Winding your way up the steep roads of Malibu, it’s easy to forget you’re a quick drive from the Santa Monica promenade and not traveling to some exotic wine region in Europe. As you approach Kim and Michael McCarty’s Douglas Rucker-designed home—the glinting Pacific and cantilevered tennis court below, the family’s Malibu Vineyard, and dotting of wild spring flowers above—it’s clear why the McCartys chose to reconstruct their entire property after the 1993 Old Topanga Fire destroyed the original. Their souls live here.
Known for ethereal watercolors of waify figures and portraits in a bruisy palette of browns, acid greens and yellows, Kim McCarty is an artist with works in collections at the Hammer Museum of Art in Los Angeles and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her massive, sunlit studio is our first stop; it is the space where she spends the bulk of her time, honing her painterly practice, despite being the co-owner of one of LA’s most iconic eateries, Michael's. Trained in Paris, Michael McCarty has been a trendsetting chef and restaurateur since he first returned to LA in his 20s, decades before the city emerged as the cultural landscape of today. Without the McCartys, heavy decor and French cuisine might still reign supreme, while Angelenos might well be confined to indoor dining.
For over 45 years, the couple has collected contemporary art and nurtured LA’s art scene from their Santa Monica restaurant, a beloved outpost for Southern California’s thought leaders, sculptors, painters, and art dealers from the moment its doors opened in 1979. Last month, the couple celebrated the 35th birthday of their legendary New York outpost with a few hundred East and West Coast trailblazers and glitterati. Theirs is a love story—of clean California cooking, fine wine, deep artist friendships, and above all else, each other.
Your relationships with the culinary arts and contemporary artists are intertwined. Take us back to your early days in LA.
Kim McCarty: Michael and I met at UC, Boulder, where I was an art student and he had just come back from France [where he trained] at Le Cordon Bleu and Ecole Hotelière. He was there teaching French cooking at the University of Colorado. In December 1975, we moved back to LA so he could open our first restaurant, Michael’s, in Santa Monica. I was 19 and Michael was 22. We wanted someone to help us design a collection of local LA artists for the space, and we met Peter Goulds from LA Louver Gallery. He was this young guy in town that took Michael seriously. He loved the idea of engaging all the senses—art, food, music, everything.
Michael McCarty: It was a very formative period of getting to know the lay of the land here in LA. There were only about eight or nine galleries in those days, just like there were really only eight or nine restaurants. Through Kim's time at the Art Center College of Design, [where she completed her BFA], we started meeting Southern California artists.
Kim: Local artists started coming into the restaurant—David Hockney, Dennis Hopper, Marcel Duchamp’s wife Alexina Sattler (who went by Teeny), William Brice, who is in our collection. It became a gathering place. Then, I went on to get an MFA at UCLA and there was this whole other group of artists.
Michael: That was when the fun really started. Stanley and Elyse Grinstein, the owners of Gemini G. E.L. prints, would come to Michael’s and any night you would go in, they might be sitting at their table on the terrace. They would say, “Here, I’d like you to meet Jasper Johns.” Then a few weeks might go by, “Here, I’d like you to meet Helen Frankenthaler or James Rosenquist. Here, I’d like you to meet Roy Lichtenstein or Jim Dine.” It went on and on. We got to know all the bad boys and girls.
In the beginning, it was just us collecting and building five restaurants. We had to make a collection for each restaurant, and they were extraordinary. If you pick up an old copy of Apartment Life from 1986, they have pictures of our restaurant, the Rattlesnake Club, in Denver, loaded with Jonathan Borofsky sculptures and Charles Garabedian paintings—huge pieces. Some of the works were loaned to us, some we did as trades for food or cooking, and some we bought back then.
Kim: We had about 5 Ed Ruschas. Michael commissioned Ed to do a watercolor pastel of restrooms that he did for us.
What was the LA restaurant scene like when you started out?
Michael: The year we opened here, in 1979, we had a rule that you had to have the plates hit the table, whether it was two people dining or 8 people, all at once. The first reaction of everybody is looking at their plates, and their neighbor’s plates, and going, “Wow, they are beautiful.” We had already determined that was going to be the way for us, that the restaurant pioneered the really good modern art on the walls concept. Mostly, restaurants were classical French and none of them focused on artists. Music was another thing. We had contemporary music, instead of classical. We wanted beautiful outdoor dining, with a gorgeous garden. You’re sitting in a beautiful environment that’s loaded with flowers and trees and air. The waiters were dressed in Ralph Lauren pink polo shirts with red ties, instead of tuxedos.
Kim: All the restaurants were inside in Los Angeles. The garden was a total foreign concept.
Michael: There were no Americans in this business really. They were mostly Europeans from cold weather climates and their vision was totally different. They wanted to do Maxim's in Paris here, that level of formality, with red interiors and those little weird lamps on the table.
Your restaurant played a role in the founding of the LA art world we take for granted today. Can you spill some tea?
Michael: MOCA was basically founded in the private room of our upstairs restaurant with Eli Broad, Max Palevsky, Marsha Weissman, Bill Norris, and Pontus Hultén. This was 1979 or 1980. It was the beginning of how they put together the concept of MOCA, with the intelligentsia downtown. They knew that if you get the developer to pay for it, they could install MOCA inside of this huge project. Kim was on the board of the Santa Monica Museum of Art, which was about 10 years later.
Since we didn’t have any money, we gave food and beverage to all the museums, like LACMA and MOCA. In other words, if you called the director up and said, “Listen, what’s your patron annual amount?” And they answered, “It’s $2500 or $5000.” We said, “Good, would you accept that in a food and beverage trade?” I told them, “You can bring all your rich people here and ply them with good food and alcohol and show them the art scene that we have, and raise money that way.” When LACMA built their new wing, there was a wall called “founders.” They were all clients of the restaurant. It was an exciting time because it really mobilized so many people.
Do you both have an overall art collecting philosophy for your home in Manhattan and this one in Malibu?
Michael: I’ve always said we never bought art from somebody we never met. The only exception was Marcel Duchamp, but his widow would eat at the LA restaurant all the time for lunch because her best friends were the designers Ray and Charles Eames. So they would bring her for happy hour.
Do you like to visit art fairs?
Kim: I have to say, I only go to art fairs once in a while if I’m in them myself, as an artist. When you’re trying to be creative yourself, it’s overwhelming to look at all those works. I will go to Frieze LA, because that’s an event here. I sometimes go to art fairs in New York. But I don’t go in December ever, because that’s a really busy time for the restaurants in New York and Los Angeles. Michael and I already have a built-in social life with our restaurant. But the fairs serve a purpose and are also good for people, so I’m not going to knock them or anything.
Michael: Kim has been in many of the art fairs in Miami, and she has shown in places like David Klein Gallery in Detroit, and Morgan Lehman and James Danziger in New York when he had a space out here. I always likened the artist going to an art fair as being a pork chop in the butcher display case.
How do you balance your painting practice with the restaurant business and being a collector?
Kim: I don’t think of myself as being a collector. It is just a group of friends that I have on my wall. Juggling is always difficult, and it’s alway more complicated as you get older, but every day I’m just in my studio from 9 to 5. I just make daily practice of that. Working in the studio is my lifeline. That doesn’t mean I don't get interrupted, but even when I’m in New York and I work out of my apartment—and even if I do crap—I’ll go to my studio. You’ll hear this from every artist: It’s like you don’t have a choice. It’s always been that way for me. Even when we’re opening up restaurants, and I had babies, I’d stay up all night painting. You always feel pulled. There’s no easy answer. But I also think that having a restaurant makes me crave the studio even more, because I really need the quiet time.
Do you ever use an art advisor or interior designer for your home?
Kim: Oh no, we just find a nail and hang it.
What are some of your favorite pieces in your Malibu home right now?
Michael: Well, look at the room we are in here. The dark piece is a Marlene Dumas. The one next to is a Billy Al Bengston. There’s a Roger Herman—and you’ve got two works by Kim that she did when she started doing iris prints. Remember Crosby, Stills & Nash? So Graham Nash was a big photographer and collector, and created this great machine that you could take a painting and digitally print into it—it’s called an iris print.
