The Fast Life and Artful Times of Nicholas Wilder : A walk down memory lane with L.A.’s wunderkind art dealer of the ‘60s and ‘70s

These days Nicholas Wilder lives quietly with his friend Craig in a building at the end of 11th Street. You can see the Hudson River from the entrance. Young men lounge on the embankment selling crack.

When Nicholas Wilder left Los Angeles in 1979, he was still considered its leading contemporary art dealer.

An acquaintance from those days comes to call. Wilder closes the door behind them, and they amble toward SoHo. At 50, Wilder is slightly stooped, hair thinning. His clothes are rumpled, glasses thick enough to enlarge his eyes. One earpiece is held on with a small safety pin. He remains trim and still looks like Leslie Howard in those old movies in which they aged young actors with a little gray at the temples and laugh-lines drawn on with an eyebrow pencil.

It is a Saturday afternoon bathed in that honeyed autumn light that makes Manhattan mellow. The fashionable gallery center is bustling, but Wilder has picked a regulars bar too shabby for the bohemian yuppies on the street, so it is pretty well empty.

There is a certain unstated significance to the way Wilder and the visitor both order Perrier and lime. Both remember when it would have been gin and tonic. The Californian lights a cigarette.

“Still smoking? Wish I could, but I found out that when I smoked I had to drink and vice-versa. Couldn’t do one without the other so I had to quit both.”

Wilder falls silent. He purses his lips when he thinks. He looks at his watch, fishes a pillbox from his pocket, washes down a tablet and smiles.

“These are keeping me alive. There’ll be rumors back home so I’d rather you hear it from me. The bad news is that I have AIDS. The good news is that I am going to live to be 80.”

The words tumble out with staccato quickness, dodging any expression of sympathy.

He explains that he has never been sick and has been under careful treatment since testing HIV positive about a year ago.

“I have bad numbers. I’ve only got 10% of my immune system but they are discovering new treatments all the time and the doctors are sure they can pull a large percentage of us through. If not, what the hell, guys like us have already won the lottery. Some people still think I was screwed in California but the truth is I got out with a million bucks.”

He explains his treatment and his routine. Doctor on Monday, rest Tuesday, golf on Wednesday and work for the rest of the week. He can travel for short periods and makes regular trips to Europe, pilgrimages to look at art. He is planning a trip to Madrid. His pills, a drug unsanctioned by the the FDA, are smuggled in from Japan.

Wilder guides a tour around the SoHo Galleries where he seems to know everybody. He introduces dealer Mary Boone, who is tiny and polite. He runs into the artist Ross Bleckner who carries on a conversation without removing his Walkman. A girl sticks her head out the door of a gallery.

“Nick, it’s 4:30. Have you taken your pill?”

He smiles and nods.

Wilder set up shop on La Cienega Boulevard in 1965 during the street’s heyday as a Happening Place, or maybe it was a Swinging Scene.

Galleries remained open one evening a week and the Monday Night Art Walk was a cultural imperative. La Cienega was Marshall McLuhan’s electronic art village. Plastic hippies in Rudi Gernreich outfits rubbed elbows with the Ladies of Whichever Contemporary Arts Council while art students in “Easy Rider” mufti glowered at the Establishment muttering Peace and Love.

Hi. What’s your sign? Want some of my dope? Have my baby.

Horrified by Charles Manson, charmed by Tiny Tim, no one let the week slip by without changing lovers while reading Rolling Stone and ArtForum to catch up with the latest enigmatic wrinkle in art’s two liveliest spheres.

You know something is happening here but you don’t know what it is, do you Mr. Jones?

The County Museum of Art established itself in prim but cool new quarters floating above the La Brea tar pits and Ed Ruscha burned it down in a painting. Era-intoxicated young curators gave parties above the merry-go-round on Santa Monica Pier and Clement Greenberg, the Mao Tse Tung of East Coast critics, organized a show of hip art--hip L.A. art. Ambitious movers and shakers would establish a Museum of Modern Art in Pasadena.

Groovy.

“It was a kind of a golden age,” Wilder reminisces. “There were about six galleries and 30 artists that counted. In those days art was all about art and artists. Now it’s all about institutions and money.”

Today, Wilder’s cavernous West Village quarters nestle below street level looking like a warehouse converted by a crew of pack rats. As in many studios the living room is formed by a circle of couches and chairs bordered in this case by jumbled books, newspapers and bits of sculpture, including everything from junk to classical fragments. It is an island surrounded on one side by corridors of leaning paintings and metal bookshelves that would serve a small college.

An impression of chaos is threaded together by lines of order both felt and thought. It’s a little like Wilder’s mind. His conversation leans to long, disjointed monologues punctuated with wise observations and wisecracks meandering towards some distant point that keeps retreating. The listener doesn’t care much, the sidetracks are all interesting. Wilder says his pills make him ramble, but he’s always been like that.

If you think he lives in a muddle, remark on a Degas exhibition at the Met and it takes him seconds to find the catalogue for the auction of Degas’ collection after his death in 1917. An obsession with art pulls Wilder’s mind together. No matter where he begins he ends with Art. The impression is of a formidable and wide-ranging intelligence that manages to blend the ecstasy of a dedicated nun with the suavity of a cardinal.

He was 28 when he wandered quietly onto Gallery Row. His preppie style was markedly different from the macho bravura of the reigning crowd and as wacky as things eventually got around Wilder’s gallery he never lost his sincere and gentlemanly aura.

He arrived in the midst of a scene where polarities of ritualized aesthetic battle were drawn by the Felix Landau Gallery, which showed such immortals as Rico LeBrun and Jack Zajac. The Ferus/Artforum axis stood for the Vanguard Left, whose most notable representatives sometimes styled themselves the Studs. Sauntering into Barney’s Beanery, they managed to carry the aura of a motorcycle gang. Billy Al Bengston dressed like Marlon Brando in “The Wild Ones.” Ed Kienholz borrowed his costume from “On the Waterfront” and Larry Bell sometimes got into pinstriped gangster outfits from “Guys and Dolls,” complete with Borsalino hats and cigars the size of the Graf Zeppelin.

New art styles were cranked out faster than put-downs on “Laugh-In,” but existing galleries had them corraled. Besides Landau and Ferus there was the Feingarten Gallery with eye-stinging Op Art. Ceejee showed a weird bunch from UCLA, including the unknown Charles Garabedian and artists who eventually formed the cradle of the Chicano movement. If it was naughty, it was at David Stuart’s, and if it lit up and rolled across the floor, it was shown at the Esther-Robles galley, which specialized in kinetic art. In Westwood the aristocratic Dwan Gallery trucked in New York and European vanguard material. Things were sewed up.

Within months Wilder unthreaded the established pattern, discovering unknown artists and supporting the under-appreciated. He introduced Bruce Nauman, Ron Davis, Robert Graham and Tom Holland. His artists were snapped up for New York shows by dealers as prestigious as Leo Castelli.

Wilder soon attained an image of mythic proportions. Young artists courted him as if he were Richelieu. A show at Nick Wilder’s was thought to guarantee fame and fortune. It was generally held that Nick Wilder was brilliant.

That reputation was scarcely what his family had expected from him. He was the youngest of three children in a clan that worshipped intelligence, accomplishment and getting ahead to achieve conventional country club status as community leaders.

In the ambiance of the Truman-Eisenhower era, they were impeccably upstanding citizens. Father was a scientist on the team that invented Kodachrome film. He was so embroiled in community service after work that Nicholas is sure he had fewer than six conversations with him in his life. Mother was a beauty who had been her college homecoming queen and possessed a highly developed sense of right and wrong that caused her to be mortified at any error on the part of her offspring. The Wilders belonged to the liberal Unitarian church.

They were driven by high ideals and dark memories. One grandfather had commited suicide after losing a fortune in the crash of ’29. When Nicholas was 12 his father died of cancer. Wilder thinks it was brought on by the chemicals used in film research.

His widowed mother--still formidable today and traveling to Russia and China at 82--cut the family losses, reshuffling the stock portfolio, resigning from the country club and buying a more modest house. She went to work as secretary to the headmaster at Allendale, a private boys school that Nicholas attended free. The youngest son was not the least of her problems. Severely dyslexic, he was thought to be retarded. Klutzy and awkward, he was held back in the 4th grade and punished with detention for his poor academic scores.

The problem plagues him to this day.

“Just last week I had to write a check with the word women in the it. I spelled it wimmin and they laughed at me.

“As a kid I became intensely visual and like other not-dumb kids who couldn’t connect, I retreated into a fantasy world.”

The experience predisposed him to the artistic notion that was prevalent in his heyday as a dealer, namely that, “The eye precedes the idea.”

He worries today about the current fashion that believes an underlying verbal structure holds art together.

“I think the need to verbalize art sends you down the wrong path. People today think in terms of their idea of what art ought to be, so you go in a restaurant and the painting on the wall is not art but somebody’s idea of what art ought to be.

“When you look and look you get to a place where you can sense the essence of the art coming from the cradle of the thing-in-itself. You can smell the art. The only way to write about art is to get at that essence. That’s why I liked poet-critics like Frank O’Hara and I think those kinds of critics are coming back. They use words to create essences so that it isn’t really language that carries the message, it’s that invisible slip-stream of the image.

“I believe in good things coming out of bad things. If I was able to find artists as a dealer it was because I went slowly and never took on an artist in one sitting, so that when I was finally sure, I was really convinced. The formation of this way of looking was from my time as a kid who was thought retarded and accused of daydreaming.

“I started out as this goony child. I was so awkward that once when I fell down at Sunday School and ran a sliver through my leg my parents refused to come and get me. Just Nick falling down again. I was so uncoordinated I was only invited to parties as a favor to my parents. At school they had to change the rules in games so I could play. Then suddenly I got so good in track and softball they had to change the rules against me so I wouldn’t win all the time.”

Flip-flopping reactions left Wilder profoundly mistrustful of traditional authority and made him question the accuracy of conventional rules and perceptions.

” You come to find out that other people’s rules--whether they are verbal, social or artistic--can’t be trusted. You eventually have to go with your own instincts. You come to a place were you can no longer deny that you know what you know.”

Wilder blossomed in high school and by the time he entered Amherst he had gone from worst to the best student in class. Majoring in political science, his college academic record was undistinguished, but he was fascinated by the service job assigned him by his fraternity. As a guard at the university museum and a projectionist for art history slide lectures, he spent hundreds of hours soaking up the sight of fine paintings and sculpture. He studied history with Henry Steele Comminger who encouraged debate and the questioning of received wisdom. He met Marcel Duchamp when the Dada master came to lecture during an Amherst re-creation of the fabled Armory Exhibition of 1913.

By graduation he had decided to go to law school and had also been bitten by “the California bug”--the mythic image of the hedonistic land crawling with sleek cars and beautiful people. Still shaped by an Ivy League mentality, he chose Stanford, the California school most acceptable back East. After a scant two quarters in law, Wilder switched to art history. It was a nonexistent major, so he wound up studying with a classics professor. Such deeply scholarly pursuit was balanced by the real world experience of running the Lanyon Gallery.

It came to be seen as the leading Bay Area gallery and the 24-year-old Wilder as a Wunderkind dealer.

“I had Reagan’s luck. I took over at the right moment but in three years it had run its course. I decided to go to L.A.”

On La Cienega it was soon rumored that he was heir to the Kodak film fortune with scads of money to support and promote his artists, advancing as much as $25,000 a year in living expenses to beginners. A fortune in those days. He groomed his stable with handsome perks like new cars and fancy trips. Anyway that’s what they said.

“In fact, I started the gallery by leaping in in this naive, monomaniacal, underfunded way. I often didn’t know where the rent was coming from. I didn’t have enough money but people thought I was rich because of the way I looked. People in New York were especially helpful.”

The gallery flourished. In his best days Wilder sold some $2 million in art a year. He imported eastern heavyweights like Barnett Newman, Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, Cy Twombly, Jules Olitski and others to alternate exhibitions with his growing stable of hot L.A. people that came to include talents as diverse as Joe Goode, Alexis Smith, Don Bachardy, David Hockney, Tony DeLapp and William Brice. He was soon regarded at the peer of the Ferus and when that gallery evolved into the Irving Blum Gallery, Blum was Wilder’s only serious rival. Wilder absorbed Ferus stars like Bengston, Ed Moses and Ken Price. He sold to important Los Angeles collectors like Frederick and Marcia Weisman and played a key role in the formulation of Robert Rowan’s collection.

Wilder’s lifelong passion for elegant foreign automobiles became flesh in Bentleys and Morgans drawn up in front of the gallery, usually attended by two or three young men of striking androgynous beauty. Wilder never made a secret of his homosexuality. Neither did he make it an issue. It was just one more bit of personal exotica in an era when everybody was promiscuous one way or another. When it was said Wilder was a drag queen it seemed almost redundant. What was one more costume in the epoch of Sgt. Peppers’ Lonely Hearts Club Band?

“I did switch outfits with a woman at a costume party one night,” muses Wilder, “From a professional point of view, it was probably a mistake.”

The gallery’s national image expanded to international cosmopolitanism when Wilder undertook the role of a shuttle diplomacy dealer.

Spending half his life sleeping sealed in the pressurized no-time environment of 747s, he often arrived in Amsterdam, Cologne, London or Paris wondering what place this was. And what day. He completely lost his 30th birthday in some time zone over the Atlantic. He made more than 100 trips abroad in the 14-year life of the gallery.

“You know what the law requires to be an art dealer in L.A.?” he asks rhetorically. “A peddler’s license. I was an international pushcart peddler.”

Back home the incessant chatter of the rumor-mill smirked at the idea that Wilder’s problems were all jet-lag. Drunk all the time, you know, and doped when not juiced.

“I probably tried every known form of narcotic,” he confesses, “But I never was really into it. Drinking was more of a problem than I admitted to myself at the time. I was constantly groggy. Once I arrived at a party for some conservative Hollywood people, loaded at 3:30 in the afternoon. It didn’t make a good impression.”

The dealer’s life-on-the-wilder-side wrapped him in a Mylar mantle of glamour in the eyes of arts groupies. One young admirer said, “I always thought of him as the Oscar Wilde of L.A. art.” But there was another set of whisperings about Nicholas Wilder. Unpretentious grass-roots artniks were astonished when they met the legendary young impresario. He was modest, frank, funny and kind. Academics came away impressed at the breadth and detail of his knowledge of art history. Artists were moved by the purity of his passion for art.

An informal consensus held that Nicholas Wilder was possessed of that rarest of all artistic knacks, an almost occult ability to find gifted artists and select their best works known as “an eye.” According to subcultural lore, all top-notch artists are assumed to have this ability and almost no civilians. Dealers, curators, critics and collectors tend to operate on knowledge of arts past and an up-to-date awareness of what has already been approved by the system. New artists have almost invariably been winnowed up through the ranks by fellow artists who recommend them to dealers. Professionals of the sphere can have successful careers as “art experts” without possessing an iota of insight.

Wilder was unique among L.A. dealers in being accorded the Invisible Order of the Eye by his peers, thus joining a tiny handful of commercial promoters like Leo Castelli and Richard Bellamy who were thought to have the true connoisseur’s knack. About the only other L.A. art professional to be held in such awe was the curator Walter Hopps, who now directs the Menil Foundation in Houston.

In 1970 Wilder removed his emporium from fabled La Cienega Boulevard. Other row dealers, unaware that the street would soon be on the fade, considered the move doubly daring and winked at the fact that Wilder chose to reestablish himself on seamy Santa Monica Boulevard in the midst of the gay world’s Boys Town.

“I had a Bad Boy image and I cultivated it. The ‘60s were a wild time and I participated wildly. It started in 1968 after a boy I was going with killed himself. He was wonderfully handsome--a ranked tennis pro. I ran around a lot after that to fight off depression. I went to the bars and the clubs, but I never hung around the bathhouses. Amsterdam had the biggest scene of all. I owned a house there but I never did that scene. No orgies, just a different partner every couple of weeks or months. I was living such a fly-now-pay-later existence nobody wanted to be my boyfriend. If I hadn’t been so emotionally desperate I might have done better. I never thought of myself as promiscuous because all the while I was looking for Mister Right.”

He smiles ruefully, “It was the wrong tactic.”

“Being gay seems natural to me. I dated girls right through college. I think other people knew I was gay before I did. Something about the way I sit.

“I could never understand people disliking you for something you can’t help. My mother was very disparaging. She used to say her niece was ‘too tall.’ You can’t help it if you’re tall.

“Being gay hurt me in some ways and helped me in others. It does have a certain sociological effect. You come to grips with the disenfrancishment that goes with it. My natural instincts are those of a politician, entrepreneur and gambler, but if you say to yourself, ‘Well I’m gay so I can’t be president of the United States,’ you look around for a profession where you are acceptable.

“I think being an art dealer is an occupation for disenfranchised people. I never knew a good one who wasn’t a woman, Jewish or gay.”

Contrary to expectation, both the pretty boys and the fancy cars soon vanished during Wilder’s Santa Monica period. Gallery and proprietor became more sedate. He drove a dusty used compact and talked about being in psychotherapy. He realized something was seriously out of whack in his life. While he was fronting hundreds of thousands of dollars to maintain his artists as bohemian princes he could barely meet his bills and the IRS was snapping at his heels for taxes that were running three years late.

“I knew I was getting better one afternoon when I suddenly relaxed driving out to Malibu to tell Ron Davis I couldn’t give him 30 grand.

“I learned that I had always felt unloveable. Mix that with a large dose of narcissism. I felt that artists are special beings who live on a higher moral plane. I was in a risky business but I felt that artists were at a higher level of risk than I was. I had to take care of them until I realized why I was driven that way. Therapy helped. It made me less crazy.”

Much of the electricity drained from the gallery. It held its position as a top establishment, exhibitions continued to be appreciatively reviewed and Wilder’s “eye” re-emerged occasionally with the discovery of an offbeat artist like Robert Helm who made beautifully crafted philosophical shadowboxes on which he lavished a couple of thousand hours each.

But the gallery was now running with an aura of cozy routine while outside the established artworld crumbled into populist anarchy. The Pasadena Museum of Modern Art was in trouble. Museums, curators and dealers were seen as elitist exploiters turning soulful art into luxury consumer goods. Artists established grass-roots “alternative spaces” to control their own exhibitions and looked for ways to produce “non-collectible” art such as huge unmovable Earthworks or invisible idea-based conceptual pieces and ephemeral performance art.

In 1979 the majority of Wilder’s best-known artists defected virtually en mass to the new James Corcoran Gallery, which was said to have imperial backing from the family of a well-known local collector. Shortly thereafter Wilder folded shop and moved to New York.

“I was getting out anyway.” Wilder felt conventional art dealing “became a different game. It was big business. In the beginning I could go to, say, Helen Frankenthaler’s studio, and pick my piece. I was good at picking. In the end, you just sent money and waited for art to arrive in a crate.”

“Big name artists were getting too expensive. My option was to show younger people but that market was being undercut by a boom in prints. Nobody wanted to pay five grand for a painting by an unknown when they could have a Jasper Johns print for the same money.”

He characterizes the end of that era--and the beginning of this one--with a complex story about a London dealer who shipped an expensive cache of American paintings to England. The sum involved was so great it had to be borrowed from British banks. In the end the money came to the States. The punch line is that the deal had nothing to do with art at all. It was simply a complex scheme to get money out of England without paying taxes. The art was only a pawn in the game.

“And there is such a thing as running out of gas. I had gambled on three cycles of art and won. I’d have been a fool to put my money on the black again. I thought I’d better take my marbles, go to New York and see what would happen.”

Well, tempis fugit , out of sight, out of mind and all that. Wilder would settle into the glitzy hub of world art, make a sumptuously comfy living dealing privately out of some discreet brownstone while his L.A. legend lived on forever, which is to say at least two years.

Instead, Wilder, now fairly clearly unlikely to live up to conventional expectation, rematerialized here in 1986 not as a dealer but, of all things, as an artist, showing-- of all places--in the gallery of his alleged rival, James Corcoran.

Some of Wilder’s most dedicated admirers winced at the potential of a consummately genuine dealer falling on his face as a unconsummated amatuer artist. Instead of embarrassment they found a sold-out group of large abstract assemblage which--though artistically imperfect--nonetheless consitituted expression of a devotional belief in what Wilder calls “The redemptive power of art.”

It was a remarkable testment from someone who has seen the vicious underbelly of the artworld up close and views the present overheated, aesthetically corrupted mainstream as a form of big-game hunting where collectors vie for status-conferring trophies.

Wilder peers across a disorderly coffee table to the large canvases he is preparing for exhibitions in Chicago and New York. For the fifth time in an hour his big shaggy dog Stella ambles over and puts her muzzle on his knee begging for a biscuit.

“She’s old. Eating is about the only fun she has anymore, so she’s always begging. Anyway, she’s healthy and inquisitive and that’s what counts, isn’t it?”

His paintings are big symmetrical hard-edge abstractions that reveal the influence of artists he showed back in L.A., people like the classical hard-edge abstractionist John McLaughlin or Billy Al Bengston in the ‘60s, when rich color relationships were his forte. Look again, however, and there is a deeper understructure of concern with old religious art, with Italy in the 12th and 13th centuries, with Duccio and Cimabue. The best painting has a gold ground.

“I don’t make enough to live from the painting, but I enjoy it so much if I can keep it going I will. If the health thing works out and I live to be 75 and have this little career plugging away working on the same problem over and over like Morandi, I’ll be satisfied.

“I like things the way they are. I’m better off than I was 10 years ago. My taxes are paid. I’m not going to follow the gun-barrel solution or check out in a mountain cabin with a stack of records and an overdose of heroin. That’s not my way.

“I’ve been playing with house money since I was 6 and I never expected anything except maybe a good game. I’ll fight this thing tooth and nail, but if it doesn’t work out tell everybody it was all right. I don’t feel cheated. I never have. My whole life has been adventure and this is just one more.”

His friend Craig shows up announcing that their air tickets to Madrid are booked.