Leonard Kaplan passed away on April 15, 2008 at 6:25 pm. He was much loved and will be missed tremendously.
For those of you who knew Lenny Kaplan, please click on the comment link below to post any thoughts or comments. Thank you!
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Leonard Kaplan
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The best way to remember Leonard Kaplan is as an excruciatingly humorous man. He may have ended his days in despair, and been riddled throughout lifewith many neuroses, but funny stories and incidents are the icing on his cake.
When I told Ruth that he had died, the second thing she said, after,expressing sorrow at his passing was, do you remember how he had mushrooms growing on his roof? He watered his roof so much because he was afraid of fire, that mushrooms started growing there, and they got so heavy that he had to replace the roof. My own favorite is of the time when one of his endless parade of pretty girlfriends was bringing him a big salad that they might eat in his hot tub. Lennie was sitting in the swirling waters as she approached, slipped on the wet floor, and fell headfirst into the Jacuzzi, salad and all. He told me that it was like being in a tureen of vegetable soup, with legs sticking outof it.
Geoff Rikeras favorite story was about the time of Lenny fishing triumph. Lenny had been bed-ridden off and on for years with a ruined back, but eventually recovered enough to start walking all over the place. He was ableto indulge his treasured pursuit of surf fishing again, and was quite successful at it. His triumph came the day he caught a big White Sea Bass at Arch Beach. He was bringing it home in a gunny sack, and crossing the highway when he had to step lively to get out of the way of a truck. Just as he jumped, the sack parted, and the fish fell in the street, where it was squashed flat by the truck tires.
We all know that Lennie was a successful merchant of exquisite art, eclectically assembled from God only knows where, which he vended through his store on Glenneyre near Thaila, Ancient Art. He developed a large and sophisticated clientele including many celebrities from Hollywood. One of these was the elegant horror movie actor who was so shrewd a haggler that Lenny dubbed him Vincent half-Price.
During the psychedelic era, Captain James Broadbelt, of the Orange CountySheriff's Department, whose wife was a devotee of the Arts, got the wrong-headed idea that Lenny was some kind of player in the drug trade. He took to hanging around and making arch remarks to Lenny, who finally gave in and handed him a crumbly substance from his fridge with the injunction to take it judiciously, because it was extremely habit-forming. Do you know what it was? he asked me, Turkish halvah!!!
Many people, including the Broadbelts, wished to own more of Lenny's Art than they could pay for. Lenny loved to tell the story of the time he had cleaned out his old cabinets and thrown away a lot of marginal sketches and drawings. He looked out and saw a lot of people rummaging through his trash cans at the roadside, and came out to see what was happening. The passer-by were retrieving his rejected fragments from the garbage, and started to beg him to sign them, which he obligingly did. It was the best opening I ever had! he claimed.
Eventually Lenny bore down on making his own Art to the exclusion of his mercantile career selling antique stuff. He was a maker of works as sensitive as they were intellectually brilliant. Over the years of his trafficking in Art, Lenny had accrued a large number of early (16th-19thCentury) biological/natural-historical prints. He insouciantly began to cut these treasures up and to use the bits to make collages of hitherto unknown creatures in the environments of his imagination, and lit by the fires of his unique mind. Yikes, Lennie!!, I protested, these things are great!! How much are you asking for them? You can't afford the frames, he said.
R.I.P.
Dion Wright
I first met Leonard in 1968, when I was in Latin classes at UC Irvine with his then girlfriend, Joyce Brown Farmer, a fabulous artist in her own right given to drawing and publishing her own underground comic, "Tits and Clits." We remained fast friends over the ensuing 40 years, his acute sense of humor and unassailable good taste in everything binding us like glue.
It was Leonard who took Joyce and me to the art galleries along La Cienaga, where real art history was being made. Even after Joyce broke up with Leonard, I remained friends with him -- he was completely addictive. It was Lenny who sold me my first antique, a 16th century choir book page that I still have to this day. At one point, I had a running tab with him for things he would wave in front of my nose or tell me to take home and live with for a while before paying him. Did I ever bring anything back? Hell, no.
There is no question that Leonard was a master conflabulator. My favorite story is the one he would tell about his Uncle Harry, who somehow managed to shove a pea up his nose, which started to grow out of his nostril.
In the early 80s, when Leonard decided to "retire" from Ancient Arts (which never really happened, since he was always dealing out of his living room in back of the shop), I was a part of the crazy cabal of people who came to visit him almost everyday. It was when crazy Elsie Paalzow and Doug Whitney were living upstairs. Elsie and I regaled ourselves with the stories that Lenny had told each of us about the other, not knowing that Elsie and I were comparing stories. Sometimes we'd laugh so hard we would cry over some of the nonsense that Lenny would dish.
I have too many stories about Leonard to tell in such a short space. The important thing is that we all loved him tremendously. He was the inspiration that compelled me to become an arts writer and critic and his compassion and humanity, not to mention his wacked out stories and jokes, will be sorely missed, but never, ever forgotten.
We are especially pleased to hear that Leonard Kaplan's life & art will be feted on Aug. 20th. My wife, Jeri Kissler Painter, also a artist, and I were friends with Leonard since the late 1980s when we leased his old antique shop on Glenneyre and transformed it into Cafe Zoolu. I had just graduated from OCC Culinary Arts program and my dream was to open a neighborhood cafe that would also be a gallery for my wife's paintings. Without Leonard's encouragement, ideas & cheap rent Cafe Zoolu would never have happened. We sold Zoolu to Michael & Tony Lynch in the early 90s and they still run it and it's still one of Laguna's most successful restaurants.
Lonnie Painter & Jeri Kissler-Painter
My Wife Jan & I just purchased an original Kaplan "Nude" from an Art Dealer in San Juan Capistrano.
He was an Amazing Artist & Collector of fine Arts, a tremendous asset to the Community of Laguna Beach!
He will be missed!
Chris & Jan Oiestad
I just came across Lennie’s blog. Alas, even the fabulous and remarkable life he created fades in memory as we all age. My comment addition here is in 2020, eight years after the last comment, by I believe, his grandson.
I was a good friend and neighbor of Lennie in the 1980s. We were friends with highly diverse and eclectic interests. I lived a few streets over on Cress and would often drop by for conversations and a bit of photography. At that time I was an aerospace physicist, having recently left the Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and now was involved in nuclear fusion research at the Occidental Research Corporation in Irvine.
I believe I met Lennie at one of the amazing parties held by a local artist Christina De Musée, whose numerous parties seemed to be populated by an incredible number of artists and marvelously eccentric personalities.
Visiting Lennie’s antique shop blended with his home was always a joyful experience as one traveled a micro-journey of artistry, history and fabulous story-telling. Walking through his labyrinthine home was like walking through the personal basement repository of the eccentric keeper of a fine museum.
His keen knowledge was profoundly broad, but also from a practical side, as a fine artist and craftsman, he was capable of replicating antiques made-to-order. Along with his many artistic faces, he had worked as a department store window designer and learned how to fabricate almost any style of art. He proudly showed me a lovely Inuit (Eskimo) bone carving (or ivory) that he had carved, that had been recognized as a genuine Inuit work of art by museum curators. I think the hand-sized carving was of an erect man on a snow sled with a spear.
One time I brought him a wooden duck decoy that I had purchased new at a store. I had acquired it for decorative purposes. He looked at it and remarked that it could be improved with proper ageing. He took solvents to it and rubbed the decoy to wear down the paint, and then put it in the oven to bake the surface. When he was finished, it looked like a genuine 100 year old decoy, that had lain in a barn for ages. Remarkable!
I especially enjoyed his pre-Columbian ceramic collection. He was an astute collector and dealer. In the back of his home were many glass cases exhibiting beautifully crafted, museum-quality ceramic warriors, men, women and other Aztec and Mayan ceramics. He would instruct me on the finer points of distinguishing the more valuable, rarer and better–crafted smaller ceramic figures from the much larger ruder pieces, that less informed collectors were more likely to purchase.
On one of his birthdays I gave him a present that was something unique and distinct from his multifarious collection of art. I had taken many photographs of his personally created art and also portrait photographs of himself. I took several of the bust portraits, as well as some of his more exotically-crafted drawings and converted them into miniature replicas of United States 33¢ postage stamps. They really gave him quite a chuckle. I wonder where those stamp sheets are now?
I’m retired now from the aerospace industry, waiting for my last satellite, the James Webb Space Telescope to launch. I’ve moved back in time to my first love of documentary photography. If he were here, I know he’d be delighted to note that my work is in the Smithsonian American History Museum, as well as other institutions, and I’m the recipient of an Emmy Award.
I do miss him and the pleasure of his company. A true rara avis.
Stephen Somerstein – San Francisco, CA
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