my collection, I was affected by its potency.
When the first verifax collage became part of my collection, I was affected by its potency. Alive and inspirational, Berman's collaged images of hand-held transistor radios emitted a melange of silent sounds. Berman took the Verifax system, one of the earlier paper copying devices, and adapted it as an art process. Working with sensitized paper and developing fluid, in a method akin to photography, Berman manipulated imagery by the random pouring of chemical fluids. Varying the length of exposure to sunlight created patterns of light and dark. Figurative imagery was intensified and diffused by freezing the action with black and white: bleeding sepia color created drips, puddles, streams and shadows.
Berman's work was among the first conceptual art (c. 1950s), to merge figurative imagery with written language. First came oversized Hebrew inscriptions painted on vellum, then SEMINA, his small magazine editions, which expanded into the verifax collages of the sixties.
John Coplans' catalogue, Serial Imagery (1968), introduced me to Stella, Lichtenstein and Warhol, but my first conscious contact with serial imagery came through Berman. Are Berman's images, mixed with his two sets of codes (Hebrew writings and obscured language), meant to be read as purely abstract, or do they contain a message to be decoded by the viewer?
In Silence Series (1965) the images on the transistor radios – a charging linebacker, Ghandi, Capitol Hill, a blank space – convey an idea of cultural juxtaposition not yet fully conceptualized, or perhaps just the unfettered wanderings of the mind. Berman's world is private and introspective; his multiple imagery has an ever-changing mystical narrative. Monochromatic images, cultural symbols chosen seemingly at random, express hope, frustration and determination. They can be a starting point for one's own personal voyage.
Seeing Berman's work was a relief in contrast to the then prevalent abstract work in which formal issues predominated over content. His aesthetic comes out of the "black, fecund political/social ambience of post World War II. It's also fashioned from the impact of a terrible mother." No wonder I loved the work! It was cathartic! Berman saved me from feeling beaten, releasing me from my own mother. His recycling of imagery opened up a new world.
Although reading helped me focus, the best information about content came from Berman himself. Spending time at the artist's studio with the work allowed me to see that the work would stand on its own. Fascinated by its figuration, I needed the work. Berman's presence was not controlling, but caused me to surrender to the moment, blocking out the past and delaying the future.
Throughout his life Berman was in financial disrepair, but he would only take out one work per studio visit. Berman, like his works, was passionate, not cold, full of romanticism. Selling was not his main concern. He felt that everyone who appreciated his work should have a piece. Oftentimes works were given as gifts to those who could not afford them. He very much wanted people who loved his work to have it. The artist realized that his work was considered investment by some, but he didn't allow that to affect his priorities.
I never tire of, never want to relinquish, the range of experiences, from joy to despair, from quiet meditation to impending destruction, that are manifest in Berman.
Many of the artists whom I collect work in a conceptual mode using unorthodox materials. Through them my fascination flows into future choices. Even though I collected George Herms, Llyn Foulkes and Dan Johnson before Wallace Berman, I also chose Laddie Dill, Leland Rice, Jean St. Pierre, Paul Carpenter and Guy de Cointet, all of whom were influenced by Berman's mystical codes. I never tire of, never want to relinquish, the range of experiences, from joy to despair, from quiet meditation to impending destruction, that are manifest in Berman.
Hungry Eyes
Diana Zlotnick and Post-War Art in Los Angeles
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.
