Self Portrait, Crater Lane, 1955

Wallace Berman was the quietly pulsing heart of the West Coast Beat movement. He created collage art from found images, compiled the work of artists including Bukowski and Ginsberg in his zine, and observed his generation through the lens. Yet an upcoming exhibition at the Camden Arts Centre is the first to show his work in the UK.

Having been permanently excluded from (his LA high school) for betting, the young Berman spent time familiarising himself with the West Coast Jazz scene. A brief spell at art college proved restricting (too many lectures) and he dropped out, though he found his creative outlet while working at an antique factory (oxymoron?) creating sculptures from scraps.

Seeming to settle down a little in the 50s, he married and became a father. The Berman household remained a "24-hour party", according to his son, who recalls one of his earliest memories as being that of the bloodied face of (folk singer) Ramblin' Jack Eliot pushed against his bedroom window (he had fallen down drunk). Also, Andy Warhol shot his first feature film there.

Verifax 1

Clearly enamoured by early reprographics, he also used Verifax (pre-Xerox copying machine) techniques to create art.

With the beat movement gathering momentum, Wallace saw opportunity to begin producing his own magazine. Before the age of the internet, you weren’t always just a few clicks away from quality alternative publications, so the zine medium was crucial for distributing the work of underground artists.

The name Semina (or 'seed') is appropriate to the embryonic Beat scene that blossomed around it. Wallace gathered contributions from a circle of friends ranging from Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs (Semina was allegedly his first publisher) to Dennis Hopper (for whom he played a seed-sower in Easy Rider) and Bobby Driscoll (the voice of Peter Pan - sadly did grow up, and died from heroin aged 31).

Wallace Berman, Semina, editions 1-9, 1955-64

The first and only exhibition of his work during his lifetime was at the Ferus Gallery, and was interrupted by those famous detractors of the beatnik movement, the LAPD, who took offence to a sketch of two people mid-coitus (actually drawn by a friend, Cameron, for an issue of Semina).

As most of his photography was destroyed in a landslide that took his house, he was never highly acclaimed for his photographic work. However, the discovery of an archive of negatives in 1999 has unveiled many of these images and it is easy to dream of the treasury of iconic models that might've appeared in his shots. Especially given the repeated use of famous figures such as the Beatles and James Brown in his collages.

Cementing his place at the apex of hippie Olympus, the bearded chap was included on the cover of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, by the seminal pop-rock group, The Beatles.

Papa's Got a Brand New Bag, 1964

It is interesting then that in a way he pre-figured the East coast Pop movement's obsession with celebrity, but without ever reaching stardom himself. Despite his active involvement with the Beat glitterati, his quiet and unassuming demeanour kept him from the limelight of his rebellious friends. His assemblage style of collage mixed with found objects acted as a technical bridge from DuChamp to Warhol. Wallace Berman was a link, between artistic styles and friendship groups, tradition and the future. He cut and he pasted, and the world almost forgot he was there.

He died on his 50th birthday, in a traffic accident caused by a drink-driver.

Untitled, 1972. Courtesy of Jewish Museum, NYC

Wallace Berman runs from 26 Sept until 23 Nov at the Camden Arts Centre. More info at www.camdenartscentre.org
 www.camdenartscentre.org

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