Sidney Felsen had not originally planned to open a print shop.
But in the winter of 1965, the accountant asked his former USC fraternity brother, Stanley Grinstein, if he would like to start a lithography studio.
Their print shop, Gemini G.E.L., would become a place of inspiration for Felsen, whose photographs of artists and printers go on view February 20 as part of First Came a Friendship: Sidney B. Felsen and the Artists at Gemini G.E.L., a Getty Research Institute (GRI) exhibition drawn largely from the GRI archives and curated by Naoko Takahatake.
For Takahatake, the photography archive provided a unique look into printmaking processes and the rise of the medium in America from the late 1960s. But the images also revealed the human side of art-making and the creative community that coalesced around Gemini. Over some 50 years, Felsen, now 99, documented artists’ professional milestones and also captured more intimate, quotidian moments—breaking bread, listening to live jazz, and enjoying family fishing trips in LA.
How It All Began
Felsen and Grinstein envisioned a studio and publishing house, modeled after the old workshops of Europe, where artists would collaborate with master printers to create original fine art prints. At Stanley and Elyse Grinstein’s Christmas Eve party in 1965, attended by Sidney and his then wife, Rosamund, they asked master printer Kenneth Tyler to join the business. By that January, the three men were spending evenings dreaming of the artists they would like to invite to launch their new enterprise—“grand old men,” Felsen told the Smithsonian, such as Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Edward Hopper, and Ren. Magritte. But none took up the offer.
Finally, Josef Albers, who had previously worked with Tyler at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop, signed on to create White Line Squares, a series of 17 prints, each depicting nested squares in gradations of a single color. Gemini promoted the new edition by taking out a full-page ad in the June 1966 Artforum, handing the copy to the layout person, a young artist named Ed Ruscha. The response was explosive. Hundreds of sale requests flooded in. Gemini G.E.L., which would become one of the leading publishers of limited-edition prints and sculpture in the world, was in business.
Felsen the Artist
Felsen began taking photos of artists at Gemini in the late ’60s and eventually, he says, “had the feeling of history building up.” In his work, Felsen chronicled over a half century of Gemini artists who became close friends: Vija Celmins, Tacita Dean, Ann Hamilton, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Julie Mehretu, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Analia Saban, and Richard Serra, to name a few. As a fly-on-the-wall observer, Felsen captured some exhilarating moments in postwar American culture, as LA was transforming into a global art center.
Though Felsen had long explored photography—he’d been given a 35mm, German-built Kodak Retina for his bar mitzvah, and later picked up a coveted Contax at a Paris flea market as a GI during World War II—it wasn’t until Rauschenberg encouraged his art that Felsen’s confidence grew. “Bob Rauschenberg was my first major ‘supporter’ as a photographer,” Felsen said in an oral history with the GRI. “He kept complimenting me, which obviously boosted my ego. He was always encouraging me to take his photograph, saying my photos had a happy feeling.” Now Felsen’s archive of photography, donated to the GRI by Ellsworth Kelly’s husband, the photographer Jack Shear, numbers over 75,000 images.
Artists felt comfortable in Felsen’s presence, observes Tacita Dean. “When being photographed, everyone has a degree of self-consciousness. I can’t work in front of people. It’s another eye in the room and the sense that somebody’s watching you. But Sidney’s photographs don’t have that, because Sidney with a camera becomes part of making a print at Gemini. The intrusive eye is not there at all. That’s the beauty of those images. It is a rare insight into artists working.”
Where Creativity Runs Free
In the familial, intimate space of Gemini, Felsen documented a community where artists were, and still are, encouraged to experiment freely. It was at Gemini, in 1967, that Rauschenberg created the six-foot-tall Booster, then considered the largest hand-pulled lithograph ever made. Rauschenberg had wanted to do “a self-portrait of inner-man,” said Felsen, and hoped to use X-ray images of his own body. When the photographer picked the artist up at the Chateau Marmont hotel one morning to head to Gemini, Rauschenberg asked, “Do you have any friends who are X-ray doctors?” In fact, Felsen’s oldest friend in LA, Jack Waltman, was a radiologist.
Two years later, in 1969, Rauschenberg created the groundbreaking Stoned Moon series, a project inspired by NASA’s invitation to witness the Apollo 11 launch, the first piloted flight to the moon. Sky Garden, the largest print in the series and one that exceeded Booster in scale, incorporated images of rocket plumes, engineering diagrams, and Florida palm trees. The experience of working at Gemini on this monumental series in turn inspired the artist’s Stoned Moon Drawing, a collage that combined NASA images, photographs by Felsen and Gemini photographer Malcolm Lubliner documenting Rauschenberg’s around-the-clock proofing sessions, and Rauschenberg’s own typed reflections, such as “ART IS SOCIAL.”
“Gemini gave you the feeling that they could do anything you wanted,” Oldenburg said in Artists at Gemini G.E.L.: Celebrating the 25th Year. In 1968 he had asked if Gemini would be interested in producing a print with a sculptural component. “It was almost like the way we started Gemini,” Felsen told the Smithsonian. “We had no idea what we were doing, but we said, ‘Sure.’” It certainly helped that LA had dozens of prototype shops for the movie and aerospace industries. The edition, Profile Airflow, was a lithograph depicting the outline of a 1936 Chrysler Airflow overlaid with a soft, translucent rubbery relief of the car, fabricated with help from a Disney mold maker, in swimming pool teal.
In his photographs, Felsen records the energy and dedication of the artists and the power of their collaborations with master printers and fabricators. The work of creating a print is a “give-and-take, experimental, passionate, exhausting time,” he said. “I really saw…the spirit of what it is to be creative and how demanding it is and how much effort has to go into it.” He captures the hard work, both the labor and joy, of creating the new. “What’s unique about Gemini—the doors are completely open for the artist to do whatever they want,” says master printer Jill Lerner. “It’s a place where creativity runs free.”
Explore the exhibition First Came a Friendship: Sidney B. Felsen and the Artists at Gemini G.E.L.
