Kenneth Kendall takes an intimate look at celebrity in 'Hollywood Confidential'

SANTA FE — Sometimes to appreciate works of art, we have to set aside our prejudices. I have a longstanding aversion to portraits of James Dean, which often crop up at low-end art fairs alongside similarly tacky portraits of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe. Beyond the sheer unoriginality, I see the proliferation of Dean-themed art as a crass attempt to profit from the tragic death, decades ago, of a celebrity whom these artists never knew.

But Kenneth Kendall (1921–2006) is different. As far as I can tell, he was the only portrait artist Dean actually met in person and commissioned while he was still alive. Kendall began sculpting a bust in clay at the request of the then-unknown actor, using a life mask loaned to him by the family. When the actor died unexpectedly at the age of 24, Kendall’s completed sculpture, cast in bronze, was installed at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles as an official memorial, still visited by legions of fans every year.

Kendall went on to sculpt and paint numerous images of Dean over the decades, two of which are currently on view at Daniel Cooney Fine Art in Santa Fe. One, from 1987, takes the form of a 5-inch oval-shaped enamel-on-porcelain cameo. Every strand of the heartthrob’s hair is lovingly painted, and the swirls of his cigarette smoke are rendered in low sculptural relief. You wouldn’t know Kendall was self-taught, judging by his impeccable technique.

But Kendall was much more than a technically skilled James Dean portraitist.

Born in Hollywood before the advent of talkies, Kendall came of age just as film was entering its Golden Age. As a young, closeted gay man, he developed fanboy crushes on many of Hollywood’s leading men, and his celebrity portraits are distinctly queer-coded. His zodiac-themed drawings of the body builder and actor Steve Reeves from 1951 are downright erotic, showcasing Reeve’s plump, glistening muscles. Created at the height of the so-called Lavender Scare, and six years before Tom of Finland (Touko Valio Laaksonen) published his first male pinup drawings, Kendall’s sexually charged depictions of male subjects were not only taboo but unheard-of in the 1950s, making Kendall a truly pioneering figure in the history of queer art.

Kendall worked as a background actor in blockbuster films, including “Citizen Kane,” mostly, it seems, as a way to get closer to the actors he adored. Meanwhile, he maintained an antique repair shop on Melrose Avenue, which was frequented over the years by everyone from Mae West to Mick Jagger. The antiques he worked on influenced his art, which leaned heavily into Victorian aesthetics, as seen in his revival of cameo-style porcelain wall plaques and his use of giltwood frames.

Such decorative, high camp elements were very much out of favor in the 1940s and ‘50s — when the earliest works in “Hollywood Confidential” date from — the antithesis, in every respect, of the macho abstract-expressionist style that dominated those decades. Even his signature was unfashionable. At a time when most serious artists had stopped signing the front of their paintings, Kendall doubled down on an ostentatious signature full of art nouveau curlicues. In a 1945 self-portrait and a 1951 portrait of Bill Suiter, both included in this show, he painted his signature to resemble an elaborate hand-stitched logo on a trompe-l’oeil garment tag, the kind seen on the inside of bespoke men’s suits.

I imagine it would have been hard for Kendall to find galleries to show his work in those days, although the fact that he never showed in any gallery, even in the 1990s and early 2000s, indicates that art world fame just wasn’t something he cared about. He made his art mainly for himself, as an expression of his inner desires — his love of cinema, antiques and beautiful men — and he was gratified when it attracted the attention of the celebrities he admired, turning his parasocial relationships into genuinely social ones. By the last decades of his life, Kendall’s Melrose Avenue shop had become a prominent hangout spot for entertainers and bohemians of all stripes — the famous, the infamous and the totally unknown — and he painted them all. He sometimes idealized his subjects — particularly in his cameo portraits — while in other paintings, their public masks slip off, and we see the emotional vulnerability in their eyes.

Kendall’s proximity to celebrity, despite being ignored by the art world, makes him a curious insider-outsider figure. Homophobia, coupled with 20th century prejudices against historiographic or antiquarian-minded art — and perhaps his own disinterest — kept him from being recognized as a great artist during his lifetime. Yet he was still able to live a relatively comfortable life in Hollywood, making boldly homoerotic art while maintaining his own sexuality as an open secret, which was no easy feat.

The paintings in “Hollywood Confidential” are a testament to Kendall’s ability to navigate an often treacherous social milieu with panache while staying true to his inner vision. Like many queer cultural figures, including the painter and novelist Denton Welch (1915–1948), Kendall’s genius is only starting to be recognized posthumously, decades after his death.

For too long, Kendall has been reduced to an art historical footnote — the James Dean memorial guy — which flattens and obscures his enduring significance. His art, so unfashionable when he made it, seems prescient in light of postmodernism and contemporary queer theory. His explorations of celebrity culture and his interest in the slippage between people’s private lives and their public personas anticipates the media-critical discourse that pop art brought to the fore in the 1960s, and which was extended and deepened by The Pictures Generation artists of the 1970s and ’80s. Of course, Kendall’s commitment to craft is impressive in its own right, and his gorgeous, thoughtful work demands to be seen in person.

It’s high time for the art world to rediscover Kenneth Kendall, and thankfully a dealer like Daniel Cooney, working in concert with the artist’s estate, has put in the necessary legwork to preserve Kendall’s art and contextualize it properly. Museums take note.

Kenneth Kendall takes an intimate look at celebrity in 'Hollywood Confidential'