Making Things You Can Feel: An Interview of Larry Bell

Larry Bell with Pacific Red II. Photography by Matthew Millman, San Francisco 

introduction by Isabella Bernabeo
interview by Bill Powers

For over six decades, Larry Bell has skillfully molded contemporary art in America. Born in Chicago in 1939, Bell moved to the West Coast to study at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, the historic precursor to CalArts. 

There, Bell became a member of Los Angeles’s Cool School, a rebellious group of artists, largely represented by Walter Hopps and Irving Blum of Ferus Gallery in the 1950s and ’60s, who brought modern-day avant-garde to the West Coast. Alongside Ed Ruscha and Robert Irwin, Bell is one of the last living members of the School. As a foundational figure in the Light and Space movement, Southern California’s take on Minimalism, which often employed industrial materials and aerospace technology to explore the ways that volume, light and scale play with our sense of perception, Bell made innovative work that experimented with the interconnections of glass and light and their relations to reflection and illusion. 

His most notable works involve his creation of semi-transparent cubes made out of vacuum-coated glass to form an immersive experience as the art melts into space. Recently, six of Bell’s cubes have been installed in Madison Square Park, where they will be on view until March 15, 2026. Improvisations in the Park carries on Bell’s legacy, but with a twist. Instead of their typical white cube environment, they have been placed outside to interact with the constantly changing elements, causing a new perception almost every hour. 

This idea, related to the flexibility of perception, is also highlighted in Bell’s recent series of collage works, Irresponsible Iridescence, on view now at the Judd Foundation in New York. These collages poured out of Bell after the passing of his wife two years ago, sharing a more emotional side of his work with audiences. They also subtly allude to the close friendship between Bell and the late Donald Judd. It was Bell who convinced Judd to build this now-historic organization in Marfa, Texas, rather than El Rosario, Mexico, impacting American art history forever.  

Blues from Aspen, 2018 
Lagoon and true fog laminated glass 
Each pane: 72 x 92 x 92 inches (182.9 x 233.7 x 233.7 cm) 
Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Anthony Meier Fine Arts. Commissioned by Madison Square Park Conservancy. Photo: Timothy Schenck. 

BILL POWERS: How does your work operate differently when it’s outside?

LARRY BELL: I’m just finding out for myself because the Madison Square Park project is the first installation I’ve done with rocks and trees and grass around. I’ve had work outside in courtyards and walled-in areas and next to swimming pools, but never in a jungle like this with squirrels hopping along and birds shitting on them.

POWERS: In Rose Macaulay’s book, The Pleasure of Ruins (1953), she says that a man-made object only knows its worth when it is left to battle it out in the elements without custodianship.

BELL: Everything has its time of being and a right to patina. Some people don’t like to see a patina on a sculpture because they think it alters the work somehow. I’m from a different point of view.

POWERS: In the same vein, I don’t think I’ve seen a Marcel Duchamp where the glass hasn’t cracked by now. That doesn't mean MoMA is throwing them away.

BELL: You know Marcel Duchamp came to visit my studio in 1962. He came with Richard Hamilton and the surrealist painter William Copley.

POWERS: William Copley also had a short-lived gallery in Beverly Hills where he exhibited Man Ray and Joseph Cornell. I believe Duchamp was an unofficial advisor for the gallery.

BELL: I was maybe twenty-two years old and there was a knock on my front door in Venice. Now, I ignored it because only building inspectors would try that entrance. All my friends knew to come through the back. So, after twenty minutes of this gentle rapping on my front door, I look out through this peephole and see three guys outside who don’t look like building inspectors. I open up and instantly Copley puts his hand out and says, “Walter Hopps sent us to see you.” Now Walter was a dear friend of mine so I invited them inside.

Blues from Aspen, 2018 
Lagoon and true fog laminated glass 
Each pane: 72 x 92 x 92 inches (182.9 x 233.7 x 233.7 cm) 
Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Anthony Meier Fine Arts. Commissioned by Madison Square Park Conservancy. Photo: Timothy Schenck. 

POWERS: And did you recognize Marcel Duchamp?

BELL: See, the thing is, I was a bit deaf even back then. When Copley introduced the other guests I didn’t really catch the name and just figured they were rich collectors or something.

POWERS: Probably better not to know you had living legends visiting you.

BELL: So, I’m giving them a tour of my studio and Hamilton is explaining to the other two men how something was made.

POWERS: The fabrication of it?

BELL: Yes, but in fact he was incorrect in his assumption so I jumped in the conversation to clarify when Copley says, “Now Marcel didn’t you do this in a certain way,” I heard the name Marcel and finally put two and two together. I must have completely frozen up because they left a minute later. The studio visit was over. I couldn’t talk anymore. Duchamp was in town, I found out later, to discuss his Pasadena Museum show with Walter Hopps.

POWERS: And that was your last encounter?

BELL: No, a couple of years later, I did a show in New York at Sydney Janis—a group exhibition on 57th Street—and Duchamp invited me over for tea. His wife, Teeny, answered the door and said, “Marcel is waiting for you in the parlor.” I walked into this incredible little room and there he was: a Brancusi to my right, a Man Ray to my left, a Max Ernst over here. He greeted me warmly and then Teeny brought out a tray of milk and cookies.

POWERS: Wow, a couple of real bad boy artists, huh?

BELL: We chatted a while and then I asked him if he was doing any shows and when he had made the work. And Marcel said, “Ooh, when I was six or seven.” He was saying he started the work when he was six or seven years old.

POWERS: A joke about how all creativity springs from childhood.

BELL: I remember he smoked these little cigars, which he held between his ring finger and his middle finger. I smoked cigars back then too but I never saw anyone hold them like that.

Installation view Irresponsible Iridescence, September 29, 2025–January 31, 2026, Judd Foundation, 101 Spring Street, New York. Photo Timothy Doyon ©️Judd Foundation. Art ©️Larry Bell. Donald Judd Art © Judd Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 

POWERS: Was the Venice Beach Mafia a term you accepted being grouped into? Meaning the group of artists working in that area in the 1960s: you, Ken Price, Billy Al Bangston, Charles Arnoldi, Ed Ruscha.

BELL: I’ve actually never heard that term before but it sounds like the type of thing Judy Chicago might have called us.

POWERS: What is the rarest kind of light? Some might argue it’s the Northern Lights but I would say it’s the green flash at sunset.

BELL: I’ve seen that in Venice. More than once. At first I thought something was wrong with my eyes. I believe it’s related to the sunlight going through the water at eye level for a split second.

POWERS: Are there any colors you gravitate towards?

BELL: I like reds and blues. They do things to your eye. The blues are close to ultraviolet and the reds are close to infrared. You can’t see ultraviolet and you can’t see infrared either, but there are energies at work with those colors you can feel. I like the idea of making things that you can feel.

POWERS: Ellsworth Kelly has some color combinations like that, which dance in your eye and are almost impossible to photograph.

BELL: He was a friend of mine, Ellsworth. a gentleman.

Blues from Aspen, 2018 
Lagoon and true fog laminated glass 
Each pane: 72 x 92 x 92 inches (182.9 x 233.7 x 233.7 cm) 
Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Anthony Meier Fine Arts. Commissioned by Madison Square Park Conservancy. Photo: Timothy Schenck. 

POWERS: One of your art catalogues is named Time Machines. Is that after the book?

BELL: Have you ever read “The Invisible Man” by HG Wells? There’s a scientist named Griffin whom I feel a certain kinship with. In the story he develops a potion, which makes tissue invisible. The effect is that the body no longer absorbs light. It will pass through it. But no one from the establishment believes in his invention. He was met with ridicule and I empathize with the character. Anyway, before he tries out the potion on a person he feeds some to his landlady’s cat, which makes the animal invisible except for the pupils of its eyes. I had a large sculpture at my studio I’d just made and my daughter who was six years old walked into the center of it, and all I could see through the glass were the pupils of her eyes. So, I named the sculpture “The Dilemma of Griffin’s Cat.”

POWERS: You have said that glass does three things with light: absorb, transmit, and reflect. Which is most essential to activating your work?

BELL: I can say that the most tenuous of the three is absorbed light—that which penetrates and sticks with you.

POWERS: How did you come up with that pink carpet for your Dia Beacon piece?

BELL: It started because the building is an old factory. The room where my sculpture is situated is where they used to print the boxes for animal crackers. When they removed all the heavy machinery, there were big holes in the floor. So, I said, “We can’t do this project unless we have a pedestal or carpet underneath to level out the surface. Finally the curator agreed, and while we were sitting there she asks me, “What color are you going to make the carpet?” At that moment, her assistant was walking by wearing a pink sweater. I pointed at it and said, “THAT color!”

POWERS: Thank god the woman didn’t wear a gray turtleneck to work that day.

BELL: It was intuition and spontaneity and happenstance all rolled into one. I learned that from my teacher Robert Irwin: as an artist you have to trust yourself.

POWERS: You have a show opening at Judd Foundation in SoHo.

BELL: Don [Judd] was the first artist in New York to buy a work from me out of the studio.

Irresponsible Iridescense is on view through January 31 @ Judd Foundation 101 Spring St, New York

Improvisations in the Park is on view through March 15 @ Madison Square Park

Installation view Irresponsible Iridescence, September 29, 2025–January 31, 2026, Judd Foundation, 101 Spring Street, New York. Photo Timothy Doyon ©️Judd Foundation. Art ©️Larry Bell. Donald Judd Art © Judd Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 

Cerulean City: Larry Bell In Conversation With Helen Pashgian

Helen Pashgian sanding a polyester disc during her artist residency at Caltech circa 1971. © Helen Pashgian

The light in Los Angeles is an ephemeral commodity. Crystal clear and warmly cerulean on a good day, a hazy blue-gray on an overcast day, and miraculous at sunset as the crepuscular rays filter through the smog. The light in Southern California has inspired a century of movie making and nostalgic fantasies of paradise. This preternatural illumination has also inspired a group of artists known as the Light and Space movement. At the apex of the technological and aerospace industries of the 1960s, these artists experimented with new forms and new materials. They worked with like glass, neon, cast acrylic, fluorescence, and reactive chemicals to create a new wave of California Minimalism. For the following conversation, we paired two legends of this movement, Helen Pashgian and Larry Bell, to discuss their practice.

Helen Pashgian: Vis-a-vis our work at the very beginning, I was very much in awe of what you were doing. When I became aware of you, I thought our work was very different. But now, both of us are dealing with color in a new way, and in a much more focused way than in the past. I want to know how you feel about this, regarding your big pieces like the ones at Hauser that you showed two years ago: the big pale pink piece and the clear piece. I was really blown away by those.

Larry Bell: Well, I definitely tried to stay away from anything other than interference colors for a long time. In the last few years, I’ve been working with saturated color. There’s a different sense about color.

Pashgian: My current works have disappearing edges, and with yours, the color dissipates to nothing inside the pieces. So, it’s very different, but it’s very similar. For example, there was one corner of the room where you could stand and actually look through all of them. The way the colors meshed was incredible.

Bell: Yeah, it’s one box that surrounds a colored piece and diffuses the lighting.

Pashgian: I remember that they were diffused towards the center, and then they got very pale and disappeared, which was pretty wonderful.

Bell: Wow. Thank you. Yeah.

Pashgian: I feel this affinity with our work at the moment that I didn’t feel in the past. Also, you have always worked with glass, and I have always worked with various resins and casts. So, the techniques were different, but now some of the results seem to be very much akin to each other, although each one is still quite different.

Bell: I would agree with that. I always liked glass because you could buy it anywhere, it was relatively inexpensive, and it did three things that I really liked: it transmitted light, reflected light, and absorbed light all at the same time. By playing around with the surface, or to change any one of those qualities, it affected all of them, and in ways that you couldn’t really predict. So, I get off on looking at things for the first time, and then seeing what happens with the combination of the frosted things, and the colored things, and so on. It’s all part of one piece. These are pieces of evidence from various experiments.

Pashgian: Well, when you’re talking about experiments, it leads me to think that we were all experimenting in the early days. We never thought that anyone would pay any attention to this work. I began as an art historian, and I was artist-in-residence with Peter Alexander for two years at Caltech. It wasn’t a very successful program, but it was all about experimentation. In the past, were you involved with Disney as an animator? Is that correct?

Bell: No, I went to art school after high school because I didn’t really have any credits for anything. The only thing I remember enjoying in high school was drawing cartoons. So, I figured if I went to a school that taught animation, maybe I could get a job with Disney. And so I went to Chouinard, but it didn’t take very long before I dropped out of the quest for employment with Disney and joined the team of painters there. I liked their sense of humor better than anybody else. [Robert] Irwin was my teacher, and his first semester as a teacher was my first semester as a student at Chouinard. I was quite young then, so I didn’t last even two years at art school.

 Pashgian: So, that’s how you met?

Bell: Yeah. I was quite unhappy with my accomplishments, and Irwin said, “Look, this is a commercial school. Why get so depressed? You can just go out and get a studio and see what it’s like out there. And then, you can always come back and just pay your tuition.” So, that’s what I did. I just left school and I never went back. The first real studio I had was this long room, and the only thing that was really dramatic were the right angles that made up the corners. So, I started working with things that related to the space in the room, and the paintings that I did were the feelings of the shadows of the space. And then, those paintings became more geometric and started to represent a two-dimensional tessera, or diagram of a three-dimensional shape. And then, one day I just decided to make the shapes instead of making paintings of the shapes.

Untitled, 2018, Cast epoxy, Lens: 25 1/2 inches (64.8 cm) in diameter, Overall: 77 1/2 x 25 1/2 x 5 inches © Helen Pashgian; photo by Joshua White, courtesy the artist and Vito Schnabel Gallery

Pashgian: What’s your take on the light in Los Angeles? Mine is that the light is not more intense than anywhere else, but it’s quite different. For example, I think that the light here is a very harsh kind of a blue light. They always talk about California being the Golden State, and the golden light here, but I don’t think it’s golden at all. I think the real golden light is in the South of France and places on the Mediterranean, where the whole landscape and the seascape is very softly lit. It’s different here because we have so many buildings that are white, with metal, with cars, with freeways. The light itself feels different. Even when you’re on the coast, the light is intense and tends to be cold. But because it’s warm here, we don’t think of it as a cold, bluish light. How do you feel about that and do you think it’s had any effect on your work?

Bell: Given the chance to do something in a room that didn’t require electric lights, I would prefer to work with daylight. But I’ve found that most of my sculptural pieces appreciate natural light better than when I have to go around and light up a room. I don’t have any feelings regarding the natural light here or anywhere else.

Pashgian: I remember once, around ’70 and ’71, there were a lot of shows all over the country. Light and space was becoming known, but particularly right here in Southern California there were fifty or sixty shows, at least. One was at CalArts, and I remember somebody came up to me at the opening and said, you know, all you light people, you’re all doing the same thing. You can’t distinguish one from the other. I’ve thought about that a lot. I think they’re all very different. But they’re different in a subtle way. And I’m reminded of the words of Kirk Varnedoe: “In the Los Angeles aesthetic, reduction does not lead toward pragmatic concreteness, as it does in East Coast minimalism. Instead, it pushes toward a dissolution and disembodiment of experience…it is not an optical style, it is an actual optical experience. It points toward uncertainty, as opposed to anything essential or concrete. West Coast minimalism is all about ambiguity.” 1

Bell: There’s some truth in that.

Pashgian: But in 1969 or 1971, Irwin, Laddie [John Dill], and I all had shows in New York, Jack Brogan came back and mounted the shows, and everyone hated them. The New York Times, or another publication, said, “This is nothing. It’s just atmosphere. There’s nothing there.” And they went on to say a number of disparaging things, like, “they’ve all been in the sun too much, and baked their brains, and too many drugs.”

Bell: I don’t know how to address that at all.

Pashgian: Well, except that things have changed now. They’re paying attention.

Bell: Yeah well, we got older, Helen.

Pashgian: But we’re still doing what we like to do, and it’s still related to what we did way back then.

Bell: I think so. Everything I do now, all the new kinds of activities in the studio are a byproduct of where I came from. The variations over time really are variations of the first corners that I saw in my studio.

Pashgian: I feel exactly the same. The echoes of the very early work are present in everything we’re doing today. We have all played with different materials over the years, and I think one of the most interesting hybrids of what you did was that great fashion show at 72 Market Street. You had models in the dresses that were made with your paintings on them. They were very beautiful, minimal dresses, usually floor length.

Bell: Yeah. They shifted interference colors too, depending on the angle. 

Pashgian: And how they moved in them. 

Bell: Right. Snakey. Those girls were snakey.

Pashgian: I think, very simply, that Los Angeles is becoming the epicenter. Almost all the major galleries in the world are moving here and the Pacific Rim is extremely important. I would say that the focus of major institutions, like LACMA, has been on countries that border the Pacific Rim. Michael Govan has discussed this a bit, LA is becoming vibrant in a new way.. How do you feel about that, Larry?  

Bell: I have almost no feelings about the art world at all. I go to Venice to work in my studio about every three weeks or so, and then I come back to New Mexico and prepare materials to take out there. I got lucky and fell into working with the Hauser & Wirth, and they’ve been so supportive that I’ve been able to do just about everything that I’ve ever wanted. That’s my scene. I have very little feelings about the arts scene of LA because I don’t really live there. I live in a hotel near my studio, and I spend every day in the studio. Going out is the drive from the house in New Mexico to Venice Beach. It takes fifteen hours in my Suburban. I go with my assistant and my dog, we check into the hotel, and then we go into the studio, unload everything, and then we go right to work.  

Pashgian: Do you still have Pinkie or do you have a new Pinkie?

Bell: No, Pinkie’s right here next to me and she’s all of sixteen.

Pashgian: Oh great, well give her my best.

Bell: All right, you’ve got it.

1. Kirk Varnedoe, Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art Since Pollock (New York: Princeton University Press, 2006), 114 

Correction: In our print edition, we attributed the aforementioned referenced quote to Kurt von Meier when it is actually Kirk Varnedoe

Interview published in Autre Volume 2 Issue 8. September 2019

Larry Bell Standing between glass installation, Venice Studio, Photo by Ron Cooper