After my conference on Saturday, I crossed over Market Street and headed up to the Paule Anglim Gallery at 14 Geary to see the Jess show, which Stephen Vincent was good enough to let people on the Poetics List know was there. The show is simply fabulous, the best gathering of Jess’ work I’ve ever seen. It made me hyperconscious of just how deeply we need a major retrospective of Jess’ work, and a huge four-color catalog to go with it.
If you don’t know already, Jess was Jess Collins, Robert Duncan’s life partner for some three dozen years. Trained as a scientist, he had worked on the Manhattan Project during World War 2, but when he discovered the implications of his labors, he abandoned science and became an artist specializing in paste-ups (as he called his collage and mixed media work), assemblings (as he called his found-object sculptural creations) and some rapturous oils, the most famous of which no doubt must be his The Enamored Mage: Translation No. 6, which you can view via that link to the gallery, a portrait of Duncan alongside a series of volumes on the occult.
Even in the space of a gallery show, one can get glimpses of Jess’ career, range & power as an artist. While his painting emerged from the same San Francisco abstract-comes-to-figuration movement of the 1950s as, say, David Park (there is a fabulous abstract field painting – the price list calls it a “Romantic Painting” – with some dark blue squiggles not far from the center that one can make out quite clearly as Don Quixote & Sancho Panza, at which point the blocky squares to the right transform from Hoffmanesque rectangles into a fog-enshrouded castle). There are several amazing collages from 1953 that suggest, at least to my eye, that, at that early moment, Jess was further along in his work as an artist than was Duncan as a poet. Throughout, however, I think it is clear just how much each contributed to the work of the other. Not only is the frontispiece of The Opening of the Field in the show, you can see Duncan’s poetry in Jess’ artwork as deeply as you can see his art in Robert’s poems. This was one of history’s great collaborations.
Although the gallery website says that the show focuses on the 1950s through ‘70s, there are later works here also, including Jess’ final painting, completed some six years before his death in ’03 at the age of 81. In this tall, thin painting is the silhouette of a man in a tan color on which is superimposed crosswise a line drawing of the portrait of a crowd. It’s a complex, undecidable image, very characteristic of the artist.
Like the California Historical Society show I discussed on Monday, I could see things not present that I wished had been included: Jess’ grand collage for Duncan’s 1970 reading of Passages in Berkeley over multiple nights, more of the Tricky Cad collages transforming old Dick Tracy comics – these are some of the earliest uses of comics in what would become Pop Art in the 1960s.
A reclusive person – I never once saw Jess at a reading of Robert’s or anyone else’s – Jess can’t be pegged into any school, tho several generations of artists drew heavily from him (everyone from Wallace Berman and Bruce Conner to Robert Mapplethorpe took serious note). It would be great if The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art had the wits to acquire The Enamored Mage – that would be the ideal place for it. And indeed all these pieces – and the others not represented in this show’s two galleries – deserve to be in public collections. It is we who will be richest the more widely they are distributed and known.
