Rat Fink – the anti-Mickey Mouse – arrived about the same time, and almost overnight became a hit with hot rodders, kids and anyone else looking for a way to express their rebellion against the establishment. In 1960, he built his first completely custom car – the Outlaw, featuring a fiberglass molded body – which was an instant hit in the car shows and hot rod magazines. The monster shirts – or “weirdo shirts,” as they were typically known – become a huge part of his business in the late ’50s. Hot rodders loved the small monster caricatures he often incorporated into his paint jobs, and eventually started to hire him to design T-shirts for their car clubs. “It’s kind of funny how that is – he’s becoming recognized as an artist, as a serious fine painter – when he was always doing it, but wasn’t recognized by the establishment.”īorn in Beverly Hills in 1932 and raised in Bell, Roth’s main interests in high school were his art classes and learning to build hot rods out of old cars.Īfter a stint in the Air Force, he came back to Los Angeles County and went into business as a car pinstriper and painter. “The price of an original Roth now is very much going the way of fine painting, which he derided for years. “He’s collected by museums auctions are bringing good prices,” Mann says. “People are just starting to realize that there’s real value to the cultural aspects of it,” he says.Īnd “Tales of the Rat Fink,” a documentary by director Ron Mann, recently arrived on DVD after successful runs in film festivals and art houses around the world this year. “It’s just beginning – just starting to leave the launch pad,” says Dick Messer, director of the Petersen Automotive Museum, where the major retrospective on Roth is now on display. It’s a coming-out party of sorts for the late Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, who made his name in the ’50s and ’60s as the builder of fanciful custom cars and the creator of rebellious icons such as Rat Fink and other hot-rodding monsters.įor while Roth – who died in 2001 – was always revered by fans of underground art, custom cars and the California-born Kustom Kulture scene, now more than ever he is recognized as an American artist, plain and simple. Outside the Los Angeles museum, an animated documentary on the artist is screened on a wall, a flea-bitten green rat serving as a drooling, gibbering chorus to the story. The gallery lights draw the eye to the art on display: a parade of custom-painted wild-eyed rats along one wall, a grid of T-shirt silk screens backlit like holy relics along another.
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