Drawing Back Another Curtain
“I have had some rather serious life tragedies and life incidents,” he began, “that have forced me, actually, to make a very stark choice. One alternative would have been to declare that there was nothing meaningful left in life, and there was no reason for me to be here. That serious. The other alternative was to find something that was meaningful that would give me a very good reason to stay here and make some contribution and have some degree of fulfillment. I chose the latter. The latter seemed to me to be an evolutionary move. A lot of my friends have said, ’My God, you have opened an art gallery. That is the craziest move you could have made. You really have huge guts.’” Attired casually on a day the gallery is closed, Mr. Kaplan, of medium height and build, is in a red polo shirt that hangs out over his jeans, topped by a gray brush cut. His slightly weathered face is unable to mask the hardest evidence that he has been forced to withstand, probably blinkingly, the worst hand that can be dealt to an involuntary player at the table of life. He related the guts-level details almost matter-of-factly. He has purposely steeled himself to tell his richly textured story with minimalist effort, the safer it is to skirt the most painful contours.
Bandini, the Gallery That Was Destined
“I appreciate what my friends said,” Mr. Kaplan went on. “But my perspective is that it was inevitable, that it’s an evolution, that it was not a courageous move.” What made Mr. Kaplan’s change of direction inevitable. He inhaled before exhaling. “My daughter was a wonderful, talented, courageous, hysterically funny young woman who died in a plane crash about three years ago at the age of 25. She had huge artistic integrity. She took great risks in life. She sought, basically, to chew on everything life could offer. And so, after her loss, I had to make a determination about what I was going to do with my life. Practicing law was not necessarily the answer for complete fulfillment. And it just came to me that if one could pursue one’s passions, if one were fortunate enough to do that, one should. My view was, I am passionate about contemporary art. I love (he practically made it a two-syllable word)young artists.” A slightly — but only slightly — more prosaic reason that Mr. Kaplan introduced Bandini Art in the Culver City Arts District in May is that he is animated by a rudimentary desire to be of service. Hurrying to elaborate or clarifying, “I mean service in all that term comprises, in all of its classic senses,” he said. “I have worked hard. I mean, I have worked hard my whole life,” and it is not likely that anyone who studied Mr. Kaplan would fail to genially concur.
Depending on the Definition of Success
“I have tried to be successful, as we define it in contemporary terms. I have been fortunate in large measure. I have had a measure of success, however you want to define it. I am in my chosen profession. It just comes time now for me to measure success differently, not in terms of power but in terms of trying to be of some service — both to young artists to try and foster their careers and also because, having an art gallery, seeing all of this art and having contact with young artists, it makes me smile. It makes me happy. It is as fundamental as that. ” Mr. Kaplan’s eyes were completing a speedy, perhaps 180-degree trip around the unusual showroom. With the artwork of Ms. Celio, a hometown girl, and Ms. Ricci, a Middle Western native, imaginatively analyzing the infrastructure of Los Angeles, in its last five days, Mr. Kaplan was asked how he unearths young artists. “A number of them,” he explained, “are part of a very large community of artistic people who were my daughter’s friends. The first two shows here were her best friends. She was a writer there — painters, sculptors, musicians. They are a tribe, and they are very tight. I have contact with them almost daily, which is wonderful. So those were the first two. The rest have been a series of artists I have seen over the years. I have watched their careers progress. Some are friends of theirs’. Some are friends of friends. It was a wide web. Some artists, I can’t honestly tell you how I got the connection with them. I just don’t know.”
In the Beginning
Years ago, Mr. Kaplan related, he and his former wife began scouting and then collecting contemporary art by visiting museums. “When we looked at their contemporary art collections,” he said, “we were craving. Then we started going to galleries. We started going to gallery shows every single weekend, locally or New York. Those were the only places we went. I am going back 30 years. Unfortunately, at that time a lot of great L.A. artists only were validated if they showed in New York. There was a sort of provincial prejudice going on. So we spent a lot of time in New York. I am glad to say that no longer is true. And I am happy to be part of the process of making that no longer true. We did a lot of looking and we did a lot of studying. We subscribed to art magazines, and we tried to develop some aesthetic. Then we started buying — lithographs and prints. As our tastes evolved, the lithographs were traded or sold for original work.”
Postscript
One take on the artist Jennifer Celio: “She observes places in transition, finding stories in their debris and finding beauty in their wasted landscapes. Her graphite drawings of places seen in passing capture fleeting histories, finding traces of life in the marginal spaces at the verges of the freeway. The delicacy of her line gives these glimpses of past lives a sense of fragility and ghostly resonance.”
One take on Laura Ricci: “She plays with the fear that the city is poised on the brink of cataclysm, too artificial to be sustainable, by imagining a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles. In her ‘Imminent Domain’ paintings, nature takes back the city, grass repopulates the freeways, and trees subvert the built environment.”
Bandini Art gallery, 2635 S. Fairfax Ave., Culver City. Open Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. 310.837.6230. The next exhibit opens on Saturday, Sept. 16. www.bandaniart.com.
