The Rake Magazine

Tag: art

  • Demolishing Modernism

    The first 30 feet of Fairway Drive run between six-foot hedges before halting at an iron gate. Visitors who activate the callbox are asked to identify themselves and the residence to which they are traveling. If the visitor has been invited by someone behind the gate, the iron bars swing open with a soft, slow hum revealing an empty landscape of lush, green, uninterrupted curves intersected twice by winding asphalt golf-cart paths. Welcome to the Tamarisk Country Club, Rancho Mirage, California.

    After the gate, Fairway Drive crosses the fairway separating Tamarisk’s 12th and 13th holes, splits the hedges separating two large homes, and forks. To the left, at the end of a cul-de-sac, is a striking palazzo of sharp geometries. But to the right, the clean aesthetic deteriorates. Behind a chain-link fence covered in combat-green plastic is a single-acre lot where utility connections, desert scrub, and shattered tree stumps poke through sand. At the property’s edge, almost lost in the drooping flowers of an overgrown hedge, is a modest metal mailbox. Behind it, written in an elegant modernist typeface attached to a darkened wood plank, is a name and address: S.H. Maslon 70-900 Fairway Drive.


    It looks like a headstone, and in many ways, it is one.

    Samuel H. Maslon was born in 1901 to the owner of a Jewish grocery on the north side of Minneapolis. Although a quiet young man, his brilliance drew attention: When it came time for him to attend law school, the Jewish community raised the funds to pay his tuition at Harvard. After graduating first in his class, Maslon moved to Washington, D.C. and clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. Soon after, he returned to Minneapolis and founded the Minneapolis law firm today known as Maslon Edelman Borman & Brand.

    Of those who noticed Maslon’s ascent, none was more important to him than Luella Rykoff, the ninth child of a well-off Los Angeles grocery wholesaler. Their first date took place while Sam was on business in Los Angeles, and was arranged by a Maslon law partner’s wife who happened to be related to Luella. Sam made an excellent impression: Luella broke off an engagement to another man and became engaged to Sam—after that first date. Later, as Luella Maslon, she astonished her relatives and moved to the “wilds of Minnesota.”

    Luella Maslon grew to love Minneapolis. She raised her children in the city, and she became an important figure in its cultural life. Luella was particularly interested in the visual arts, and so she became a docent at The Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Not long afterward she and Sam began acquiring an important collection of their own. Years later, Sam Maslon would recall, “Soon we found ourselves in the world art market—looking for works of art in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Zurich, Israel—and suddenly we realized that something great had come into our lives.” Edith Nadler, a lifelong friend in both Minneapolis and California, recalls that, “She wasn’t just a collector, she was a teacher. She suggested that I become a docent at the Institute. She imbued people with a love of art.”

    Luella’s family remained in California, and so she and Sam would travel there for extended vacations with their children in Palm Springs, a few hours from Los Angeles. Janice Lyle, the director of the Palm Springs Desert Museum, credits Luella with being one of a small group of people who transformed Palm Springs into a destination that was “not just for golf and tennis. This became a place for cultural experiences.”

    Sam Maslon served as a trustee at The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and Luella served as a trustee at the Palm Springs Desert Museum (she also chaired that museum’s Art Committee, guiding its acquisition of contemporary artworks). Their impact on both institutions was profound and long-standing, embodied only in part by the 19th and 20th century masterpieces given to each.

  • Off the Wall

    Fucci is the nom de plume of Peter Bue, whose signature paintings can be found inside and outside stores, coffee haunts, and restaurants all over the Twin Cities, with the highest count in Uptown and Lyn-Lake. That painting of Pee-Wee on his cruiser outside Penn Cycle? That’s a Fucci. Woody Allen moping on the side of Specs, the glasses shop at 22nd and Hennepin? Fucci. The party scene from Breakfast at Tiffany’s on Via’s Vintage Wear? Fucci again. And there are many more. He’s been painting around town for 15 years, but only within the past few years has he been selling paintings and murals faster than you can say Holly Golightly.

    I went to see Bue last month at his studio in the Calhoun Arts Building on Lyndale and Lake. When I knocked on his door, the loud rock music that had been blasting was turned down and Bue, a forty-something guy with a long grey ponytail and a quick smile, appeared in the doorway. He waved me inside his dimly lit workspace, where a crowded jumble of paint cans dripped various shades of gray. In-progress paintings leaned seven-deep against the baseboards. There was a second-hand Victorian couch that’s been worked over by more than a few cats, and a fireplace Bue painted to look like marble. Among the finished paintings crowding the upper walls, Marlon Brando and Barbara “Jeannie” Eden smoldered and smirked down at us.

    This is the think-tank where Bue plans his big murals, and where he paints small stuff, like the “off-the-rack” 4×6-footers he’s been showing lately in the 34th and Hennepin Dunn Bros. “So what’s with the ‘Fucci’?” I asked. “Well, when I was getting started with the murals, I wanted to have a name that would go with my work. It was the 80s, and both Ferrucci jeans and Gucci were real popular, so I combined the two and got Fucci.” Even if you’re not close enough to see the distinctive signature, you can tell his work by the confident, heavy brushstrokes and pop-culture subject matter. Bue definitely has a thing for movie stars, particularly from the 1950s and 60s.

    He remembers watching Breakfast at Tiffany’s, James Bond movies, films by the Rat Pack, and Marlon Brando’s The Wild One on TV as a teen. “Painting this stuff is how I feel young again,” Bue said. He also sticks to the pop-culture material because he likes being able to pay rent every month. “I needed to make something that was saleable, and subject matter from film and television made sense because it’s already in people’s heads. It’s stuff people like, so they buy it.” And why are most of his paintings colorless? “I paint these people in black and white because that was how I first saw them, on my black-and-white TV. Plus it gives me my own niche,” he says. “Who else do you know who’s painting murals in black-and-white?”

    Typically, Bue’s work begins by taking snapshots of the film or TV moment he wishes to paint—he jogs the DVD in slow-mo until he gets the frame he wants, then takes a picture with a 35mm camera. Bue says that the great thing about taking stills out of films is that “the scene has already been set up and balanced, and the models are professional actors.” He blows up the picture at Kinko’s and has it color transparencied. He then projects this onto a large masonry board, traces the projection onto the surface, and begins painting in the details. Toward the end of the painting process, Bue stops looking at the original snapshot and focuses exclusively on the painting. “Nobody sees the original that I work from,” he said. “They only see the painting, so it needs to make sense on its own.” He then installs the Fuccified masonry board outside the store or restaurant that commissioned the work. (With some older work, Bue painted directly onto the brick or stucco.)