Marriage Stories, works about marital strife made by artist duo Ed and Nancy Kienholz go on view at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art
Patricia Zohn reviews Scenes from A Marriage: Ed and Nancy Kienholz at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art for Airmail.
It’s late at night. A woman in a pink dress leans over a railing. Her face is embedded in a picture frame; her downward glance exudes an air of exhaustion, or even despair. Nearby, as if in an alternate universe, an artist sits at an easel, his work tools on a table in front of his body, which is smashed through the canvas. Between them, a television with a ferocious canine head jutting out from the screen is another totem of their disconnect.
Bout Round Eleven, a recently acquired work by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the centerpiece tableau of an exhibition opening tomorrow—“Scenes from a Marriage: Ed & Nancy Kienholz”—could easily pass for the set of a Hollywood film noir.
By all accounts, the 23-year-long Kienholz union of art and life was one of the most productive and collaborative to grace the 20th century. Yet both were familiar with marital discord. Nancy was divorced when she met Ed, and he had been through four previous marriages and had “no faith in women,” she said. He was well known as the feisty auteur of life-size assemblages dealing with abortion, the castration of Black men, and sex work—taboo subjects that had L.A. museum trustees, city councilmen, and the public squirming.