As usual I found material online that is far from complete and I need to add my own experience to the collection. The material I found on Ron Boise the sculptor was here and here.
In late 1963 I bought five sculptures I saw in a North Beach gallery. The Vorpal Gallery (from “the Vorpal Blade went snicker snack” Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky) was owned by Muldoon Elder. We became close friends and remained so for many decades.
The five sculptures were one foot high on a wooden base. They were on my mantle at three different homes. My children grew up with them. I finally sold them back to Muldoon in the late 1980s for a little more than I paid for them. Interestingly, at the many parties I had at my homes, the women visitors liked the sculptures and a few men were offended.
In early 1964 the San Francisco police raided Muldoon’s gallery and seized much of the Ron Boise sculpture as obscene. The trial was a few months later.
My first function was to talk Muldoon out of hiring the lawyer he asked to represent him, Fay Stender, a political radical who would have generated opposition just for her role in the case. I got him to use Marshall Kause at the ACLU who brought in the trial lawyer who won the case, Ephraim Margolin. Ephraim became a lifelong friend of mine.
For three months I ran a campaign of coffee clutches and neighborhood talks among San Francisco wealthy art patrons, because I believed, at the time, that public sentiment would influence the jury outcome.
The trial had several significant features:
- The judge allowed Ephraim to bring in Boise‘s larger sculptures and place them around the room. One was of Harry Truman whose arm and hand pointed at the jury.
- Another was to bring me in, as a Republican banker in a three-piece suit to testify that I bought the Boise sculpture as fine art for my home.
- The last was my suggestion to have the director of the Legion of Art museum testify, then demand he explain the ten-foot high bodily entwined sculpture by Rodin in front of the museum that was clearly sexual. A year after the trial he removed the heavy marble Rodin, never to be seen again.
While the jury came back with a unanimous verdict in Ron’s favor, our own poll of the jurors revealed that one woman, from a small town in Texas, was the sole hold out for six hours.
Muldoon is known widely as the gallery owner who was the main seller of M.C. Escher prints in the U.S. His business grew rapidly with a gallery in New York and Southern California. Escher, who lived in Holland was very restrictive in his sale of prints. Muldoon solved that problem by enlisting every good-looking woman he could entice to fly to Holland to buy as many prints as Escher would sell. Muldoon sent a long string of women to Holland to build a very large collection for retail sale.