Sidney B. Felsen, co-founder of the beloved Los Angeles printmaking studio Gemini GEL, died Sunday at his home in Los Angeles of kidney failure. He was 99.
“Richard Serra once said, ‘Sidney preferred to take his time,’ and we think that captured his heart completely,” said Felson’s wife, Joni Weir, and daughter, Suzanne. Felson wrote in a statement to The Times.
Felsen and the late USC fraternity brother Stanley Grinstein founded Gemini GEL in the mid-1960s, sparking a national printmaking renaissance by providing a humble place for local artists to socialize, exchange ideas and create.
The Melrose Avenue Artist Studio and Lithographic Press opened in 1966 and grew rapidly, attracting Josef Albers, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg (Claes Oldenburg), Jasper Johns, David Hockney, Ellsworth Kelly, Richard Serra, Roy Lichtenstein and others created works there over the years that illustrate the history of modern printmaking.
Serra, who created more than 320 prints at Gemini, called Felson his muse in a tribute speech honoring Felson and Weill at the 2004 Hammer Gala.
“Printmaking is a cult performed by practitioners who occasionally suffer from anxiety, who need guidance and support as well as patient collaboration, who need a witness to watch the process from the beginning, someone who understands how marks are transformed and reproduced to evoke “This transformation would not have been possible without a guide, a supervisor, a producer. Sidney Felson was all of that. … I prefer to think of Sidney as a muse. Not the producer; the assimilation of his aura is the stimulant of the process… [and] Taking pictures was Sidney’s way of spying on us, not spying on us.
Known for its openness to innovation, Gemini attracted artists from coast to coast, who often gathered there for art openings or for raucous all-night parties at Greenstein’s home. A sense of community fostered relationships among artists and helped form the loose and geographically broad nascent Los Angeles art scene of the 1960s and 1970s.
When Gemini turned 50—Felson was 92—the Los Angeles County Museum of Art opened a survey exhibition organized by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., showcasing Gemini’s work from 1966 to 2014. Sen and Greenstein’s experimental vision to push boundaries in printmaking, and the unusual collaboration between artist and printer in Gemini.
But in those early days, Felson said, he never imagined his small print studio would be so important.
“It was naive,” the soft-spoken Felson told The Times in 2016.
Stanley Greenstein (left) and Sidney Felson in Filson’s Gemini office in 2006, with his photo hanging on the wall.
(Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times)
Felson was born in Chicago on September 3, 1924, to parents who owned and operated a grocery store. When he was a teenager, his family moved to Los Angeles to enjoy the warmer weather. He had a sister, the late Shirley Trotter. Felson attended Fairfax High School in Melrose, not far from where Gemini eventually put down roots.
Felson joined the Army after high school and was stationed in Europe. After returning to the United States, he attended the University of Southern California, where he majored in accounting.
Before founding Gemini, Felson was a well-dressed man who liked to wear a wide-brimmed Panama hat and gold-rimmed glasses in his later years. He worked as an accountant during the day. But in the evenings he would also take painting and ceramics classes at the Chouinard Art Institute (which later became CalArts).
He met his first wife, longtime gallerist Rosamund Felsen, through friends at a party in the late 1950s. The two had a daughter, Suzanne Felsen, in 1961. The two divorced in Mid 1970s.
Felsen met and fell in love with Joni Weyl, who worked in the Gemini GEL sales department in the late 1970s. They married in the mid-eighties.
Joni Weyl and Sidney Felsen stand in David Hockney’s portrait Sid and Joni at the Table Seated at Table) (2005) ex. This work is part of the 2018 exhibition “82 Portraits and 1 Still Life” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
(Los Angeles County Museum of Art)
Felson was also a skilled amateur photographer. In 1937, he was given a Kodak Retina camera as a bar mitzvah, sparking his lifelong passion for the art of photography. During the more than half-century of running Gemini, Felson also photographed a steady stream of artists. Shooting using a rangefinder camera because of its quiet, unobtrusive shutter, he captured artists at work and at play.
In 2003, Felson published a collection of these photographs in the coffee table book The Observing Artist. In 2018, Gemini held the exhibition “The Observed Artist”, which featured more than 200 images selected by Felson from approximately 2,000 negatives.
“Probably for the first ten years, it was really just working with great artists that you knew, and it was a privilege to work with them,” Felson told The Times at the opening of the exhibition. “But then you start to realize, ‘Wow, this is the history of art all around us.'” It warms your heart.
Felson came to the Gemini office almost every day and actively ran the company’s business until a month before his death.
Felsen’s passion for printmaking continues at Gemini, which is now run by the second generation of the founding family, Ellen and Ayn Grinstein, Weyl and Suzanne Felsen.
“One of the most incredible things I learned from Gemini is that anything can be achieved through printmaking,” artist Julie Mehretu said in the exhibition “First Came a Friendship: Sidney B. Felsen and the Artists at Gemini GEL.” Exhibited at the TI Institute. “Deeper than that was a way of life that Sidney taught me: how to love, how to enjoy life, how to work hard and how to live life with grace.”
Felson is survived by his wife, Weyl; Daughter, Suzanne Felson; grandson, Hugo Bader; son-in-law, Kevin Swanson; former wife, Rosamund; and his stepsons with Rosamond, Anthony and James Schindler.
