Edward Kienholz, Sculptor of Jarring Tableaux, Dies : Expressionism: Controversial artist examined seamy side of life. ‘Back Seat Dodge ‘38’ sparked furor in L.A.

Edward Kienholz, the angry sculptor with the menacing eyebrows whose life-size tableaux made him one of America’s most sociologically salacious but famous art symbols, died Friday.

Kienholz--whose most controversial works encompassed the seamier side of human life, from the erotic “Back Seat Dodge ‘38” in the 1960s with its infamous couple locked in tawdry embrace to more recent re-creations of dens of prostitution in Nevada and Amsterdam--had become a searing presence on the international art scene.

The artist Times critic William Wilson called “the Paul Bunyan of American art” was 66 when he died in the tiny town of Hope, Ida.

His longtime friend and dealer, Peter Goulds, said from his L.A. Louver gallery in Venice that Kienholz suffered what appeared to be a massive heart attack although “he had been in apparent good health.”

He had moved in the last three decades of his life from a troubled man whose experiences as a worker in mental institutions and observer of world poverty pushed him to produce life-size representations of his disappointments to softer, more warming observations of the human condition.

Goulds said it was his 21-year marriage to Nancy Reddin Kienholz, who was also his collaborator on the later works, which helped bring about that transformation.

His recent “Merry Go World or Begat by Chance and the Wonderhorse Trigger” was a caring yet carefree tribute to the uncertainties, the random chance of life.

It is a carousel entered through a single door. Viewers gaze through windows of the world at portrayals of the poverty of Africa, the intricate histories of China, and the comforts of the West, for example.

Goulds described it as “a view of choice each of us might have shared” were it not for the accident of our particular birth.

If Kienholz, who lived in Los Angeles from 1953 to 1973, had been an angry, almost mythical presence on the art scene in his youth, he became a humanist in his mid- and older years.

That presence never made itself more known than in 1966, when he incurred the wrath of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, which attempted to censor a major exhibition of his work at the then-new County Museum of Art.

The focal point of that exhibit was his challenging “Dodge” and the outrage many felt over the sexual embraces in its back seat.

After a stormy series of meetings and compromises, the show went on, but Kienholz later recalled the flap as “a hell of a turning point” in his own development.

“Up to that time I played the farm boy, scuffling my feet and saying, ‘Aw shucks.’ I always said I didn’t like words and that was why I made art, but I had to take a stand. It was a moment of growing up.”

At that point he had come light years from the farm in Fairfield, Wash., where he was born in 1927.

Kienholz had little art education but had a lengthy odd-job resume when he arrived in Los Angeles and saw his first galleries.

He opened the Now Gallery and Syndell Studios in 1956 and co-founded with Walter Hopps the now famous Ferus Gallery in 1957.

His first efforts at art involved collages, some of simple wood shavings glued to canvasses in an abstract expressionist mode.

The gallery became a place where young painters and sculptors who shared similar aesthetics gathered to work and philosophize. At that point Kienholz was still painting and fashioning objects from simple sources. Soon he began to place more objects in his collages. From there he evolved to the free-standing, often grotesque and life-size abstractions that became his famous tableaux.

He sold his interest in Ferus and began concentrating exclusively on his tableaux, moving to the Virginia Dwan Gallery in Westwood. From there his reputation began to stretch, soon to New York City.

In his work he utilized all his life experiences: from visits to houses of ill repute to his views on an unpopular war in Southeast Asia.

He was temperate regarding loose women; furious with a stringent society that ordered its youth to its death, and unforgiving of a culture that undervalued art.

By then some of his pieces were also being accepted in Europe.

“Most of my work is about death or impending stoppage,” he said in 1981. “We have never had a war on our land, so we don’t know devastation. Europeans have experienced it and they understand what I’m doing.”

After accepting a grant to work for a year in Berlin in 1973, he returned to the United States to live in such disparate cities as Hope in Idaho and Houston.

Gradually his work moved from jarring, intense anger to what Goulds called “a humanism larger than the work itself.”

He had brought two children to his fifth marriage, she one. And the couple found their new homes free from street crime and supportive of education for their children.

Wilson credited the artist with a “combination where theater, literature, jazz and the fine visual arts all worked as one. His influence in my judgment is so profound and so pervasive as to place him along with Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol as one of the great contemporary American artists.

“Long before subjects of social and political issues were considered proper for the fine visual arts, Kienholz dealt in such forbidden subjects as child abuse, prostitution and abortion.”

The closest understanding of Kienholz’s creativity came from his wife.

“Sometimes when Ed is working and a piece is going well, it seems that his hands take over,” she said before his death.

He agreed, adding: “I think we are all crippled by a fear of dying. To be engaged in art is to get past that and get in touch with the unconscious.”

Goulds said that memorial services are being planned but that only one thing thus far is definite.

“He will be buried as he wished--in his favorite Packard”--on acreage he owned near his home in Idaho.