The Berardo Collection

Edward Kienholz (1927-1994) and Nancy Reddin Kienholz (1943-). Edward Kienholz an American, self-taught as an artist. In the early 1970's began dividing his time between Berlin and Hope, Idaho. Kienholz went to Washington State College and Whiteworth College, also in Washington, for a short period, then moved to Los Angeles in 1953. He worked in various jobs, including hospital attendant and night-club owner. In 1956, he opened the Now Gallery and a year later helped establish the Ferus Gallery, the first vanguard gallery in Los Angeles, where he had his first one-man show in 1958. His early wood reliefs gave way to assemblages in boxes, finally developing into room-filling environments which he calls "tableaux": bizarre constructions that comment satirically on the American way of life, the theme of man's lack of spiritual value, without either the satirical or the anarchic humor of the Surrealists. In 1961, he executed his first large tableau, Roxy's, a macabre version of a 1940s Las Vegas bordello, and began contributing to important group exhibitions in US and Europe. In 1972 he married Nancy Reddin with whom he would work in the future. In 1973 He won a DAAD Fellowship to Berlin. For his famous bar, The Beanery, he produced a life-size environment, one where the viewer can actually enter and mingle with the customers. The patrons are created mostly from life casts of the artist's friends. Kinholz filled the tableau, as he called this and similar works, with such grotesque invention and such harrowing accuracy of selective detail that it becomes a scene of nightmarish proportion. For Kienholz, art is an instrument to be put to special use: if it can revise human understanding, it can change the world. In instructing man that he need not unresistingly accept his unhappy fate, he proposes that there is, after all, no incurable disgrace. The "tableau" The Soup Course at the She-She Café was presented in 1982 at the Galerie Maeght in Paris. They had a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1996.