Ed Kienholz
L.A. Louver
During the early ’60s in Los Angeles, Ed Kienholz forced a culture to confront itself in a series of unforgiving, deeply felt tableaux. His well-known The Back Seat Dodge, ’38, 1964, and The Illegal Operation, 1962, were shown this summer, for the first time in many years, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; seen retrospectively, these early works retained their ability to provoke and dismay. The painful friction of confrontation and exposure that viewers felt in the early ’60s, however, gave way to sad, even tender, feelings of empathy, as they looked back in time and realized that things