Los Angeles Modern Auctions (LAMA)

Zlotnick herself marked her beginning as a “serious” collector” with the purchase of a John Altoon painting from Ferus Gallery in the late 1950s. Shortly thereafter, she would acquire assemblage works from Daniel LaRue Johnson and George Herms and, in 1963, she bought her first Ed Ruscha at an auction for $30. The Studio City house that the Zlotnicks purchased in the mid-1960s was to become not only a home, but alternately a museum, gallery, and salon, with artists and art aficionados frequently passing through. Diana paid little mind to what “the neighbors might think” in the well-to-do community of Laurelwood – the couple’s younger daughter Marianne recalls coming home from high school one day to discover Timothy Leary as a guest. When room to hang artwork became scarce, Zlotnick patched over the dining room windows to make more wallspace. At one point, she encouraged her older daughter Bonnie and her friends to express themselves by drawing directly on their bedroom walls as they pleased. Her husband was even known to treat artists’ animals – Marianne recalls a postcard from Wallace Berman thanking Harry for “the medicine for Rover.”

Nowhere, perhaps, is Diana Zlotnick’s enthusiasm, curiosity, and zeal more apparent than within the pages of Newsletter on the Arts (NOTA), which she wrote, published, and disseminated on a sometimes monthly, sometimes seasonal, basis from 1971–2019. In its earliest incarnation, the typewritten missive was simply headlined “What’s Up?,” a nod to her boots-on-the-ground style of observing and absorbing the city’s burbling art scene. Through Zlotnick’s idiosyncratic and frequently diaristic chronicling, Newsletter on the Arts shared not only exhibitions and performances in Los Angeles, as well as LA artists working in New York and abroad, but also births, marriage announcements, and obituaries, grant recipients and Guggenheim fellowships, acquittals, forthcoming publications, wanted ads, investment advice, personal invitations, and – significantly ­­– her own art criticism.

The picture that emerges is one of an art lover writing herself into history from a place of pure passion, undaunted by any trappings of art world exclusivity.

As her confidence and collection grew, Zlotnick continued to carve out a space for her own reflections on the art she saw, including pointed contradictions to the more formal critiques printed in the LA Times and elsewhere. “The Los Angeles Times Does It Again,” Zlotnick wrote in the Spring 1978 issue of NOTA, “Critics Suzanne Muchnic and William Wilson failed to understand and enjoy the geometric forms of Channa Horwitz that bend, flow, expand, and diminish within a linear matrix.” Her ability to articulate her thinking on the works she loved did not stay confined to NOTA, either. She wrote a catalog essay for the 1986 show Southern California Assemblage: Past and Present, hosted events in her Studio City home, took a curatorial role in helping to organize exhibitions, and led classes and seminars including at the University of Southern California. The picture that emerges is one of an art lover writing herself into history from a place of pure passion, undaunted by any trappings of art world exclusivity.

To engage with Diana Zlotnick and the works that she loved is to glimpse a truly unique collector, one who cast herself not merely as a benefactor, but as a co-conspirator. She worked hard and thought hard; as her daughter Marianne put it, “Aside from her children and grandchildren, art was her life to the end.” Indeed, prior to her passing in 2021, she brought Ed Ruscha’s Thirty-four Parking Lots when she went for her Covid vaccine at Dodger Stadium ­– in order to point out Ruscha’s photograph of the same parking lot, taken decades earlier.

Diana Zlotnick’s legacy as a collector lives on in the myriad institutions to which she gifted works, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Orange County Museum of Art, the Laguna Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. LA Modern Auctions is proud to be a part of this legacy, and to celebrate the world of Diana Zlotnick and the historic milieu that she fervently bolstered as a collector and connector.