Remembering Betty Freeman

Four or five years ago I visited Betty Freeman's Beverly Hills home. In the entrance hall I saw a Dan Flavin, possibly the first Flavin bought on the West Coast. This wasn't one of those 'new' old Flavins -- it was old, old, with a badly frayed electrical cord and everything. I said something about the Flavin and Freeman said something back in a 'talking with a visiting stranger' mode.

In the next room I saw a terrific Sam Francis. I said something and Freeman was again politely professional. I turned around and saw a Doug Wheeler, at which point I practically jumped out of my shoes and exclaimed how great it was to see a Wheeler and that I wished Wheeler was better appreciated and so on. Freeman blinked at me and asked if I knew Wheeler's work. Oh yes, I replied, and went on even more.

Clearly, quickly, I had passed a kind of test. Reading Mark Swed's remembrance of Freeman in the LAT yesterday, I understood a bit of what the test was: Freeman was all about living artists, and not many collectors had taken the Wheeler leap. She had, and she'd been right about him. From that point on we were old friends. Over the weekend Freeman died from cancer. She was 87.

After we talked about Wheeler a bit, Freeman led me into a room off to the side of her kitchen, a room with a big glass wall of a window. I looked out at her back yard. I turned around and there was David Hockney's legendary 1966 Beverly Hills Housewife (above). The housewife, of course, was Freeman. The day I was visiting she was wearing something strikingly similar to what she had worn in the Hockney, 40 years before.

It was a revelatory moment: All of a sudden I saw early Hockney as a realist, not as a kind of post-fauvist who stayed within the lines and used hyper-real, arcadian colors. The scene was exactly as he'd painted it. The lines were as strong and as distinct as he'd presented them. I felt like I was in a diorama. (Heck, I was.)

For the next couple of hours, Freeman and I chatted mostly about Clyfford Still. She had been an early collector of his work, and had become about as friendly with him as anyone ever had. She had kept their correspondence in a series of shoebox-like boxes, and we flipped through dozens, probably scores of letters. It was apparent that she hadn't looked through the stuff in years, but the memories and stories came rushing right back.

As usual, Still hadn't made anything easy on a potential collector: After Freeman and her husband expressed interest in buying a painting (a pretty big deal for them -- he was a dentist, I believe, and they were hardly rich), Still spent the next several months 'interviewing' Betty. He took her to Yankees games, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and to concerts at Carnegie Hall. At Yankee Stadium, Still and Freeman sat in the upper deck. Once, in the middle of the game, Still broke off their conversation and pointed down at the white chalk lines that marked the end of fair territory and the begin of foul territory. "That is my line of force," he seriously and coldly told Freeman, and then quickly resumed the previous conversation about who-knows-what. Freeman was stunned, but understood something new about Still's art. They never again discussed his work, just other stuff.

In the months to come Still went on to make sure that Freeman disliked his self-declared rivals, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. Finally he sold her a painting -- and hypocritically raised his price from $5,000 to $15,000 to match what Rothko was getting. Freeman told me that it wasn't easy to come up with the money -- $15,000 meant something back then -- but they did. They moved to Los Angeles shortly thereafter and hung it in their house... and were terrified years later when Still called out of the blue and announced that he was in town and would be dropping by to see it. Freeman knew that if Still didn't like how collectors had hung his painting that he would take them back -- or worse. (He liked it.)

Freeman's faith in Still never wavered. She wrote a biography of him, but she told too much truth and in a nasty series of letters he forbade her to publish it. (Still was particularly upset that Freeman had written about how they had visited the Rembrandts at the Met, and that Still had spoken approvingly of the Dutch master. Still liked to cloak his influences.) Freeman's Still eventually ended up at the Los Angeles County Museum. The biography has remained unpublished.

After Freeman and I talked Still for a while, we started in on Hockney. I suspect everyone who visited Freeman ended up talking about Hockney. At some point in our conversation Freeman excused herself, walked back into her laundry room and emerged with several more shoeboxes. They were full of decades of letters with Hockney, plus tons of Polaroids of paintings-in-progress that Hockney had sent Freeman. The most recent letter and Polaroids were only a couple weeks old. We had a blast.

Betty Freeman never would have made the ArtNews 100, or whatever. She was not a wealthy person who accumulated. She was an old-fashioned collector, a connoisseur of mid-century modern art. Today's Gagosian-following flunkies would do well to learn all they can about her. I'm grateful for that afternoon I spent with her. There are few afternoons I remember better.