A Kaleidoscopic Portrait of an Artist by Those Who Know Best : On the eve of Robert Irwin’s retrospective at MOCA, friends, family and others piece together the life of this enigmatic artist

The full arc of artist Robert Irwin’s career is something to behold. Irwin started out in the ‘50s painting landscapes, then, says Walter Hopps--the dealer often credited with “discovering” him--”he used painting as a springboard into a vision as broad as the Earth itself.” As will be seen in the retrospective of Irwin’s work opening next Sunday at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the distance he’s covered over the course of his 35-year career is vast, indeed.

Regarded as a seminal figure in the California Light and Space Movement that emerged in the ‘70s, Irwin moved from Abstract Expressionism, to Minimal works investigating properties of light and space, to site-specific works so discreet and finely tuned that if one wasn’t alert, they could easily be missed. As the material presence of his work has grown more ethereal, the content has expanded to encompass the most profound philosophical questions.

The question that’s had a hold on Irwin for the better part of his life is: Exactly what is the nature of perception? His answer to that question is a body of work designed to make the viewer aware that each of us invents the world according to how we choose to process the information that constantly bombards us--in short, his art is about paying attention.

Irwin’s work is also about the sublime; though rigorously austere at a glance, this art is fueled by a sense of joy and is at heart a meditation on immanence.

Irwin’s presence in the art world, particularly in Southern California, has been as commanding and hard to define as the art he’s made. Born in Long Beach in 1928, Irwin is a revered teacher and lecturer, a legend at horse handicapping and a self-taught iconoclast who’s always stood slightly apart from the art world.

Serving an apprenticeship of sorts at the Ferus Gallery in the late ‘50s, Irwin struck out on his own in the early ‘60s, then spent the years 1968 to 1970 investigating perceptual phenomena with NASA scientist Ed Wortz and artist James Turrell. In 1970 Irwin got rid of his studio and hit the road, spending the next few years driving around, visiting colleges, talking to students, thinking and writing. In 1976 the artist met writer Lawrence Weschler at UCLA, and the two immersed themselves in a heated discussion of philosophy that lasted three years.

Irwin then moved to Las Vegas and holed up in a skyscraper for a few years of solitude and returned to the world with a new sense of purpose. He’s spent the better part of the past few years wrestling with city fathers nationwide as well as corporate boards in an attempt to sell them on a variety of progressive proposals for public artworks.

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A man of enormous complexity, drive and energy, Irwin has touched many people over the course of his life. Herewith, a composite portrait of the artist by those who’ve known him well:

GOLDIE IRWIN (mother): “When Bob and his sister were young, I took them to the museum, but he really wasn’t exposed to much art, so I don’t know where his interest came from. But from the time he was a little boy he used to lie on his stomach and draw pictures for hours at a time. He did them well, and in high school they made a fuss over him because of his artistic talent.

“He was always a leader and was a thoughtful, analytical child. I remember times when the family would be sitting around talking with the radio on and he could look up and tell you everything that had happened on the radio--who won which game and who all the players were. He always had an ability to remember information.

“He was a caring, loving child and very inclined to want to please you. He was never rebellious, and though he probably did things we wouldn’t have wanted him to, if he got in trouble he took care of it himself. I remember his father saying not long before he died, ‘That boy never caused me five minutes worry in my whole life.’ He’s always been extremely disciplined and health-conscious and never smoked, didn’t do much drinking and doesn’t even drink coffee.

“He used to do beautiful portraits; in fact, when he was in the service he won a contest with one of his portraits that I still have up in my house. He has a fit every time he sees it but I love it--I can’t think of another artist who can do bone structure better than he did. Then all of a sudden he stopped doing portraits and started doing these modern things that left me way out in left field.

“Whatever worries he’s had he’s kept to himself, but I know he’s had problems. He was married when he was young and that didn’t work out. He was fond of this girl but he told me, ‘I have to give all my time to my work, and I don’t have enough time to give her.’ He also went through a hard time when he gave up painting and went into philosophy. He wouldn’t go along with the policies of the art world anymore, and that created difficulties for him. At the time he told me: ‘They try to tell you what to think, and I don’t want anyone to tell me what to think.’ ”

ED MOSES (artist): “When I met Bob in the ‘50s he’d just gotten out of the Army and had a reputation for being a real ladies’ man--he was the golden boy and was already a legend. (Billy Al) Bengston introduced him to the Ferus group, and when he first started coming around he was showing sailboat watercolors at the Felix Landau Gallery. He was a talented illustrator but we were contemptuous of illustration, and the first time I saw his work I said to Walter Hopps, who was with me, ‘That guy’s nothing.’ Walter said, ‘You’re gonna be surprised,’ and he was right--not long after that Bob’s work really took off.”

CRAIG KAUFFMAN (artist): “From the start Bob was a different breed. I guess he was learning from us when he first started hanging around at Ferus, but he wasn’t the type to play the role of student and was always extremely independent. He was willing to learn, though--Irwin is nothing if not a good learner, and he could pick up stuff and really make it his own. He’s always been good at adapting information and engineering his own ideas in a way I think even he doesn’t completely understand--it’s sort of like he forgets his sources.

“Bob was street-smart in a way the other Ferus artists weren’t, but in the beginning he was conservative compared to the rest of us. He dressed straighter, and whereas most of the Ferus artists didn’t have jobs or anything, he lived in a nice place and was married to this tall, thin girl named Nancy who had a job. He always struck me as a basic, homespun kind of guy with a lot of discipline and his own spacey philosophy.

“I left for Europe in 1960, and when I returned two years later Irwin had changed quite a bit--he was sort of underway by then. He was making his stripe paintings and he had this whole ritual for showing the work to people--you had to sit in a chair that was positioned what he felt was exactly the right distance from the painting. There was a certain mystique about it that worked for him.”

ED KEINHOLZ (artist): “When I met Bob at the Felix Landau Gallery in 1956 he struck me as unusually well-washed. At the time most people I knew were living in barns or warehouses and we were a pretty grubby crew--there was insanity in our group, but Bob was never insane.

“I could shoot a better game of pool than Bob but he always did well at the track, and when I met him he’d accumulated $1,000, which was a lot of money in the ‘50s. If he had $1,001 that meant he had a dollar to eat on, but he’d never touch the thousand. He was disciplined and compulsively dedicated to whatever he did.

“I remember going to his studio and watching him work when he was doing those line paintings. It took him weeks to make each one, and he’d occasionally scrap a month’s work because he felt the need to move a line an inch. He was married then to a lady he loved dearly, and with great caring and affection they got divorced. Similar to the way marks on a canvas wouldn’t fit a picture he had in his mind, the marriage somehow didn’t fit some mental construct he had.”

KEN PRICE (artist): “Sometime in the late ‘50s, Bengston and I were driving somewhere and we saw a storefront with glazed windows, which is what artists did to their places then. In those days it was so rare for somebody to be an artist that we just stopped and knocked on the door and that’s how I met Bob. He and Billy wound up living together some time later in one of those Hollywood-style apartments with carpet on the floor; Billy had one bedroom with an easel in it, and Bob was off painting in the other bedroom. At the time Bob was making Abstract Expressionist paintings and was a very hard-working painter--he spent a lot of time at it.

“Bob was a handsome guy with the right car, which was important in the ‘50s, and he was very romantic. He liked to dance, he liked women and had great humor and lots of energy. We had good times together but everybody was very serious back then too, and Bob had squabbles with people--Bengston, Moses and various others. I never had a problem with him, though, and always thought he was a good guy.”

BILLY AL BENGSTON (artist): “I thought Bob was just a surfer who painted when we first met. He was different from the Ferus artists in that he didn’t want to be a wild man like we did, but he very much wanted to be part of our scene, and he and I roomed together for a few months in the late ‘50s. We had a good relationship then but that changed when the Ferus gang began to break up. At that point I’d begun to see the artist-dealer relationship as a whore-pimp situation, with the artists being the whores, and one time I called Bob a whore and he didn’t like it. It’s not a good idea to corner Bob, because if you do he’ll snap and you’ll go down--he snapped with me.”

MOSES: “Bob can be a lot of fun, but he could really tear your head off if he wanted to. He’s an in-charge kind of guy--it’s his way or no way--and physically he’s very powerful. When I first met him I was taking judo, and one day I tried to show him how to do a throw and I absolutely could not move him--he was like a massive stone. I’ve seen people wilt like lettuce when he grabbed them too.”

WALTER HOPPS (adjunct curator for the De Menil Collection, Houston): “Bob’s art is fairly humorless--there aren’t a lot of laughs in Irwin’s work--and he has a maniacal drive that can be terrifying. He has the capacity to narrow his focus so sharply that it’s as if he can’t bear the existence of anything other than the object of his obsession, and this caused a few quarrels between us. He once got furious with me when I expressed my admiration for Dick Diebenkorn’s work. Speaking with awesome intensity, he demanded to know how I could care about Diebenkorn and also profess to support what he was doing.

“Obviously Bob’s an extraordinarily selfish person, but he has to be to be the kind of artist he is. He can be generous in all the nominal ways, but ultimately the kind of focus he’s capable of is selfish. I use the word selfish in the best sense--Irwin’s selfishness is similar to that of Kandinsky or Mondrian. These are incredibly directed people.”

IRVING BLUM (dealer): “When Walter Hopps and I met Bob in the late ‘50s we were initially struck more by his ambition than by his work, which didn’t catch up to his personality until the line paintings--at that point his art and his persona became one. Bob’s persona, or mystique if you will, is rooted in the fact that he’s very veiled and never gives all of himself at one time. You just get pieces, and consequently you’re left speculating about him.”

DOUG CHRISMAS (dealer, Ace Gallery): “Bob is an odd combination of qualities; he’s kind of this butch guy, yet he’s acutely sensitive to things. He’s fiercely competitive, but throughout his career he’s pointedly avoided his profession--I think he’s done that in order to give himself room to think. He’s also extremely elusive and you can’t really pin him down--communicating with Bob is always a chess game.”

JOHN NEFF (historian and director of the art program for the First National Bank of Chicago): “When I started researching Bob’s early years he seemed uncomfortable with some of the stuff I was finding--he did record album jackets in the ‘50s, for instance, and he wasn’t too happy when I came across those. I also found some pictures of him in the late ‘60s where he looked like a really mean dude. He had a goatee beard and was wearing this weird hat and he looked like he’d kick your ass all the way down the block.

“Several artists I talked to who knew Bob in the ‘60s said he was the most gentle person in the world, but he was also the most violent, and there was a period when he was thought of as a tough sonofabitch. The thing about Bob is that he’s like a force, and if that force turns malevolent I’m sure he could’ve easily whipped anybody in the art world back then. I’ve been on juries with Bob and seen him get worked up and he’s still a force to be reckoned with.”

HAL GLICKSMAN (curator): “When Bob first showed up on the scene he was struggling to learn Abstract Expressionism after the fact, but as we now know, Abstract Expressionism wasn’t Irwin’s thing and his work didn’t start to click until 1958 when he made a series of small hand-held paintings. Then once he started his stripe paintings he sort of left the other Ferus artists wondering what happened--he just zoomed off into the stratosphere.

“Bob saw the importance of being part of the Ferus scene because that’s where the action was, but he always seemed a little apart from that gang. He was quieter than the other Ferus artists, who were all good-timers, and he was very thoughtful. He didn’t hang out and party and he struck me as rather strange at the time--for instance, he was a surfer, but he took surfing grimly seriously, which is how he approached everything.”

EVE BABITZ (writer): “The California art world has always been based on looks, and if you’re really cute you can get away with anything. When I first started seeing Bob at Barney’s and at art parties, his pose was ‘I’m the coolest and most obscure,’ and he was so good-looking people bought the pose--I certainly bought it. The wildest thing I ever saw Bob do was give a lecture, and he wasn’t promiscuous and didn’t run around with women. I guess he didn’t need to make conquests, because he was already happy. Some people don’t need a new reason every day to be happy, and I think he’s one of them.”

HENRY HOPKINS (chairman of the UCLA art department and director of the Wight Gallery): “When Bob was with Ferus I had a gallery across the street, and he used to come over and we’d sit around and talk. I remember saying to him once that artists had an uncanny ability to predict the future, and he said, ‘Henry that’s not true. The difference between artists and everybody else is that artists live in the present and most people live 15 years in the past.”

CHARLES GARABEDIAN (artist): “Bob and I got to know each other in 1960 when we had studios in Ocean Park and we became involved in each other’s work in an odd way--he hated my work and I wasn’t too interested in his. We hit it off as friends, though, because we both played the horses avidly and we went to the track together day after day and had a great time. The guy was really intense about the horses and was the finest handicapper I’ve ever seen, and it was at the track that I came to understand him as an artist. He could analyze a race in a very calculated and precise way and could completely shut out any emotion, and that attitude operates in his work as well.”

FRANK STELLA (artist): “I met Bob the first time I went to L.A. in the early ‘60s, and I was quite impressed by him because he obviously knew what he was doing--at the time he was making those beautiful line paintings. I still love those paintings and really admired some of the scrim pieces too--ultimately I’m interested in whatever he does because he’s a wonderful artist and is one of the enduring bright lights.

“It’s inevitable that artists reach the point of wanting to move beyond the conventional boundaries of painting--it even happened to me, and I discovered it’s not so difficult to break the boundaries. The hard part is figuring out how to telegraph some kind of convincing presence when the traditional boundaries are redrawn and have become ambiguous, and that’s something Bob wrestles with every day. His solutions to the problem are perhaps the best I’ve seen.”

FRANK GEHRY (architect): “When I met Bob he was working on his line paintings, and I remember thinking at the time that he was slightly off--he seemed to pull progressively more away from the world as his focus on those paintings intensified. It was as if he couldn’t stand the sensation of socializing and being with people--he had something to do, and he seemed perfectly willing to give up worldly things, like friends, until it was done.”

MAX PALEVSKY (arts patron): “Many years ago a friend took me to Bob’s studio in Venice, and at the time he was trying to figure out how light works. He had all different kinds of light fixtures and bulbs in there, and it struck me as odd for someone to be so intensely focused on something so ethereal. It was immediately obvious to me that Bob was an autodidact with a stubbornly original mind, and that’s something that hasn’t changed--he’s incapable of digesting information in a conventional way.”

RICHARD KOSHALEK (director of the Museum of Contemporary Art and co-curator of the artist’s retrospective): “The first time I worked with Bob was at the Walker Art Center in 1966, and one of my main duties at the time was to keep him supplied with Coca-Cola. He won’t drink just any Coke, though--he does research and finds the best place to get a fountain Coke in whatever town he’s in, then he goes there every day at around the same time. He can talk at length about syrup-to-soda ratio, how the maintenance of the equipment affects the taste and so forth--he has a very eccentric relationship with Coke.”

LARRY BELL (artist): “I met Bob the first semester he taught at Chouinard in 1958, and he was a fantastic teacher. He brought tremendous enthusiasm to his conversations with his students and had an oddly physical way of talking--he’d take you by the shoulder, look you in the eye and make you feel like you were really doing something interesting. It was very infectious and made you want to believe in yourself. In fact, permission to believe in myself was the most valuable thing he gave me as a teacher, and when I left school it was at his suggestion. He said, ‘You’re wasting your time being a student now--why don’t you go off and do your thing?’ He liberated me to go my own way.

“After I left school we became friends, and I just loved hanging around with the guy because he was so much fun. He has an amazing ability to grasp large amounts of information, and he’s probably the kindest person I’ve ever known. I really love and respect him, and even though it’s been more than 30 years since I was in school, I still consider Bob my teacher.”

VIJA CELMINS (artist): “I studied with Bob when he was a guest instructor at UCLA in 1963 and we had wonderful conversations. What was great about Bob was the way he questioned things--he compulsively pushed things as far as they could go and was always looking for the loopholes in art and ideas. After I got out of school I’d stop by his studio every now and then to see what he was doing, and I’d see this extremely clean work--I think he was doing the line paintings at the time.

“He was kind of an awesome person, and I have to admit he scared me a little--he was very strict and was not a fellow who fooled around. His work has always been elegant, but it’s not too luscious--it’s sort of severe.”

ED WORTZ (NASA scientist and gestalt psychologist): “Bob is a tactile intellectual. When he talks he uses his hands a lot, and one of his favorite expressions is ‘Run your hand over the thing’--be it an idea or whatever. He’s never done much hands-on sculpture, yet he likes to touch things and people. His work is a lot more cool than he is, and he has a compassionate interest in people that doesn’t always come across in his art.”

JAMES TURRELL (artist): “When Bob and I first got together I was coming from a background in perceptual psychology and was just starting as an artist, and he struck me as quite dapper and successful. It was good to see an older artist working the territory I was interested in, and although there were times when I was furious at him, we had a very creatively fertile relationship for a while. The reason I left that relationship in 1969 was because there was an inequality between us. As the younger artist, I was having a difficult time getting my ideas known as mine, so I felt it would be better to be on my own.

“There was a period when I may have put the blame for whatever difficulties I was having on somebody else, but I know more about it now and see it all differently. The work Bob and I do is very difficult to take on the road, and I respect him for staying with it, and I regard him as a worthy opponent and a good artist--he’s better than L.A. deserves, in fact.”

JAN BUTTERFIELD (art critic): “Bob and I met in the early ‘70s, and at the time I had a lot to learn about art theory and he had a lot to learn about writing--he couldn’t spell or punctuate and nobody’d ever taught him to break up sentences. There was all this brilliant stuff pouring out of him in the most bizarre condition, so he taught me how to think in a clearheaded way and I taught him about writing. We fought a lot too. He’d say, ‘Butterfield, you’re trying to hold onto five lines of thought when two is sufficient--you’re not getting it,’ then he’d put on his hat and walk out the door. He once told me if I ever used the word Zen in an article about him our relationship was over. He said, ‘The word Zen is evocative of Alan Watts on a houseboat in Sausalito, and that’s fuzzy thinking. Don’t use that word for me--learn what I’m about.’ ”

JIM QUINN (author of eight books on horse handicapping): “When Bob first became a regular at the track in the early ‘70s he had a long white beard and shoulder-length hair and was known as Bob the Painter--we all thought he painted houses. Bob didn’t hide the reality of his life from us so much as it just never came up, because for him it had nothing to do with his concerns at the track.

“Bob’s a trip handicapper, which is a term used to describe people who use observational skills to assess a race. There’s no system to trip handicapping--it’s strictly observational. One of Bob’s pet theories about the track is that so much highly diversified information comes into play during a race that the observer can make it represent anything he wants. He calls this idea ‘intentionality,’ and I think it correlates to his art, which is essentially an inquiry into the different ways people perceive reality.”

FRANK STELLA: “Bob and I share a common interest in the horses--he likes to bet on them and I like to run them. I’ve heard his analysis of handicapping and don’t find it that magical or against the grain. He’s much more against the grain when it comes to making art than he is at the betting window.”

PETER GOULD (dealer, L.A. Louver Gallery): “The way Bob studies the racing form is similar to the way he approaches art. He scrutinizes the details and always has the most eloquent analysis of the race, but the twist is that you can never be sure what he’ll put his bet on.

“In the end that’s probably the twist in his art too. For all the research and inquiry he does, he’s an artist who invariably comes out of left field, and all that information goes into a blender that finally allows the irrational to emerge. After examining all the information he acts on his intuition, and his conclusions often seem to be based on a hunch.”

ED WORTZ: “Bob once told me he’d developed the ability to manipulate his dreams to the point that he could see a piece in his dreams and repeatedly rework it at will.”

MANNY FARBER (artist): “Bob is very good at geography, and when it comes to cars and car traveling he’s done it and knows all about it. I grew up in an Arizona border town called Douglas that can only be entered from the north--there are no roads leading into it from any other direction, and Bob knew that because he once traveled the periphery of the United States by car. When I told him where I was from and we talked about the region, I realized he knew the territory around Douglas better than I did. He has a strong affinity for the ground and retains that kind of information extraordinarily well.”

ALEXIS SMITH (artist): “I studied with Bob in 1967 and was amazed by his ability to zero in on the aspect of a work that was authentically connected to the person who made it--and that would be the thing he encouraged his students to develop. Minimal art was very hip when I was in school, and it was a very radical idea in 1968 to make the un-Minimal kind of work I was making, but Bob always supported me.

“Most artists are only interesting as artists and basically don’t do anything else, but Bob leads an unusual life. He spent years driving around just talking to people, and he could probably go anywhere and entertain himself--he has a long list of things he likes to do. He’s a very ingenuous person and he’s also somewhat innocent--you can’t make the kind of work he makes without having a big streak of innocence and hope. Bob’s innocence is reflected in the fact that he expects to be able to pull off really radical things--it doesn’t even cross his mind that they can’t happen.”

LAWRENCE WESCHLER (Irwin biographer): “Bob told me it’s not unusual for him to cry at movies--he’s a soft touch, and there’s something quite childlike about him. He’s said that the point of his work is to show that the wonder’s still there, and I think the wonder he’s referring to is a child’s wonder.”

ARNOLD GLIMCHER (dealer, Pace Gallery, New York): “Bob has a value system of right and wrong that’s absolutely Christian, and he always gives whoever he’s talking to the most he can. It’s naive of him to think everybody’s ready for the level of sophistication of his work, yet he’s willing to talk to somebody who knows nothing about art and try and make them understand what he’s doing. He’s a very sweet person in that way.”

CHRIS BURDEN (artist): “I met Bob in my first year of grad school at Irvine in 1969 and he was really different from most of my teachers. Rather than coming on like a parent or disciplinarian, he was respectful of the students and was open to different kinds of work. You could really pick up that Bob believed in art and was into new ideas, and that he felt that a lot of the stuff that went under the banner of art wasn’t interesting at all--and I agreed with him.

“For my first project at Irvine I needed $300, which was a lot of money then, and he managed to squeeze it out of the administration for me. He was also around for my MFA show--I did a controversial piece and there was a big powwow about whether they were going to let me graduate, and Bob was one of the few people who stuck up for me. I think he worried for me that I was always trying to butt heads with authority, but that was something we had in common. I remember him telling me to pick my battles well.”

WESCHLER: “Bob and I spent the better part of the late ‘70s talking--he taught me about art and I taught him about philosophy, which he had a burning desire to understand. I’ve never seen anybody read philosophy with such dogged, lunkheaded concentration. He’d spend eight hours on two pages of Wittgenstein, he’d cover the page with marginalia and would absolutely maul Wittgenstein. You wouldn’t want to go to Robert Irwin University to learn about Wittgenstein, but if you look at Irwin’s life, you can see he was actually living this philosophy in a way the great professors weren’t.”

COY HOWARD (architect): “I’ve always had the feeling that as a young man Bob looked around and asked himself, ‘Why is everybody so unhappy?’ He then figured out that there were four or five things at the root of most human suffering and he systematically edited those things out of his life. He was able to do that because he’s extraordinarily perceptive and has had the discipline to honor decisions he made early on about how he was going to live. The decisions he made were to be an artist, to follow the work wherever it led and to continually ask better questions of himself. Bob would probably object to my characterizing it this way, but his is essentially a spiritual quest.”

WESCHLER: “A few years after we met, Bob moved to Las Vegas and I went to New York. He was living in a skyscraper owned by the Mafia and I used to call him at the end of the day and get these incredible descriptions of Nevada sunsets. His apartment was practically all glass and he had an amazing view--below him was the Vegas strip and above him was the galaxy--and he lived there almost entirely alone. Bob is a paradox in that he’s immensely gregarious, but he’s also capable of phenomenal solitude.”

JOHN NEFF: “Most people who experience what Bob went through--the isolation and great turning inward for long periods of time--never come out of it, but he emerged to interact with the world. With his public artworks, Bob puts tremendous energy into trying to educate various different interests groups, and I don’t think this is something he enjoys. He does it because he feels it’s the only way to accomplish something he believes is worth doing.”

HAL GLICKSMAN: “Bob is naive in the sense that the Bodhi Dharma was naive--he thinks the world is savable and that people are basically good, and that he’s now doing very engage things like airport projects disproves any accusation that he’s elitist. A lot of people moan, ‘Oh, he’s not a purist anymore, he’s doing airport sculptures,’ but what he’s doing is far more profound than that. He’s attempting to bring a very particular kind of experience to the public at large rather than just the art community.”

WILLIAM WILSON (art critic, Los Angeles Times): “I saw Bob last year and he seemed to have mellowed; whereas he used to seem driven to change the world, he now seems intent on helping it. Unfortunately, it seems that this idealistic Johnny Appleseed who walked away from the art scene to see what good he could do in the real world hasn’t been hugely successful, because few of his public art projects have been completed.”

MANNY FARBER: “Bob’s place in San Diego is on a raised promontory that overlooks the bay and he has an unusual vista--you can see an incredibly wide stretch of landscape and harbor. He has a beautiful view, but he works in the most antiseptic studio I’ve ever seen--it’s like a laboratory. It’s all bare surfaces and is clean to the point of baldness. There are no amenities or things on the wall--Bob doesn’t waste time on that sort of stuff--and he has a long table, which is where he operates with a TV nearby; he always works with the TV on.”

WESCHLER: “The key to Bob is that he’s simultaneously breezy and driven, and hanging around with him is like riding rapids. On one level he’s one of the most open people I know, but there are very deep things he’s not gonna talk about, and he shifts between those two poles quite abruptly. He can be cracking a joke about Wittgenstein or telling a story about Jasper Johns at a cocktail party, and cascade from that into a deadly serious attitude that’s so extreme it’s frightening. You go from one to the other with Bob in 30 seconds, and it’s a thrilling ride.”

WALTER HOPPS: “I saw Bob not long ago and he seemed much more at peace than he was when I met him. I don’t know whether he really is at peace or whether he’s learned how to behave at peace. With Irwin one never knows.”

“Robert Irwin,” co-curated by Museum of Contemporary Art Director Richard Koshalek and Associate Curator Kerry Brougher, will be on view June 20-Aug. 15 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave. Related events include a conversation between Irwin and biographer Lawrence Weschler at the Bunker Hill ballroom of the Hotel Inter-Continental, 251 Olive St., 3 p.m., June 20, as well as gallery talks. (213) 626-6222 .

Robert Irwin: A Selective Biography 1928: Born Sept. 12 in Long Beach. 1943: Buys first car, though too young to drive. Works on car for a year. 1946-48: Serves in U.S. Army in Europe. 1948-54: Attends Otis, Jepson and Chouinard art institutes, all in Los Angeles. 1956: Marries Nancy Oburg. 1957: First solo exhibition, at the Felix Landau Gallery, Los Angeles. 1957-58: Teaches at Chouinard Art Institute. 1959: Begins seven-year association with the Ferus Gallery. 1959: Divorces Oburg; they remarry two years later and divorce again in 1966. 1960: Solo exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum. 1961-64: Creates line paintings. 1962: Teaches at UCLA. 1964-66: Creates dot paintings. 1966: First one-person show in New York, at the Pace Gallery. 1967-69: Creates discs. 1968: Begins three-year period of research in perceptual phenomena with Ed Wortz. 1968-69: Teaches at UC Irvine. 1969: Solo exhibition at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art; paints last painting, gives up studio 1970: Creates first site-specific piece involving scrim, at the Museum of Modern Art. 1975: Begins self-education in philosophy. 1975-77: Series of site-specific works installed at the Ft. Worth Art Museum in Texas. 1976: Installation at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. 1977: Retrospective of early work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1980: Completes “One Wall Removed,” a site-specific project at the Malinda Wyatt Gallery, Venice. 1981-84: Serves on the board at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, making preliminary plans for the museum, which opened in 1986. 1982: Installation at Louisiana Museum of Art, Humlebaek, Denmark; publication of “Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees,” Irwin biography by Lawrence Weschler. 1984: Moves to Las Vegas; receives MacArthur Fellowship. 1984-85: Series of site works installed at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. 1988: Moves to San Diego. 1990: Marries Adele Feinstein. 1992: Installation, Pace Gallery, New York.

Irwin on Irwin

“As I was hanging my first show at the Felix Landau Gallery in 1957 I got a clear look at what I was doing and it was terrible. You can romanticize yourself and have all these illusions about what you’re doing, but every once in a while you might get lucky enough to get a real look at what you’re doing, and that happened to me at that critical point. My education, I think, started then.” --Quoted by Lawrence Weschler in his Irwin biography, “Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees” (1982)

“When people walk into a gallery where I’ve installed some of the things I’ve been doing recently a lot of them say, ‘Oh, it’s an empty room.’ The question then, of course, is empty of what? Actually the room isn’t empty at all--on a perceptual level it’s loaded with shapes, edges, corners, shadows, surfaces, textural changes. The point of the work I’m presently making is to draw people’s attention to all those things that were previously considered too incidental or meaningless to enter seriously into our picture of the world.” --From the Weschler biography

“People have asked me why I’ve agreed to this retrospective and it’s true I didn’t use to give my place in history much thought, but one has a responsibility to leave a good record. I once saw an exhibition of Mondrian’s entire career and you could see how each step evolved from the one before, how there wasn’t any revolution, how it was all a process of continually considered evolution that took him step by step, all the way out. “I have a feeling my work has some of the same character. I’m in a fairly hilarious position in that most of my work of the past 20 years doesn’t exist--most of it was never even built and almost all my more recent steps have essentially been erased. Nonetheless, I have gone a fairly long distance, I’ve done it step by step, and though it may be a bit more difficult to see since it’s not all in one medium, every step is there.”

--From an essay by Weschler in the catalogue for “Robert Irwin,” opening next Sunday at the Museum of Contemporary Art