Jirayr Zorthian, 92; Eccentric Painter, Colorful Personality

Jirayr “Jerry” Zorthian , eccentric Yale-trained sculptor, painter and craftsman whose rambling Altadena ranch was described variously as “the Eagle Rock dump” and “a living work of art,” has died. He was 92.

Zorthian, himself known as the last bohemian, a rustic latter-day Toulouse-Lautrec or an ongoing work of performance art, died Jan. 6 at Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena of congestive heart failure.

His paintings, primarily of nude women that he said expressed “every man’s fantasy,” sold for tens of thousands of dollars.

“For Zorthian ... the beautiful human body was ... not merely an object but a potent means of communication for any and all ideas, as well as a source of inspiration and aesthetic delight,” Paul J. Karlstrom wrote for the L.A. Weekly after Zorthian’s death. Karlstrom is the West Coast director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art. He interviewed Zorthian for an oral archive and collected his papers. “In a very real sense, his nudes are autobiographical, telling more about him than his subjects.”

As an example, he said Zorthian’s “Memory of Youth: French Teacher” depicts a red-haired boy, the artist, looking through a window at two nude female figures, a front and back representation of the teacher he fantasized about as an adolescent.

But Zorthian was perhaps better known in Southern California art circles for his free-form lifestyle than for his art.

Each spring for the past decade he threw a “primavera” birthday party. He dubbed himself “Zor-Bacchus,” wore a toga over long red underwear and nibbled grapes from the hands of nude, garlanded nymphs, many of whom were his models. Zorthian joined the nymphs in dancing to the pipes of a cavorting Pan, who was garbed in furry goat leggings. Alcohol flowed freely and a roasted pig fed hundreds of guests who could include Caltech scientists, movie stars, internationally known artists, writers and musicians and ordinary folks.

The 5-foot, 3-inch Armenian American had counted among his friends jazzman Charlie Parker, artist Andy Warhol and Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman.

Feynman met Zorthian at a party where Feynman was playing the bongo drums. “Naturally this crazy nut and I became good friends right away,” he wrote in his best-selling book, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” He added that they exchanged lessons in physics and art and sketched the same Playboy models.

In downtown Los Angeles, Zorthian was a colorful figure each spring on Olvera Street as he rode his horse and led his menagerie for the Blessing of the Animals by Cardinal Roger M. Mahony.

In 1997, he served as gleeful grand marshal of Pasadena’s alternative Doo Dah Parade. Zorthian also voluntarily played host at coronations of the Doo Dah queen, with a bonfire and lavish libations at his 45-acre hilltop ranch.

The ranch-unlike-no-other served as a haven of bohemian life and a backdrop for items of Zorthian’s artistic expression -- junk he recycled into sculptures and architecture.

Zorthian called the ranch “The Center for Research and Development with an Emphasis on Aesthetics,” and fashioned rental houses out of discarded items, including telephone poles and railroad ties. He also built rock walls, towers, inlaid bridges and walkways. He painted in a studio and bred horses.

Zorthian and his wife, Dabney, lived in a small pseudo adobe house on the ranch, well-loved by friends as welcoming, although cluttered. The couple often preferred to sleep outdoors.

They slaughtered their own livestock and made their own sausage, milked their own goats and made cheese, raised their own vegetables and gathered eggs from their own chickens. As a young immigrant, Zorthian had been startled by how wasteful Americans seemed and vowed to recycle everything he could and to create his own self-sufficient environment.

In 1973, when Zorthian was a mere three decades into his ongoing habitat project, William Agee, then director of what was the Pasadena Museum of Modern Art, told The Times that Zorthian’s “entire ranch is a living work of art ... the distinction between architecture and sculpture difficult to tell.... “

As for Zorthian’s other art, Agee commented: “Personally, I find his drawings and paintings very strong and powerful, but he is so involved in so many things that by nature and temperament he is not geared to cranking out a lot of salable art, and he can’t put that ranch on the art market.”

Proudly, Zorthian offered his own down-to-earth appraisal of his “art ranch” for The Times in 1990: “This entire property has sort of been sculpted with a skip-loader.

“I have 40 more years of work,” he added. “I don’t have time to die.... A lot of people my age have given up being curious or vital. Can you imagine me in a retirement home playing shuffleboard?”

But Zorthian was equally at home attending posh art events in a tuxedo or digging through restaurant trash cans for recyclable objects.

Known as San Gabriel Valley’s most eccentric character, he also earned more mundane honors, including the 2002 Good Scout Award for his support of the San Gabriel Valley Council, Boy Scouts of America. And for 24 years, he welcomed kids to his summer day school at the ranch.

He chaired the Pasadena Art Fair in 1954 and 1955 and staged a show of his work at what was then the Pasadena Art Museum in 1953.

Born April 14, 1911, in Western Anatolia in Turkey, Zorthian escaped to Europe with the remnants of his family after two waves of political massacres and came to New Haven, Conn., in 1923. He earned a master of fine arts at Yale and studied art in Italy in the 1930s.

Returning to the U.S. during the Depression, he painted several massive murals, including 11 for the Tennessee state capitol in 1938 that earned him the honorary title of “colonel.”

During World War II, he served stateside in Army intelligence and painted what he came to consider his masterpiece -- a mural he titled “The Phantasmagoria of Military Intelligence Training.”

His first marriage, to shaving cream heiress Betsy Williams, ended in divorce but earned him the first acres of the Altadena ranch where he had lived since 1945.

Zorthian is survived by his wife of 46 years, Dabney; a brother, Barry; five children, Barry, Seyburn, Toby, Alan and Alice, and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.