Los Angeles to New York

Virginia Dwan, founder of leading avant-garde galleries in Los Angeles and New York between 1959 and 1971, was a major force in an art world made increasingly mobile by commercial jets and the interstate highway system. New York artists Franz Kline, Philip Guston, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Rauschenberg, and Claes Oldenburg, along with the Los Angeles-based Edward Kienholz, were among those who had shows in Dwan's Westwood gallery. A keen follower of the Parisian art scene, Dwan also gave Yves Klein and Martial Raysse their American debuts. Her 1962 group show My Country 'Tis of Thee is among the earliest exhibitions of pop art. Dwan supported artists who challenged the limits of art's status as both object and commodity and who eventually developed an art sited outside the gallery in remote locations in the American West. If the Los Angeles gallery featured abstract expressionism, neo-Dada, and pop, the New York branch broke ground with brilliant presentations of minimalism (10, 1966), conceptual art (Language II-IV, 1968-1970), and land art featuring the work of Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, and others (Earthworks, 1968). Dwan sponsored iconic earthworks such as Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, Michael Heizer's Double Negative, Walter De Maria's 35-Pole Lightning Field, and Charles Ross's Star Axis. This is the storied history of the Dwan Gallery told by an astute scholar of modern art, the gallerist herself, and a meticulous researcher.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.