20 THENEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 2, 2019
Europe on Herron grants, going to the
major museums in Amsterdam, Berlin,
Paris, Rome, Florence, and Madrid. Af-
terward, they attended different gradu-
ate schools; Vija had won a scholarship
at U.C.L.A., and Terry went to the Uni-
versity of New Mexico in Albuquerque.
They visited each other and wrote let-
ters, but eventually they drifted apart.
She sometimes feels that Terry was the
love of her life. It was very saddening
for her to learn, about fifteen years ago,
that he had died.
During the next few years, Celmins
had a number of long-term relationships
with men who were not artists, but her
closest (platonic) friend was Douglas
Wheeler, one of the first California art-
ists to work with light and space. They
met walking their dogs on Venice
beach—Wheeler had a German shep-
herd, and Celmins had an Alaskan mal-
amute, named Lācīte. (The name, pro-
nounced la-seet, means “little bear” in
Latvian.) “Vija was different,” Wheeler
told me. “She looked at things in the
deepest way. You could feel her eyes going
over everything, like hands. Sometimes
we’d find ourselves transfixed by a par-
ticular light effect in the sky—not say-
ing anything, but reacting in the same
way. I just had a love for her. Seeing her
work made me feel O.K. about my life.”
Celmins got married in 1968 to Peter
Givler, a writer she had lived with for
two or three years. Givler was study-
ing at Occidental College for a gradu-
ate degree in comparative literature. For
a while, they lived in a rented house in
Topanga Canyon, and Celmins drove to
her studio in Venice. Givler had brought
the Alaskan malamute home one day,
as a present for Celmins, and the dog
lasted longer than their marriage. “When
I was a child in Latvia, I never saw a
dog,” Celmins told me. “They proba-
bly ate them. I wanted a dog so much.
Lācīte shed every day, so I have dog
hairs in my early work—a lot of trou-
ble, but I loved that dog.”
Tony Berlant introduced her to David
Stuart, a Los Angeles dealer whose
gallery showed Berlant’s mixed-media
sculptural collages. Stuart put several of
Celmins’s student works in a group show
in 1964, and in 1966 he gave her a solo
show, with the Second World War air-
planes and other photo-based images,
and two small sculptures of collaged and
painted houses, one of them on fire and
the other lined with whitish-brown fur.
To her surprise, there were several sales.
Noma Copley, the wife of the artist and
collector William Copley, bought oneof the houses (for three hundred dol-
lars), and Betty Asher, a leading Los An-
geles collector of new work, bought the
other. The Copley Foundation also gave
Celmins its award for an outstanding
artist—“It was for two thousand dollars,
which kept me going for months.”
Celmins supported herself by teaching,
first at California State College and later
at the U.C. campus in Irvine. She liked
teaching, and continued to do it occa-
sionally, but since the late sixties she has
been able to live on her work as an art-
ist. Looking at her furry house in the
SFMoMA show, I asked Celmins if she
had been thinking about the Swiss Sur-
realist Meret Oppenheim’s fur-lined tea-
cup, done in 1936. She said she hadn’t,
but Surrealism had clearly breathed on
the house, and also on a group of over-
sized sculptural objects that were in the
same gallery—giant replicas, in balsa
wood, of three Pink Pearl erasers, a pen-
cil, and a six-foot tortoiseshell pocket
comb that was an intentional dead ringer
for the one in René Magritte’s 1952 paint-
ing “Personal Values.” SFMoMA acquired
this Surrealist talisman in 1998; it was
prominently displayed on a lower floor
during her show. “I had never seen a real
Magritte when I did that comb, but of
course I’d seen many reproductions of
the painting,” Celmins recalled. “I loved
it. Magritte was not a very good painter,
but he’s a visual poet.”
By the time she did “Comb,” Celmins
knew beyond any doubt that she was
not going to be a Surrealist or a con-
ceptual artist or a finish fetishist or a
California light-and-space artist or any
of the other varieties sprouting in Los
Angeles. She was going to be a painter,
in her own, unpredictable way, and what
this meant was that for the next ten
years she would give up painting and
work almost exclusively with pencils on
paper. One of her last paintings, “Burn-
ing Man,” showed a wrecked automo-
bile and a man running from it, both
on fire. “I was thinking maybe I should
try some color,” she explained. It’s a vi-
olent, Warholian image, and she never
did anything like it again.O
n her evening walks with Lācīte,
Celmins had started taking photo-
graphs of the ocean—the surface of the
ocean, as seen from Venice Pier. “I was
going to make a film about it, but I didn’t“I’m more of an idea fireman.”