REVIEW AND REVISION DRAFT. Please send
suggestions to me, John Lofland, at jlofland@dcn.org
This is a three-post series on the question of whether the
former Robert Arneson residence at 1303 Alice Street in Davis should be a
candidate for City of Davis designation as a “historical resource.” In the first
section of this post I explain what a “historical resource” is, how that status
is determined, and why anyone should care.
In the second part of this post and in the next two posts I
report three categories of facts about the “Alice house,” as some people call
it, relevant to deciding if it should be a City of Davis historical resource or
not.
The first of
these categories, appearing below, is a chronology of what happened there in
the relevant years of 1962-1976. The second category and the subject of the
second post is the psychology of artist Robert Aronson in the “Alice house”
period and in larger context. The third
category and post center on the art that Arneson created while he lived in the
Alice house with major attention to his art featuring the Alice house itself.
HISTORICAL RESOURCE CANDIDATES & DESIGNATION
The City of Davis is currently conducting a survey of structures
and subdivisions built between 1946 and 1975 for the purpose of determining
which of them might be considered “historical resources.”
Briefly and roughly, a “historical resource” is any
structure in Davis “of . . . cultural . . . or historical value to citizens of
the City of Davis and designated . . . by the city council . . . . These
designated resources comprise the Davis Register of Historical Resources”
(Davis Municipal Code 40.23).
A structure may have “value to citizens” for one or more of
four reasons: it is associated with (1) key historical events or patterns or
with (2) significant persons; (3) it exhibits distinctive architectural style
or merit, or (4) it does or could yield important “archeological or anthropological
information."
The City of Davis survey is being conducted by historical
preservation consultant Kara Brunzell of Napa (email kbrunzell@yahoo.com) with
the assistance of resident volunteers. I am one of the volunteers and one of my
tasks is to research 1303 Alice Street.
Specifically, the question is the degree to which the house at
the northeast corner of Alice and L streets might be an historical resource
under criteria numbers (1) and (2)--associated with significant patterns and
events and/or with a person significant in Davis history.
In overview, the significant
pattern here is the rise of Davis (and UCD) in the later 20th century
as an important center of a distinctively West Coast genre of high art
partially captured by the term “funk.” Developed and centered on the UCD
campus, this movement greatly influenced the development of the city’s artistic
culture and institutions and continues to do so to this day in a wide variety
of vibrant ways.
This significant pattern is associated with 1303 Alice
Street because one of the giant figures (a significant
person) in the rise of Davis as an art community lived there for fourteen
years, from 1962 to 1976. This is of course Robert Arneson, who undisputedly
ranks among the greatest American and perhaps world artists of the 20th century.
However, the mere fact that he lived at 1303 Alice for many
years is not, to me, sufficient to recommend historic resource designation.
This is because, as a university city, Davis has housed a great many world-class
intellectuals, some equaling or exceeding Arneson in their significance. If designation
depended on simply living someplace, we might be overrun with historic resource
houses, thus cheapening the very concept.
In the spirit of more connection than simple residence, let
me report a second key fact. Aronson not merely lived there; he made the place a
major subject off his art for some eight years, from about 1966 to 1974. It
might, therefore, be said to be an “art house” and not only an “artist’s
house.”
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| 1303 Alice Street, 2014 |
1303 ALICE STREET CHRONOLOGY
With this as
the framework, I shift from general declarations to the specifics of the
matter. What precisely did Arneson do at and with 1303 Alice Street and why
does it matter from a historical resources perspective?
We are exceedingly fortunate that prominent art historian
and psychoanalyst Jonathan Fineberg researched Arneson’s art and life for many
years and published an amazing description and analysis of both in his 2013 University
of California Press book titled A
Troublesome Subject: The Art of Robert Arneson. In 270-oversized double-column,
small type pages one is transported into the complex worlds of “all things Arneson.”
Professor Fineberg is a very serious and accomplished scholar
and I think I can do no better than to assemble facts relevant to historical
resource designation from his account (while also drawing on other sources).
• The 1303
Alice Street house was built at the open-field north edge of Davis in 1958 and
the Arneson family moved there in 1962. At that time, he and his spouse,
Jeanette, had three sons, aged 1, 3, and 6. A fourth son was born in 1964. Age 32 when he arrived, Arneson was about to
become a UCD tenure-track assistant professor. His last job before that was as
a high school art teacher.
• His art did not begin to feature the house
until 1966. But once started, he produced a large number of many kinds of art
objects in which it was the main subject.
 |
| Left, 1967; Right, 2014 |
• While he was prolific, he was still a relatively
unknown artist and did not yet have regular gallery outlets for his work. With
art objects piling up around the house, he decided in April of 1966 to convert the
Alice house living room into a one-day (Sunday) gallery of Alice art for sale
and to distribute flyers to everyone he knew--friend, enemy, or whatnot. (While several histories report this event, I
have not read an account of how much art he sold.)
 |
| c. 1965 (from Fineberg, 228) |
• He had a year sabbatical leave in 1967-68 in
which Jeanette and the sons lived in Doylestown, Pennsylvania for the purpose of
accessing special medical treatment for one of the boys and he lived four days
a week in New York. Not having access to a studio in which to produce ceramics,
he turned out a great many Alice objects in several other media.
• He was promoted to an associate professor
with tenure in 1968. And, in October of that year, he met 21-year-old UCD undergraduate
Sandra Shannonhouse, with whom he would begin a romantic relation.
• This relation became known to Jeanette and
there was a considerable period (years?) of break-ups and reconciliations with
both women in which there was sometimes a kind of turn-taking between the women
he was living with in the Alice house. In addition, for periods, he lived with
one or the other of them in Benicia, Berkeley, Petaluma, and a 110 Russell Blvd
apartment in Davis. (Or one of the women lived in one of these places alone.)
• The fluidity of these residential pairings
and changes was sometimes quite complicated. Professor Fineberg reports, for
example, that in the:
. . . academic year of 1971-72 they [he and Sandra] had to relocate from
. . . [the 110 Russell Street] apartment to Alice Street every weekend to look
after the boys--that was Arneson’s arrangement with Jeanette. By June he and
Shannonhouse were worn out from this arrangement and the stress split them up again.
(Fineberg, 89)
• During one period of attempted reconciliation
with Jeanette in later 1969, he made a new-start gesture of beginning to create
1,500 Arneson-style floor tiles to be installed on the Alice house kitchen
floor in time for a Christmas celebration. The project was stalled when, in
using a gasoline powered fire device to remove the vinyl already on that floor,
he ignited a large explosion that flattened him and extensively damaged the
house, requiring major restoration (and providing for an additional bedroom).
(The 1,500 tiles are apparently still there and one wonders if both they and
the house were put up for sale which would fetch a higher price.)
• The divorce action between Jeanette and
Robert became final on November 10, 1972. He and Sandra Shannonhouse were
married on May 19, 1973.
 |
| In the Alice House, 1974 (from Fineberg, 237) |
• Arneson was diagnosed with bladder cancer and
operated on in February of 1975. The couple decided to relocate to Benicia,
partly because it was a return to the town in which he grew up and partly because
it was closer to the Kaiser cancer treatment facility in Oakland. The process
of extensively rehabilitating the property they purchased in Benicia postponed
their leaving the Alice house until the summer of 1976.
* * *
These are the sparse chronological facts relating to 1303
Alice Street as regards designating it a City of Davis historical resource. In
the next post, I will describe Aroneson’s perspective on these events and his
art as reported by Professor Fineberg.
Let me close by calling attention to the portion of his entire career he spent
living in this house. If you reckon that he began life as a truly professional
artist when he moved into this house in 1962, when he died in 1992 he had been
an artist for 30 years.
With periods away, the Alice house was his main residence
for 14 years, 1962-1976. These 14 years form almost half of his entire career.
What is significant about this, to me, is that the main and
most famous and important works of the fully-developing Arneson we think of
today were done after he left Alice Street,
I think art analysts would agree. That is, there are light-years of differences
in intellectual insight and technical sophistication between his work before
and after 1976.
I point this out not to belittle the significance of the
Alice house period but to call attention to it as a fundamental fact that then
leads to this point: His achievements in the Benicia period were built upon the
person he became in the Alice period. The Benicia period would not have
happened had there not been an Alice period in which Arneson re-fashioned
himself into a person who was then a truly exceptional artist.
In the next post, I report Jonathon Fineberg’s analysis of
how and why Arneson transformed himself.
