WALLACE BERMAN, SEMINA 7 (1961): A Portrait of the

Transcription

WALLACE BERMAN, SEMINA 7 (1961):
A Portrait of the Underground Artist as a Dead Man
A Thesis presented to the Faculty of the Department of Art History, Brooklyn College
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts
By
Samuel Farnsworth
Spring 2011
2
ABSTRACT:
At the heart of Wallace Berman!s understudied career are the nine issues of Semina
that the artist hand-printed in limited runs between 1958-1964. Semina 7 (1961) is the
only issue authored solely by Berman and it has been described as possessing both
autobiographical and elegiac qualities. This paper reviews previously ignored portions of
Semina 7 to suggest a new reading. I argue that Semina 7!s somber mood, its tributes
to recently deceased artists and other culturally marginalized figures -- all set for the first
time in the artist!s own voice -- can be understood as a eulogy to Berman!s own
secluded self.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Introduction: 3
1. Before Semina 7 - Hiding in Plain Sight: 4
2. Semina 7: 19
3. After Semina 7 – Stepping into the Light: 40
Conclusion: 44
Figures: 47
Bibliography: 59
3
INTRODUCTION
At the heart of Wallace Berman!s understudied career are the nine issues of
Semina (1958-1964) that the artist hand-printed in limited runs and sent to friends and
colleagues. This free form, loose-leaf art and poetry journal included some of the most
interesting creative minds of the time, including William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Joan
Brown, and Robert Duncan. Semina manifested Berman!s own particular type of social
resistance: a hermetic transcendence that might provide shelter against what he and his
peers saw as the oppressive puritanical values of mainstream post World War 2
America.1 Semina 7 (1961) is the only issue authored solely by Berman and it has been
described as possessing both autobiographical2 and elegiac qualities.3 It includes a
short poem that elucidates these interpretations: “Spurred by what reason / Do I leave
this ark / For the "city of degenerate / Angels! 500 miles south other than to die.”4
Semina 7 was the last work Berman made in a Larkspur houseboat (his “ark”) before
returning to Los Angeles where, despite these ominous lines, he would flourish and
finally receive the accolades his work merited.5 This paper reviews previously ignored6
portions of Semina 7 to suggest a new reading of the issue based on autobiographical
references. I will argue here that Semina 7!s imagery can be read as a swansong to the
1
Michel Duncan, “Semina as Art,” in Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and His Circle, ed. Michael Duncan and
Kristine McKenna (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, Inc), 38. Duncan uses the term hermetic transcendence in
regards to the way Semina contributed to, “a defensive counterculture capable of transcending the puritanical values
of mainstream America.
2
Ibid, 30.
3
Stephen Fredman, “Surrealism Meets Kabbalah,” in Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and His Circle, ed. Michael
Duncan and Kristine McKenna (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, Inc), 47.
4
Wallace Berman, Semina 7, George Herms reprint 1992, collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
5
Rebecca Solnit, Secret Exhibition: Six Artists of the Cold War Era (San Francisco, City Lights Books, 1990), 106.
6
A self-portrait that is critical to my work on Semina 7 was not included in the catalogue to the Semina Culture:
Wallace Berman and His Circle exhibition that toured from 2005-07.
4
end of what is already seen as the artist!s most hermetic period. Semina 7!s somber
mood, its tributes to recently deceased artists and other culturally marginalized figures -all set for the first time in the artist!s own voice -- can be understood as a eulogy to
Berman!s own secluded self. Semina 7 divides Berman!s career into two equal parts,
distinguishing his more conventionally successful final 15 years from a fiercely defiant
and underground period that began with his discharge from the Navy in 1946.
1. BEFORE SEMINA 7 - HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT
1946, the first year of post-war peace, would be a formative year for Berman in
three areas: music, spirituality, and literature. At 22, Berman found himself in a changed
Los Angeles, a city that had become a sprawling melting pot of nations and cultures.7 A
large African American community that arrived during the war in search of jobs built a
thriving jazz scene, and it appealed to Berman.8 In 1946 Berman briefly enrolled in Los
Angeles! Chouinard Institute of Art, but soon dropped out to hustle pool and listen to
jazz.9 With his confidant swagger and stylish zoot suit Berman found himself at home in
the music clubs, befriended by several jazz greats.10 He was present in the recording
studio when, in 1946, Charlie Parker suffered a nervous breakdown fueled by drug and
7
Brandon Taylor, Collage: The Making of Modern Art (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 120.
Ibid, 120.
9
Solnit, Secret Exhibition: Six Artists of the Cold War Era, 8. A friend, Joan Simon, remembers that Berman hustled
pool and played cards for money, and that once the LA police broke into a party specifically to arrest him.
10
Solnit, Secret Exhibition: Six Artists of the Cold War Era, 8.
8
5
11
alcohol addiction. Parker would remain an active force in Berman!s imagination and
in his work, appearing in Semina 7 in several manifestations.
Berman returned12 to the traditionally Jewish Fairfax District in 1946 where he
discovered the Kabbalah teachings that offered spiritual guidance through the lingering
effects of the Holocaust, and knowledge of the atrocities of war.13 In that same year the
Dead Sea Scrolls were unearthed by a shepherd in a cave on the northwest shore of the
Dead Sea.14 The historian Christopher Knight has made the connection between these
ancient documents and Berman!s parchment paintings, which in turn resemble pieces of
Semina.15 Jewish mysticism, and most particularly to Semina 7, the Aleph, would always
remain an active part in Berman!s work.
Another major influence was the author Hermann Hesse, who in 1946 received
the Nobel Prize for his book The Glass Bead Game.16 One of Berman!s early
sculptures, from 1949, is entitled Homage to Hermann Hesse and has been described
as giving form to the abstract games described in The Glass Bead Game.17 In the
catalogue for the 2005-07 traveling exhibition, Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and His
Circle, Michael Duncan writes, “[in] a way Semina is Berman!s glass bead game, a
11
Rebecca Solnit, “Heretical Constellations: Notes on California 1946-61” in Beat Culture and The New America
1950-1965, ed. Lisa Phillips (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1996), 69.
12
“Wally Berman, Semina Figure Arts,” Los Angeles Times, 5 June 1992. Wallace Berman!s parents moved the
family to Los Angeles from Staten Island when Wallace was 7 in an unsuccessful attempt to ease his father!s
tuberculosis. After his father died, Wallace!s mother (whom he called “angel Anna”) supported the family by working
as a seamstress, and received help from her brother, a plumber. Theirs was a somewhat threadbare middle-class
Jewish household in the Fairfax District.
13
Fredman, “Surrealism Meets Kabbalah,” 47.
14
Christopher Knight, “Instant Artifacts,” in Support the Revolution, ed. Wallace Berman (Amsterdam: Institute of
Contemporary Art, 1992), 37.
15
Ibid, 37.
16
Duncan, “Semina as Art,” 22.
17
Ibid, 23.
6
complex enigmatic system of thought generated from within that touches on a universe
of anxieties, truths, and feelings.”18
Semina perhaps finds its most direct ancestry in Duchamp!s Boite en Valise, a
discussion of which was included in a 1945 issue of View magazine that Berman kept
with him for many years.19 Like Duchamp,20 Berman sought with his work a breakdown
of the barriers between art and life.21 Although Berman fervently resisted discussing
historical connections, it is clear that Duchamp was an influence, not just on Berman,
but also on other mid-century California artists, like Clay Spohn.22 In 1946 Spohn was 48
years old and employed as instructor of drawing and painting at the California School of
Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute).23 There is little documentation of any
direct encounter between Spohn and Berman but the elder artist clearly laid the
groundwork for Berman!s career. Like Spohn before him, Berman was strongly
influenced by the French Dada and Surreal artists of the 1920!s.24
Gambling, Jazz, Kabbalah, foreign fiction, Surrealism. The nexus of Berman!s
influences is broad and seemingly still expanding. His was a palette of contradictions
and divergent interests, and he seems to have relished in trying to find common ground,
a central point that might tie it all together. One steadying influence in this cloud of new
and exotic information was the importance Berman placed on family. In 1951 he met
18
Ibid, 23.
Ibid, 26.
20
Andre Breton, The Lost Steps (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 88.
21
22
Taylor, Collage: The Making of Modern Art, 121.
23
Ibid, 121.
24
Sandra Leonard Starr, “Assemblage Art in California, A Collective Memoir 1940-1969,” in Forty Years of California
Assemblage, UCLA Art Council (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 85. Tosh Berman also confirmed
this fact in email with the author on 8 February 2011.
19
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Shirley Morand while standing in line to see Jean Cocteau!s film Blood of a Poet at Los
Angeles! Coronet Theater.25 They were soon married and would buy a little house on
Crater Lane in Beverly Glen.26 Just as diverse as Berman!s set of artistic inspirations
were the friends who regularly gathered at their house. “There would be a jazz
saxophonist, a drug dealer, a tap dancer, a poet, a painter, the grocer guy down the
street- [it was a] sort of an underground salon,” recalls one friend.27 In Secret Exhibition:
Six Artists of the Cold War Era, Rebecca Solnit describes how in the early 1950s
Berman eased off his cool posturing and, “became a very straightforward and loving
person.”28 During these years he worked in a factory run by an old friend that produced
replicas of Shaker and other early American furniture.29 Shirley also worked and so
Berman often stayed home to care for their son, Tosh, and to make art. Berman was not
a particularly prolific artist and Solnit describes how, “this period seems to have been
more one of gestation that production.”30 Without an established art market to promote
their works, and with underground jazz clubs as a model, Berman and his circle made
and talked about art privately. Or, as Taylor put it, “artists sought not public approbation,
but (at best) the approval of a local audience or even a handful of like minded friends. [It
was an] intense, private, self enclosed milieu with multiple crossovers between poetry,
art and jazz.”31 Like the Situationists and Fluxus artists, Berman!s vision for mid-century
25
Ibid.
27
Ibid.
28
Ibid.
29
Ibid.
30
Ibid.
31
Taylor, Collage: The Making of Modern Art, 121.
26
8
art precluded commercialization and disregarded the idea of the sacred art object.
Writing in the exhibition catalogue for the Whitney Museum!s 1995 Beat Culture and
The New American, 1950-1965, Solnit describes how Berman and his friends,
“…dedicated themselves less to the making of objects than to the making of a
culture in which it was possible to make the brilliant, risky, groundbreaking,
sometimes soaring, sometimes outrageous art that would emerge from the
subculture they brought into being in LA and contributed to in SF. Their
achievement cannot be measured only by the artifacts they left behind but by the
richness and impact of the subculture or avant-garde they fostered and all the
doors it opened to what would be called the counterculture and then to the culture
at large.”32
The Bermans were a catalyst for this growing subculture, providing not just a place to
gather, but also esoteric information and encouragement to younger artists, from the
poet David Meltzer to the assemblage artist George Herms to the actors Russ Tamblyn
and Dean Stockwell.33 Solnit describes how Berman became, “the kingpin of the LA
underground artists! culture… A low-rent LA-Hebraic Marcel Duchamp.”34 So prominent
were the Bermans within the California underground circle that they were profiled in
1958 LOOK Magazine as a typical Bohemian family.35 When, later that year, the family
was profiled in still another popular magazine they began to grow weary of the media
exposure.36 A year earlier, in 1957, after a long period of private creative gestation,37
Berman had finally agreed to show his work at Los Angeles!s Ferus Gallery.38 The
32
Solnit, Beat Culture and The New American, 1950-1965, 70.
Ibid, 76.
34
35
Unidentified author, “San Francisco!s Bohemians: Bored, Bearded, Beat, Wally Berman, Shirley Berman, Linda
Cherney, Eric Nord,” LOOK Magazine, August 19, 1958.
36
Starr, “Assemblage Art in California, A Collective Memoir 1940-1969,” 100.
37
Ibid, 89. Berman would occasionally show his work in the window of the Stone Brothers Printing shop that was run
by Robert Alexander. The shop became a hangout for Berman and his friends.
38
Ibid, 90.
33
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Bermans discomfort with media exposure, coupled with the well-known complications
of the exhibition, pushed the artist and his family out of their temporary spotlight, and
back into the underground.
For the Ferus show Berman made a series of large sculptures built from found
materials.39 These works -- Cross, Panel, Temple, among them -- led art critic John
Coplans to credit Berman with launching the California assemblage movement.40 Solnit,
though sees them differently, writing that Panel, “had little in common with the
assemblages other artists were beginning to make. The carefully chosen images and
objects function as words in a poetic, mystic incantation rather than as cultural raw
material.”41 Assemblages or not, what is clear is that, as their titles suggest, the
sculptures turned the surrounding space into a zone for spiritual contemplation. Berman
mixed influences freely and he included in his Temple a drawing by his friend (the artist
who went by the name Cameron) that depicted a copulating couple.42 The drawing,
which had previously been included in Semina 1 (1955), alarmed a gallery visitor who
reported the sexual material to the LAPD Vice Squad. The authorities called the gallery
before visiting to request the removal of the drawing,43 but Berman and the directors of
the gallery, Walter Hopps and Ed Keinholz, refused. Berman in particular insisted on
staying at the gallery until the police showed.44 When several plain-clothes detectives
39
Charles Brittin, “The Ferus Gallery Affair,” in Support the Revolution, 12.
41
Ibid, 23.
42
Michael Duncan and Kristine McKenna, Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and His Circle, 104.
43
Rebecca K.Y. Schoenthal, “North Beach to Haight-Ashbury Underground Artists and Community in 1950!s San
Francisco.” (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 2005), 281.
44
Ibid, 281.
40
10
45
arrived they toured the gallery and asked, “Where is the art?” Upon finding the
offending image, the officers promptly handcuffed and arrested Wallace for
“lewdness.”46 At the trial Berman was found guilty of, “displaying lewd and pornographic
matter.” Berman responded to this decision by both saying and writing on the courtroom
blackboard the words, “There is no justice, just revenge.”47 Although he was released
with only a fine, the incident struck Berman hard. Shirley Berman remembered that, “in
his wildest dreams he didn!t think he was going to be found guilty. He just couldn!t
believe it. He was very naïve in some ways, and he couldn!t believe that creative
people would still have to go through that. He was in very bad shape during this whole
thing.”48 In December 1957 Wallace sent out Semina 2 with an appended typed notice
pasted on the back cover:
“During the second week of a scheduled month exhibit of my paintings and
sculpture, members of the vice squad entered the Ferus gallery and confiscated
a copy of Semina 1 which was exhibited as an important part of a work entitled
"Temple.! Brought before the righteous judge Kenneth Holliday, who, taking the
allegorical drawing in question out of context, declared me guilty of displaying
lewd and pornographic matter. I will continue to print Semina from locations other
than this city of degenerate angels.”49
The scandal that followed this exhibit seems to have discouraged the artist from publicly
displaying his work for another 10 years. The attention garnered from the magazine
spreads and from his show developed in Berman an extreme public reticence.50 The
45
Hal Glickman, ed., Wallace Berman Retrospective (Berkeley: UC Press, 1978), 12.
Catherine Taft, “She: Works by Wallace Berman and Richard Prince,” Art Review no. 31 (April 2009): 122.
47
Glickman, Wallace Berman Retrospective , 1978, 12.
48
49
Wallace Berman, Semina 2, George Herms reprint, collection of the Museum of Modern Art, 1992.
50
Francisco,” 289.
46
11
Berman family exchanged houses with the Herms family in order to escape the
publicity that came from these incidents.51 In 1959 Berman was dropped from the Ferus
Gallery roster by the new director, Irving Blum,52 and would instead proceed to work in
semi-seclusion, showing his art only to friends. Berman!s show at Ferus only reinforced
the artist!s instinct to work in isolation and his move to San Francisco facilitated this
working method. Coplans has written that Berman adopted a hermetic life in order to
survive as an artist, suggesting that Berman set out to construct a vision so internal that
it would, “confuse even the most zealous censor.”53 Candida-Smith describes how
Berman retreated into “highly personal, hermetic language, arcane even to those who
knew him.” During this time Berman!s close-knit circle closed even further in upon itself.
They worried about potentially obscene content in their work, and therefore often
refrained from exhibiting in public venues.54 This paper argues that Semina 7 marks the
end of Berman!s extreme public reticence. Its mournful tone pays tribute to a series of
underground icons. Before looking more closely at this transitional work however, it is
important to gain an understanding of Berman!s life leading up to it.
In 1957, taking his 5x8 inch tabletop platen Kelly hand press, Wallace and his
family left Los Angeles for San Francisco.55 Between 1957 and 1961 the artist would
print and send out 5 issues of Semina either from the family!s Jackson or Scott Street
homes, or from a houseboat across the Golden Gate Bridge in Larkspur. This
51
Michael Duncan and Kristine McKenna, Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and His Circle, 339.
53
Francisco,” 289.
54
Ibid, 289.
55
52
12
56
houseboat represents the zenith of Berman!s physical isolation, and is where he
would print and distribute Semina 7. Berman was fascinated with the mail and the idea
that it could rather easily allow a connection between people in remote locations.57
Prefiguring the mail art movement58, Semina has roots in the words seminal, and
semen, suggesting an important packet of mixed seeds that might allow for random
forms of cross pollination. Hybridity and diversity were important qualities to Berman
and he purposefully fused each issue with varied and sometimes contradictory
information.59 Richard Candida-Smith points out that a model for Berman!s concept can
be found in The Artist!s View, a cooperative publication produced in San Francisco
between 1951 and 1954. He writes that, “Its purpose was to allow artists and poets to
comment on topical events and present an aesthetic alternative to political ideology.”60
Usually The Artist!s View took the form of a broadsheet, the content and design of which
was the product of one person, but in 1954 the artist Jess designed an issue comprised
of loose-leaf pages meant for shuffling and viewing in random order.61 Berman would
have seen or known of this local publication because Jess and his partner, the poet
Robert Duncan, were central figures in the San Francisco artistic and intellectual
community.
56
Starr, “Assemblage Art in California,” 106. George Herms, who lived in a nearby houseboat, is quoted about the
location!s inaccessibility during high tide. While this was literally a backwater locale, Berman had a network of artist
friends living nearby and he hosted informal shows in an abandoned, roofless, houseboat, called The Semina Gallery.
57
Eduardo Lipschutz-Villa, “Support The Revolution” in Support the Revolution, ed. Wallace Berman, (Amsterdam,
Institute of Contemporary Art Press), 6.
58
In “Semina as Art,” Michael Duncan describes the way Semina!s, “playful package format designed to be sent
through the mail,” relates to the mail art movement, “as practiced by Ray Johnson and various artists associated with
Fluxus. Begun in the mid- 1950s and later christened the “New York Correspondence School,” Johnson!s massive
project consisted of sending unsolicited collages and drawing to friends and art celebrities through the mail.” 27
59
Vincent Katz, “Image/Word,” Tate Etc. no 16 (Summer 2009), 94.
60
Richard Candida-Smith, Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California , 236.
61
Ibid, 236.
13
Semina!s heterogeneous nature also has roots in Surreal and Dada
periodicals, like the lavish and avant-garde View Magazine, as well as 291, and Andre
Breton!s Litterature. An American publication that ran from 1940 to 1947, View helped to
introduce Surrealism to the general public.62 View was the vision of artist and writer
Charles Henri Ford and writer and film critic Parker Tyler who combined designs by
renowned artists with new prose and poetry set in stylized typography.63 Several special
issues were devoted to the work of just one artist, including Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy,
and Marcel Duchamp.64 The Duchamp issue, from 1945,65 was one of the few items
Berman kept with him throughout his life,66 and helps to clarify a connection between
Semina, and Duchamp!s exhibition in a suitcase, Boite en Valise. Berman knew of
Duchamp through his friend Walter Hopps, although apparently he had not seen Boite
en Valise in person.67 This is somewhat surprising since the “exhibition in a suitcase”
was then in Los Angeles as part of the Arensberg Collection.68 Duchamp was also a
central figure in the Litterature, published by Breton in France from 1919 to 1924.69
Dawn Ades writes that Litterature carries into Surrealism certain key elements of Dada,
such as “the refusal to conform to accepted practices within a literary or artistic métier,
62
Charles Henri Ford, View: Parade of the Avant-Garde: an anthology of View magazine 1940-1947 (New York:
Thunder!s Mouth Press, 1991), xiii.
63
Ibid, xi.
64
Ibid, 42-48, 119.
65
Ibid, 119
66
Duncan, “Semina as Art,” in Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and his Circle, 27.
67
Ibid, 27.
68
Ibid, 27.
69
Dawn Ades, “Between Dada and Surrealism: Painting in the Mouvement Flou,” in In the Minds Eyes: Dada and
Surrealism, ed. Terry Ann R. Neff (New York: Abbeville Press Publishers), 23-41.
14
70
[and] a mobility in the realm of ideas […]” She describes Breton!s purpose as being
the, “positive aim of keeping all avenues open, as well as the negative one of avoiding a
school,” and stresses the fact that, “the illustrations were understood to be no less a part
of the complex of ideas and attitudes of the group than were the experiments with
language and poetry.”71 Curiously, both Breton and Berman made a habit of italicizing
the body of the poems published in their periodicals. Although both Litterature and
Semina include works by a variety of contributors, they are each filtered through the
particular, and similar, sensibilities of their editors. There!s an informal quality to each
periodical, an easiness that belies the rigor with which they were assembled. Litterature
and Semina both elevate the ordinary into the extraordinary by using un-authored
photographs as found objects. Additionally, Breton and Berman share formative
experiences in a shaken, changed post-war culture. Ades describes the way 1920s
Europe impacted Breton!s vision:
“The disillusionment and despair felt by Breton and his friends, marked by the
horrific war, and the impression they had that a tidal wave had swept away all
known landmarks and that the post-war world was totally inadequate to deal with
or even to recognize this, soured them against the existing avant-garde, but
pushed them to search for "a new spirit.!”72
Although Berman rarely spoke of historical influences, we know that he was interested
in Dada and Surrealists movements in France around 1920.73 Breton was at the center
of the activities there, and in many ways he stands as an important aesthetic and
conceptual ancestor to Berman. A discussion of the artistic merits of each man quickly
70
Dawn Ades, Dada and Surrealism from the compilation, In the Minds Eyes: Dada and Surrealism, 29.
Ibid, 29.
72
Dawn Ades, Dada and Surrealism Reviewed (London: Westerham Press), 168.
73
71
15
extends beyond their material artwork, to their poetry, circle of friends, activism, and
most important for our purposes, their use of the periodical to communicate with kindred
spirits. Specifically, in Semina 7, Berman borrows from ideas found in Breton!s
Surrealist manifestos: 1) art, poetry, and love are revolutionary, not commercial, actions,
2) the importance of the unconscious as a site for art as well as an engagement with
alternate mental states including the idea that mental disorders or addictions are
important types of non-conformity, 3) the imagination as a divine source and the use of
games as inspiration. 74 Breton!s 1924 definition of Surrealism might be extended to
describe Semina. “Pure psychic automation, by which it is intended to express, either
verbally, or in any other way, the true functioning of thought. Thought dictated in the
absence of any control exerted by reason, outside any aesthetic or moral
preoccupation.”75 Berman, like Breton before him, used the periodical in an attempt to
spread a message of non-conformity, and of the importance of the imagination during a
time both men saw as being strangled by reason and logic.
One of Semina!s great contributions lies in its publishing of the work of
young poets and artists. Semina included the works of so many Beat generation artists
and writers that William Burroughs dubbed Berman "a poet-maker.”76 Allen Ginsberg,
John Wieners, Robert Duncan, Charles Bukowski, David Meltzer and Philip Lamantia all
contributed to Semina, and Berman himself included works by Hermann Hesse, Antonin
74
Andre Breton, What is Surrealism (London: Pluto Press, 1978). These are themes that appear repeatedly in
Breton!s writings and I suggest are also inherent in Semina 7.
75
Dawn Ades, Dada and Surrealism Reviewed (London: Westerham Press), 168.
76
Michael McClure, Lighting the Corners: On Art, Nature, and the Visionary, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1993), 195.
16
77
Artaud, Jean Cocteau, and Orson Welles. Berman added his own poems and
imagery as well as work by California artists like Llyn Foulkes, Jess, John Altoon,
Charles Brittin and Walter Hopps.78 Berman!s reasons for making Semina seem to be
two-fold: inspiration and communication. Like many Jazz musicians, Berman was
motivated by the joy in creation itself, but it was also important to him that Semina be a
gesture of friendship sent through the mail.79 He printed Semina in runs of between 150350 and besides sending them to friends he would occasionally hand out copies to
random passersby on the street.80 Semina was not available for sale. Today few original
copies remain, so this author consulted a reprint of the entire collection, volumes 1-9
made in 1992 by George Herms in an edition of 300, located in the collection of The
Museum of Modern Art. Each issue of Semina varied in size and length, but each
contained a folder or envelope to house a series of loose pages. The quality of the
printing is fine and slightly embossed, and the papers are exquisite in their subtle
textural and color differences. Calling Semina an assemblage of ideas and trends, the
poet Michael McClure described the tactile, sensual quality of receiving an issue:
“[T]he actual act of the hand-folding and gluing is there, the artists putting the
pieces in the pockets – it!s there, still present to the eye, like the smell of glue in a
new Semina. Semina contrasts the glossiness of hand-produced photographs
with the almost Japanse-ness of the background of industrial materials that are
used. There is also the luridness of nudity and sexuality contrasted with the
various spiritualities of [its authors].”81
77
Ibid, 192.
“Wally Berman, Semina Figure Arts,” Los Angeles Times.
79
Michael McClure, Lighting the Corners: On Art, Nature, and the Visionary, 191.
80
Francisco,” 304.
81
78
17
Semina helped to expand an artistic network by allowing many of its recipients to
become contributors to a, “cultural expression of potent urgency.”82 This community
was in direct contrast to what McClure calls “The American Way,” as represented by,
“the Korean War, the starched shirts and ties, the military preparedness to battle against
the Iron Curtain or the Bamboo Curtain.”83 In a 2006 Modern Painters article titled We
Dissent, Francis Frascina discussed Semina and other works that resisted mainstream
post-war American society. He described how, “after 1945 few possibilities existed for
acts of cultural resistance either to consumer society or to the rapacious [New York] art
market, particularly acts that also created transgressive pleasure for artists.”84 Semina,
according to Frascina and McClure, filled this void by establishing guidelines for a selfsustaining artistic community. McClure writes that, “Semina is about rules. There are
rules to putting it together…it is so precise a game that a new freedom is created for the
imagination, as in information theory; the more rules there are, the more specific
something must be – then more powerful channels are created for freedom.”85 Semina!s
loose-leaf contents allowed a freedom of viewing while also necessitating a strict
structure to cohere a mixture of images and poems each printed on paper of different
size, shape, and color. In the Semina Culture exhibition catalogue, Duncan describes
the periodicals complex and conceptually rigorous structure: “The order of its contents
was up to chance or whim. [Berman] abdicated his role as a sequencing editor,
presenting an array to be experienced as a reader saw fit. With its element of chance,
82
Michael McClure, Lighting the Corners: On Art, Nature, and the Visionary, 191-92.
84
Francis Frascina, “We Dissent,” Modern Painters (November 2006), 83.
85
83
18
Semina can be considered a kind of game, offering readers playing–pieces with which
they set up their own interpretations and meanings.”86
By encouraging subjective understandings Semina relates to earlier avant-garde
works like Litterature while also presaging later works that would purposefully fracture
traditional authorship.87 Richard Candida-Smith, like McClure, sees aspects of a game,
of chance, in Semina. He writes that, “Berman intensified the effect of unclosable
meaning by cutting the fragments into cards. This simple decision transformed the
journal into the equivalent of a tarot deck. Each reading meant a reshuffling and redealing of the materials to reveal an entirely new meaning.”88
While Berman built a network from the artistic and poetic contributors to Semina,
he also included his own work in each issue. However, prior to Semina 7, Berman!s
poetry appeared only under pseudonyms, each of which was a constructed alter ego.
Candida-Smith describes the roles of the various fictitious authors:
“Pantale Xantos presented his attitudes toward heroin and self destruction.
Marcia Jacobs was a reincarnation of the early twentieth century French Jewish
poet Max Jacob. Peder Carr likely represented Berman in his guise as working
class intellectual. His alter egos underscore that the diaristic aesthetic is not
autobiographical…. Berman used his alter egos to imagine other ways of being,
often contrary to the choices he had made. His alter egos were literary conceits
that helped him reaffirm the actual commitments that provided the ongoing
structure of his life.”89
86
Roland Barthes 1967 essay “The Death of the Author,” for example.
88
Candida-Smith, Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California, 236.
89
Ibid, 238.
87
19
The structure of Berman!s life was built around the increasingly connected realms of
domesticity and art.90 During much of their time in Northern California, Shirley worked
while Wallace stayed home to make art and care for Tosh.91 Other artists shared this
reversal of traditional gender roles, most notably Berman!s friend Bruce Conner and his
wife Jean.92 What was unique for Berman was the way he explicitly included his family
in his art. The presence of family in his work further separates Berman from other,
mostly New York based, artists of the time. In her PhD dissertation, Rebecca Kelley
Young remarks how, “the representation of personal life - family, gender, sexuality – in
the work itself marks it as decidedly bohemian. It stresses anti bourgeois qualities at a
time when many New York artists were focused on becoming increasingly professional,
with carefully managed careers.”93 Like Wallace!s wide circle of friends, Shirley and
Tosh were both part his underground support system, and participants in his work.
2. SEMINA 7
In 1961, while living on a houseboat in Marin County, Berman produced an issue
of Semina that for the first time was comprised solely of his own work, made under his
own name. It manifests a stark and ominous tone that I suggest reflects the end of an
intensely secluded phase of his life. Berman pays tribute to a series of recently
deceased artists whose life and career he admired, and he includes a telling self-portrait
90
Ibid, 215.
Francisco,” 284.
92
Ibid, 284.
93
Ibid, 285.
91
20
slumped in an alley, and signed by an alter ego previously employed to write about
self-destruction. In this way Semina 7 becomes a kind of eulogy to the individual artists
and to the fiercely underground aspect of Berman!s life. Semina 7 was the last work he
made on a derelict houseboat in what was then a remote portion of the San Francisco
Bay Area, and it directly precedes the artist!s move back into the heart of a thriving
1960s Los Angeles art scene.94 Semina 7 is a portrait of an artist in transition, an artist
ready to leave his reclusive perch for the artistic opportunities of a major metropolitan
area.
Semina 7!s 18 works of photography and poetry, with a single drawing, are
printed in black on different sized white, cream, and grey papers that slip neatly into a
white pocket envelope set on the inside of a 5x8 inch cardboard folder. Pasted to the
outside cover of the folder is a picture of a figure, her face erased, strapped to an
unusual chair (fig. 1). A large black Aleph, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, covers
the entire upper left portion of the paper, and the only color in this issue is found in the
red “SEMINA 7” in the upper right. According to Duncan, the figure is the controversial
Barbara Graham, as portrayed by Susan Hayward in the 1958 movie, I Want to Live!95
This execution image preceded by two years Andy Warhol!s 1963 silkscreen, Lavender
Disaster, which featured a grid of imagery from the electric chair at Sing Sing prison.96
As Duncan points out, in September 1963 Warhol was in Los Angeles to show at Ferus
Gallery. He met Berman and even used the family!s backyard to shoot portions of his
94
Duncan, “Semina as Art,” in Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and his Circle, 31.
96
Ibid, 31.
95
21
97
film, Tarzan and Jane Regained, Sort of… (1963), and could have seen and been
influenced by Berman!s execution image. Barbara Graham was convicted of a 1953
murder during a botched robbery and executed in the State of California!s gas chamber
in 1955.98 The semi-fictionalized portrayal of her life and crimes by Ms. Hayward
suggests that the troubled Graham was innocent, and instead the victim of a revenge
hungry political system.
Candida-Smith suggests that Berman!s erasure of the face suggests the
erasure of self, and that, “the motif of facelessness may easily portray the insignificance
of individuality in its confrontation with the divine.”99 Added to this is Stephen Fredman!s
idea that the Aleph, a symbol that became a kind of personal logo for Berman, here
takes on a, “transformative, sacralizing function, as though it were capable of conferring
a blessing upon a degraded, commodified reality.”100 Graham!s grim fate at the hands of
what may have been an overzealous judicial verdict serves here as a stand in for the
artist!s own legal battle that led to his proclamation, there is no justice, only revenge.
Despite Berman!s usual intentions to obscure and confound, this image forms a very
appropriate introduction for the contents that follow. The Aleph repeats on almost every
page, and Berman pays tribute to, and seems to identify with, several other culturally
marginalized figures. The artist is simultaneously defusing traditional power sources
while also bestowing his own blessing or memorial on those whose work conflicted with
mainstream norms. While the cultural homogenization of the post-war era and the
97
Ibid, 31.
Carl Sifakis, The Encyclopedia of American Prisons, (New York: Facts on File), 287-88.
99
100
Stephen Fredman, “Surrealism Meets Kabbalah,” 47.
98
22
censorship of McCarthyism may have intensified the need for American artists to
position their work in direct opposition to their time, the defiant artistic stance itself has a
long history, especially in France. We return again to Breton, who sought through his
work nothing short of a revolution: “The imagination is revolutionary or it is nothing / The
Revolution will be surrealist or it will not be at all.”101 Invoking a similarly radical spirit,
the most comprehensive exhibition of Berman!s work to date, held at Amsterdam!s
Institute for Contemporary Art in 1992, was titled, Support the Revolution. In Semina 7
Berman pays direct tribute to Barbara Graham, Vaslav Nijinsky, Charlie Parker, Billie
Holiday, pianist Joe Albany, and poet John Wieners, all of whom suffered through
periods of incarceration or institutionalization for drugs and other psychiatric problems.
Several of these tragic figures had only recently died at Semina 7!s 1961 printing, and
this paper suggests that Berman, whose departure for Los Angeles was imminent,
meant to bury with them his own reclusive artistic self.
Semina 7!s individual pieces, none larger than 4 x 6 inches, fit tightly into the
white envelope pasted inside the cardboard folder (fig. 2). The envelope is printed with
the inscription, “ALEPH / a gesture involving / photos, drawings, & text,” and with the
dedication, “for Shirley and Tosh / I love you.” In removing the contents for better
viewing, the tendency is for them to spill out together. Because of their small size and
fragility, it is difficult to extricate them one by one. The result then is a dozen or so small
pieces of paper spread out chaotically, some upside-down or backwards, on the table.
Here one understands more fully the association with tarot cards, or playing cards. Like
101
Andre Breton, What is Surrealism, xvi.
23
a game, Semina is different each time one reads, or plays it. Semina involves the use
of chance as an anti-hierarchical practice and therefore subverts logical or systematic
readings.
One of the more intricate pieces is a vertically oriented photographic collage, at
the bottom of which is printed Berman!s poem, “Spurred by what reason / Do I leave this
ark / For the "city of degenerate / Angels! 500 miles south other than to die”102 (fig. 3).
This phrase, the “city of degenerate Angels” works parenthetically, enclosing Berman!s
San Francisco period. He used the same wording in Semina 2, following his Ferus
Gallery arrest as he left Southern California, and then again here as he prepares to
return. The term “degenerate Angels” recalls a traditional description of Hell populated
by fallen angels. Berman is abandoning his houseboat -- his reclusive ark -- in order to
join the masses of fallen souls. This dramatic language suggests that the artist saw his
idealistic, individualistic days as coming to a close. It suggests the artist!s stark
uncertainty about an imminent change to his life.
This card features images of three individuals collaged together in an interior
space with peacock feathers and a tombstone shaped painting or sculpture, perhaps of
Pre-Raphaelite origin. This object stands on the ground, seemingly propped up by its
surroundings, with vine-like decorations and a simple depiction of a white egret, heron,
or other large bird. Hovering above the rounded top of this object is the profile of a
woman!s face. Her far away and dreamy look helps to suggest a Pre-Raphaelite, or
perhaps Art Nouveau moment. This combination of imagery introduces a connection to
102
Wallace Berman, Semina 7, George Herms reprint 1992, collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
24
Berman!s own loose-knit artist group that took the name the Rat Bastard Protective
Society. The initials (RBPS) were meant to offer a mixed up nod to the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood Society (PRBS), and also a local trash collectors union, the Scavengers
Protective Association.103 Solnit describes how the Rat Bastards responded to the utter
lack of outside interest and support by making work as experimental, ephemeral, and
personal as they could imagine.104 Like the Surrealists, Berman and his cohorts would
comb city dumps and thrift stores as a type of resistance, a rebellion against the values
of the mainstream. The Pre-Raphaelites complete disavowal of mass production and
their own types of creative, hermetic resistance must have appealed to the newly
formed Rat Bastards. The founding member of this group was Bruce Conner who
sought to re-name the type of work then being descried as “Beat.”105 According to
Candida-Smith, Conner thought Beat was a derogatory term, accompanied by a kind of
publicity that “exploited, degenerated, and decayed” artists into “providers for art
boutiques.”106 In 1959 Conner and Michael McClure proposed that artists and poets
repudiate the term Beat and instead call themselves “Rat Bastards.” The meetings of
the newly formed group, whose members included Joan Brown, Jay Defeo, and Defeo!s
husband Wally Hedrick, consisted mostly of studio visits and other informal gatherings
to look at or talk about art.107
103
104
105
106
107
Ibid, 169.
Ibid, 169.
25
Adjacent to the image of the Pre-Raphaelite woman in this dense image are
two other collaged photographic portraits, of Jean Cocteau and the dancer Vaslav
Nijinsky.108 Cocteau is seen as an older man with a German Iron Cross superimposed
on his forehead. This is an enigmatic gesture, one that seems like a defacing of the
French poet and artist, someone who was an inspiration to Berman. Perhaps it is meant
to relate to the way the face of Semina 7!s cover image is obscured or perhaps it is
related to a 1959 series of photographs Berman took of his friend, the artist Jay Defeo.
In one of these images Berman superimposed an Aleph onto DeFeo!s nude torso as
she posed in front of her iconic -- and then only recently finished -- work, The Rose.
Duncan described the way the Aleph works in Semina 7 as a type of “seal of
approval.”109 Similarly, the Iron Cross might be understood as a strange type of
endorsement, or mark of the author!s presence. The images of Cocteau and Nijinsky
can also be seen as a type of memorial since Cocteau!s death was imminent, and
Nijinsky had passed only 10 years previous.110 Like the other artistic figures to whom
Berman pays tribute in Semina 7, Nijinsky!s greatness was tempered by his bouts with
mental illness, and the cultural marginalization that followed.111 This card, like others in
Semina 7, serves as a gravestone to a disenfranchised creative figure. Together the
edition can be seen as the end of an underground – even marginalized – period of
108
Ibid, 30.
110
Peter Ostwald, Vaslav Nijinsky (New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1991), 337.
111
Ibid, 101. Nijinsky suffered his first nervous breakdown at 23 in 1913 and his first manic episode in 1918. He died
in a London mental hospital in 1950.
109
26
Berman!s life. After Semina 7 the artist would return to the cultural mainstream and
integrate with society in more traditionally successful ways.
Two images encourage a brief digression; they introduce a discussion of gender
and sexuality in Semina 7. These are semi-nude photographs of faceless women (figs.
4,5). One woman is identified with a simple cursive tag as, “Patricia J.” Here Patricia
Jordan, who in 1960 married Berman!s friend Larry Jordan, wears only a strange,
unknowable mask and exotic jewelry. The obscured face recalls those of Barbara
Graham and Cocteau. Candida-Smith!s suggestion that facelessness emphasizes the
insignificance of individuality in its confrontation with the divine here rings true in regards
to the exotic, even funereal, way that her body is adorned. The mask and jewelry seem
more ceremonial than functional or decorative. In both nude images a large white Aleph
helps to obscure the lower half of the figure!s body. A displaced stand in for Ms.
Jordan!s face is found in a collaged photograph of Billie Holiday, who had died only
months before Semina 7!s printing.112
A 2009 exhibition at Los Angeles!s Michael Kohn gallery studied Berman!s use of
the female form in relation to that of the contemporary artist Richard Prince.113 A
summary of the show in the magazine ArtReview described Berman!s imagery as
serious, but from a Feminist point of view, stereotypic and problematic, noting that its,
“esoteric aura seems undeniably earnest, exhibiting feminine sexuality as a form of
112
Stuart Nicholson, Billie Holiday (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995), 228. Holiday died on July 15, 1959.
Holiday!s plight is taken up later in my work.
113
Catherine Taft, “She: Works by Wallace Berman and Richard Prince,” ArtReview 122, no 31 (April 2009), 122.
27
spiritual power.#”
114
This accurately describes the use of nudity in Semina 7, which
combines ceremonial jewelry, ancient Hebrew text, obscure poetry, jazz and drug
imagery, and deceased artistic icons to form a vessel for transcendental
communication. These were Berman!s inspirations and he seemed to think that a direct
and honest accounting of them might in some way move the viewer too. Sexuality
seems to have been of special motivation for Berman. One of the few documents found
in his archive is a letter from Indiana University!s Institute for Sex Research requesting
copies of Semina for their collection.115 In Semina 7, Patty Jordan seems to be included
as a model, a stand in for Berman!s ideas about sexual transcendence. And yet this
masked woman with breasts exposed is purposefully named. Berman!s inclusion of a
credit seems to allow “Patricia J” to be part of the group, a Semina player.
Although Jay Defeo objected to the inclusion of one of Berman!s photos in a
1978 issue of Artforum, she also maintained that the image was the result of, “an early
experiment in erotic photography, and an objective collaboration between two artist
friends.”116 While she was not entirely pleased with Berman!s “conceptions” she refused
to interfere with what she said was, “his vision, his interpretation.”117 This is a niche of
Berman!s work that might not withstand a strong feminist critique, but what if we look at
them instead from a homosocial point of view? Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick updated the
114
Ibid, 122.
Wallace Berman, “Indiana University letter,” 10 March 1966, Berman Papers, reels 5282 5284, Smithsonian
Institute of American Art Research Center, New York, NY. Berman!s papers are a light scattering of
correspondences, obscure poems or short stories, with an occasional clipping from a newspaper or magazine that
mentioned his work.
116
Jane Green and Leah Levy, ed., Jay Defeo and The Rose, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), xvii.
117
Ibid, xvii.
115
28
term homosocial in her 1985 book, Between Men, in order to address social bonds
between persons of the same sex.118 Among other inquiries, she questions the
traditional gulf between male heterosexual and homosexual concerns in light of the way,
for women, no such gulf exists.119 The term homosocial is now in wide use in literary
studies to address a range of ideas concerning the way men relate to each other. Most
appropriate here is David Hopkins! book, “Dada!s Boy: Masculinity after Duchamp,”
which looks at Breton!s group through a lost veil of traditional masculinity.120 He begins
with a quote from Lynne Segal:
“The dominant idea of a fixed and pure heterosexual masculinity, to which
women and children are inescapable subordinated, once so securely grounded in
the nuclear family, is, if not in crisis, at least a little less hegemonic than it has
ever been before.”121
Attempting to account for this development from an art historical point of view, Hopkins
analyzes the male relationships of Breton and Duchamp!s circle and then those of their
“progeny,”122 including Rauschenberg, Johns, Warhol, Joseph Beuys, Jeff Koons,
Richard Prince and others. Essentially Hopkins is interested in the way these artists
break down traditional masculinity and thereby create an, “astereotypical, self-reflexive
conception of heterosexual male identity.”123 We find a linear trend from the twisted
“Dada masculinism”124 to the “queering”125 of post World War 2 art that then reverses
118
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, Columbia
University Press, 1985), 1.
119
Ibid, 3.
120
David Hopkins, Dada!s Boy: Masculinity after Duchamp (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).
121
Ibid, 1.
122
Ibid, 109.
123
Ibid, 41.
124
Ibid, 113.
125
Ibid, 113.
29
126
directions back to a “laddish”
quality seen in the work of Prince, Mike Kelley, Martin
Kippenberger, and the Chapman Brothers.127 Hopkins addresses the use of female alter
egos, and of drag among Duchamp, Warhol, Douglas Gordon and other artists, and the
way these strategies effectively blur distinctions between stereotypical gender
constructs. Although not mentioned in Hopkins book, Berman and Semina fit nicely into
his discussion of new forms of masculinity, particularly to that unorthodox form Hopkins
describes as “Dada masculinism.”128 Like Breton, Berman!s circle of friends, including
the group of Rat Bastards, was largely comprised of men, and Semina was designed as
a form of communication between them. Unlike some of their East Coast counterparts
for whom testosterone and alcohol seems to have coursed in equal measure, these
were mostly family men devoted to their wives or partners. Where Duchamp had a
female alter ego named Rrose Selavy, Berman used the pseudonym Marcia Jacobs. A
poem in Semina 2 called “Circus” describes a surreal scene of drug use among
acrobats, bicyclists, and dwarfs. Like much of Berman!s work it has a disorienting effect.
Here, however, the disorientation is enhanced by the presence of his female alter ego.
Next to this poem is a drawing by John Altoon of androgynous figures carrying a small
person (or perhaps a dwarf) in a makeshift stretcher. Bakhtin!s ideas of the subversive
power of the carnivalesque129 are relevant here, in regards to Berman!s repeated
126
Ibid, 192. Hopkins describes the word “laddish” as a British creation of the 1980s, used mostly to designate, “an
attitude of boisterous camaraderie among young men, predominantly but by no means exclusively of working-class
origins, who seemed stuck in late adolescence.”
127
Ibid, 192.
128
Ibid, 113.
129
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, in Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed., Julie Rivkin, Michael Ryan (Malden
MA: Blackwell, 2000), 45-51. Bakhtin describes how the traditions of the carnival, including body humor, bad taste,
and the inversion of ordinary values, have a powerful subversive effect.
30
inversions and their destabilizing effects. Just as their female counterparts were
launching the feminist revolution, this mostly male contingent of poets and artists were
taking care of their children and thus re-defining the parameters of masculinity. Again,
Breton might inform our understanding of Berman!s sexuality. Duchamp wrote that
Breton was a, “lover of love in a world that believes in prostitution.”130 Extending this
description to Berman we see more fully the earnest and serious quality of his sexual
imagery, as discussed by ArtReview. Might we understand Berman, Conner, Herms,
and others like Dennis Hopper as helping to introduce this new kind of masculinity? And
if so, does it change our understanding of the nude imagery produced in Semina 7?
One work by an East Coast contemporary of Berman that might offer further
insight into understanding how gender works in Semina 7 is Robert Rauschenberg!s
Bed (1955). Berman knew of and admired Rauschenberg!s work by the early 1950s.131
Bed, like Semina, rethinks the traditional orientation of the work of art, and constructs a
work literally in layers. Rauschenberg!s energetic marks, like Berman!s stark and
forceful compositions suggest aggression, but both ultimately reveal a more poetic
sensuality. In his essay, “Robert Rauschenberg!s Bed, and the Symbolism of the Body,”
James Leggio concludes that Bed is comprised of a series of opposing forces,
man/woman, self/other, and that its bodily traces make it a type of liminal art object,
allowing a connection between the self!s double identity, both “out there” and “in
130
131
"Andre Breton,! Arts – loisers [Paris], no. 54 (5-11 October 1966), 7. As cited by David Hopkins, Dada!s Boys, 51.
Walter Hopps, “Interview with Walter Hopps,” in Wallace Berman Retrospective, 1978, 14.
31
132
here.”
Where Rauschenberg uses gestural brushwork to signify the body, Berman
employs semi-nude imagery. Both artists relish in the necessarily tactile, physical quality
of their working surfaces. Semina is a personalized and intimate, but not overtly
sexualized, “gesture” between two, often male, friends. Like Rauschenberg,133 Berman
rejoiced in the spaces between categories, using art as exploration in search of
contradiction and subversion, more than for elucidation.
Breton preached a similar edict of constant interior and exterior mobility. Just as
in his novel Nadja, where questions of “who am I” are relentlessly displaced with those
of “whom I haunt,”134 the opening vision of Mad Love sets 7 versions of the author
himself on a bench facing an equal number of women, former lovers presumably.135
Breton!s term “objective chance” describes the Surrealist passion for the power an
object in the external world can have on the imagination, or inner world.136 And for the
Surrealists, the self-portrait, at once both self and other, offered an immediate
connection to the liminal and sacred space between exterior and interior worlds.
Returning to the central premise of this paper, Berman includes in Semina 7 a
very telling photographic self-portrait (fig. 6). One of only two horizontally composed
works, this is a cramped composition in which the artist slumps corpse-like in a
dilapidated doorway, weeds growing up around his ankles. Given his predilection for
ambiguity and the masquerade, perhaps it should come as no surprise that this self-
132
133
134
135
136
Ibid, 106.
Ibid, 107.
Andre Breton, Nadja (New York: Random House, 1960), 11.
Andre Breton, Mad Love (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 5-6.
Anna Balakian, Andre Breton: Magus of Surrealism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 41-44.
32
portrait contains this edition!s only use of a pseudonym: the upper left corner is signed
P. Xantos / Embarcadero / S.F. / 1959. As previously described by Richard Candida
Smith, Pantele Xantos was the alter ego Berman used to address self-destruction. This
speaks directly to my premise, which is that, this image, and more generally Semina 7,
can be read as a portrait of the underground artist as a dead man. This image, a
claustrophobic composition credited to Berman!s author of self-destruction, shows the
artist slumped in front of a boarded up doorway. These death metaphors suggest an
imminent personal transformation. The self-portrait is surrounded by a series of cards
that pay tribute to recently deceased artists whose brilliant careers were derailed by
addiction or other kinds of mental instability. I want to make a connection between the
social ostracization brought about by these kinds of struggles with the secluded,
underground artistic life Berman was living in a Marin County marsh. In this context we
can compare Berman!s self-portrait to the series of more blatantly eulogistic cards, in
order to understand this image as a memorial to his own reclusive artistic self.
Additionally, since Berman made a point to include only his own work in Semina 7, we
might extend this understanding of the portrait of the underground artist as a dead man
to the work as a whole.
Curiously, the self-portrait was not among the handful of Semina 7 images
reproduced in the comprehensive catalogue to the 2005-07 Semina Culture exhibition.
Others have called Semina 7 a kind of self-portrait137 because it is comprised only of
Berman!s work, and here we have a very telling central, autobiographical image. In
137
Michael Duncan, email with the author, 28 March 2011.
33
addition to a self-portrait!s inherent dichotomies, in this card Berman offers further
disparity through word play. In plain handwriting at the right margin of the paper the
artist seeks an intellectual conversation about foreign cultures and their hybrids: “If
someone will explain Chinese perspective to me – I will elaborate on the Choctaw +
Cherokee blood in Jack Dempsey.” Then, in a classic Berman gesture, he unites the
fundamentally opposed political spectrums of John Birch and Karl Marx by printing a
simple dedication to the two men. Again a disorienting effect is produced by the
conflation of two fundamentally opposed worlds. The result is that no lasting meaning or
purpose can be drawn except that Berman envisioned the impossible: a narrowing of
the divide between the radical right wing political advocacy group, The John Birch
Society (est. 1958), and Marx!s socialist vision. The double dedication exists in a state
of continual and purposeful renewal, devoid of objective meaning. Its stark combination
of dissimilar ideas relates back to Surrealist and Dada strategies of disorientation and
hierarchical destabilization through unusual juxtapositions. While this paper seeks to
glean from Semina 7 a coherent portrait of Berman in a time of transition, the artist
himself repeatedly disguised or removed fixed meaning in order to provide space for the
play of the viewer!s imagination and intellect. The goal of this paper, then, is not a
hermeneutic or iconographical analysis, but to mine the language of Berman!s
conjunction of disparate and jolting combinations of forms.
A small, bookmark shaped card in Semina 7 bears only the inscription “Art
is Love is God,” a phrase that became a mantra for Berman. It shows up in several
other issues of Semina, and like the self-portrait, it very concisely conflates several
34
notions into one representation. Solnit describes the way this simple phrase both
unifies and distinguishes its signifiers. She writes that, “[Art is Love is God] is both an
impossible equation and an assertion of the interdependence of the three.”138 With this
mantra Berman describes three expansive ideas in the simplest of ways. He doesn!t
offer any description except in the way he equates them to each other.
His use of the Aleph is similar. In the Kabbalistic tradition from which Berman
drew, language is not an abstraction imposed on reality, but primary and primordial,
reality!s very essence.139 The letters of the alphabet existed before the creation of the
world and they contain immense power over it.140 In the forward to the exhibition
catalogue for the 1978 Berman retrospective organized by the Otis Art Institute, Hal
Glickman describes this tradition as rooted in an obscure Catalonian, thirteenth century
Kabbalistic text of unknown authorship called the Sefer ha-Temeunah, or the Book of
Configuration.141 According to Glickman this work claims that the Hebrew alphabet and
sacred scrolls existed before creation, and that, “in our world one of the letters is
imperfect or one may be entirely missing. Thus our world is imperfect, beset with evils
and misfortune.”142 Other writers have cited the 1946 discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls
as inspiring in Berman a desire to make a timeless and universal artifact, although his
parchment paintings are usually noted as the result of that inspiration.143 Berman!s
friend David Meltzer describes the Aleph as, “one of the central sources of mystery and
138
139
140
141
142
143
Ibid, 103.
Ibid, 104.
Hal Glickman, “Foreword” in Wallace Berman Retrospective, 1978, 1.
Ibid, 1.
Christopher Knight, “Instant Artifacts,” in Support the Revolution, ed. Wallace Berman, 38.
35
contemplation in the Kabbalah is the Hebrew alphabet. The 22 letters of the alphabet
are twenty-two realms, twenty-two states of consciousness… Each letter represents a
literal self, a number, a symbol and an idea.”144 The Aleph, as the first letter, often
represents Adam, the first man, and Berman employed it as his personal signature.145
Throughout Semina 7 we find the Aleph, boldly printed either black on white, or white on
black. By using the ancient symbol for Adam as a kind of personalized blessing,
Berman again unites opposing notions, of both the universal and the individual, and
perhaps also, through the Aleph!s connection to the first man, an oblique reference to
the last man, to the end of the artist as we knew him. Further decoding is difficult
because his use of the Kabbalah and the Aleph seems to have been purposefully
opaque. Solnit describes how Berman, “never used the [Hebrew] letters to spell our
particular meanings…(instead) he continued to emphasize the mystery and immediacy
of the revelation over the laborious reasoning of interpretation.”146 The Aleph lends an
air of morality and spirituality to Semina 7, and some understand this as Berman!s
response to what he saw as inadequacies in his own culture. Writing in the catalogue for
a 1988 group exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum called Different Drummers, Frank
Gettings notes that Berman!s works cannot be read as literal statements or as narrative.
Instead, “(the) strong moral and spiritual overtones stem from what he believed were the
social and ethical hypocrisies of the post-world war II era.”147
144
David Meltzer, “The Door of Heaven, The Path of Letters,” in Wallace Berman Retrospective, 92.
Francisco,” 281.
146
Solnit, Secret Exhibition: Six Artists of the Cold War Era, 107-8.
147
Frank Gettings, Different Drummers, 19.
145
36
Berman and his circle directed their activities away from the hypocrisies of
mainstream society to establish an underground community that was heavily influenced
by contemporaneous Jazz musicians. What Berman learned from Jazz, according to
Meltzer, was a “sense of cool, a sense of art as a form of resistance, as a form of selfprotection.”148 Solnit says, “Although many artists of the postwar period claimed jazz as
an influence, Berman… had gone further, into a rapport with the musicians and an
understanding of their world, acquiring familiarity with the drugs, slang, and style that
would come to define their own lives.”149 Indeed, many within Berman!s circle
experimented with or abused heroin and other heavy narcotics. Semina 7 refers to
drugs with a photograph of Berman!s drug of choice, marijuana (fig. 10). It!s the largest
work of the 18 pieces, and it shows plants up close and in full bloom, stamped with a
large white Aleph. George Herms sums up the complicated implications of this image,
writing, “This is not the time to glorify drugs. But 30 years ago drugs and madness were
considered doorways to experience. The church had stopped satisfying spiritual
hunger. Narcotics were a way of altering consciousness.”150 The marijuana image does
seem dated, as well as more generic and less consciousness altering than the rest of
Semina 7!s exotic material – that of jazz, love, or even the amorphous Aleph. Using art
to change consciousness is a nod to the Surrealists, and relevant in regards to the
marijuana card are their sommeils, a type of group séance or self-induced hypnosis that
148
149
150
Ibid, 5.
Solnit, Beat Culture and The New American, 1950-1965, 70.
“Wally Berman, Semina Figure Arts,” Los Angeles Times, 5 June 1992.
37
151
was temporarily popular with Breton!s circle in 1922.
Looking to take Freud!s
writings in a different direction, these artists and poets sought a “second state” of
consciousness and thought the trance accessed it more directly than automatic writing
or the narration of dreams. Berman and his circle were fascinated with drugs and
madness in part because they sought an alternative state of mind, one divergent from
the mainstream. The drug imagery in Semina 7, like the Jazz iconography to follow,
helps to establish Berman!s underground status that countered what he saw as the
puritanical values of society.
In Semina 7 we find two cards that pay tribute to the Jazz great, Charlie “Bird,”
Parker (figs. 7,8). These recall the previously seen image of Billie Holiday and the
funereal tone established by her recent death. Holiday succumbed to a life of substance
abuse, dying penniless in 1959, at the young age of 44. More explicitly somber are
these two unturned Parker cards. One features an image of the musician adorned by an
eagle swooping over a lion, a large black Aleph printed over a Hebrew text, and the
saxophonist!s all too brief years of life, 1920-1955. The other shows a close-up of a
saxophonist!s horn coaxing an Aleph from its bell like a charmed snake. Berman knew
Parker in Los Angeles and was an avid listener of his music.152 Parker battled substance
addictions,153 and, like Nijinsky, suffered serious psychological problems that led to
151
Ades, “Between Dada and Surrealism,” 34.
153
Robert Reisner, ed., Bird: the Legend of Charlie Parker (New York: Da Capo Press, 1977), 133. Parker had
abused his body so badly that the coroner who performed the autopsy mistakenly estimated Parker!s 34 year-old
body to be that of someone between 50 and 60 years old.
152
38
154
periods of institutionalization.
While Parker and Holiday may have been too popular
in their own time to remain part of the underground, the somber context of Semina 7
reminds us of their struggles with race relations, addiction, money, and their own
creative genius. The biographical similarities of the eulogized figures can be no
accident. In figuratively laying these tortured artists to rest, Berman sought to bury his
own hermetic version of what has since become an artistic cliché.
On a different card Berman offers a similar type of tribute to the poet John
Wieners (fig. 9). Wieners was an active presence in the San Francisco poetry scene in
the late 1950s, but just prior to Semina 7!s 1961 printing he moved to Boston where he
was committed to a psychiatric hospital. Here Weiners is shown in a close up
photograph on a postcard addressed to David Meltzer. Berman introduces a poem by
Wieners with a handwritten note: David / Heard from John – received poem.” Another
mention of Wieners is made in a poem called “Opos”, perhaps short for opposite, which
recalls the earlier gender-bending discussion. In that poem Berman refers to Wieners as
the “Grand Duchess of the five / Dollar matchbox.” Berman makes subtle reference to
still another psychologically unstable artist on a separate card, Joe Albany, a Jazz
pianist who played with Parker.155 Albany!s 25-year battle with heroin forced the
musician in and out of hospitals and prisons.156 What is relevant here about the Parker
and Holiday memorials, the Wiener and Albany tributes, and the nod to Nijinsky, is that
Berman calls attention to the difficult lives and careers of artists who never fully
154
Carl Woideck, Charlie Parker: His Music and Life (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 130. “In 1946,
Parker, battling heroin and alcohol abuse was committed to California!s Camarillo State Hospital.”
155
“Joe Albany, 63, Dies; Master of Jazz Piano,” New York Times, 16 January 1988, Obituaries
156
Ibid.
39
integrated with their own mainstream society. Because of race, addiction or mental
instability these artists remained part of what we might broadly define as an
underground artistic culture. This context further clarifies the reading of Berman!s
slumped self-portrait, signed by his self-destructive alter ego as a farewell to another
artist of the underground -- himself. As he prepares to move to that bustling “city of
degenerate angels,” 400 miles to the south, Berman composes a dramatic statement
that bids adieu to the holy but hopeless piece of himself who worked in relative
seclusion aboard an “ark.”
In “Fairytale For Tosh,” Berman repeats the phrase “The wolf is dead” ten times
(fig. 11). Michael Duncan describes this wordplay as, “less reassurance than a recurring
attempt to ward off danger.”157 Like Semina 7 as a whole, this poem uses dark imagery
to will the end of a difficult moment. Despite the somber mood of Semina 7, there is a
sense of resisting the darkness, of beginning a turn towards the light. In a previously
mentioned poem, Berman wondered if his move to Los Angeles was for any reason
“other than to die.” In fact this change of locale, and I suggest artistic intention, helped to
launch Berman!s most conventionally successful period. Like “Fairytale for Tosh,” the
collective impression of Semina 7 is an insistence that what is to come must be better
than an expiring past. Perhaps a companion piece to “Fairytale” is a photograph of
Berman!s son Tosh, age approximately six, holding what appears to be a toy gun (fig.
12). A black Aleph stands guard over a small boy set small on a relatively vast white
page. Is the boy armed to help ward off the approaching wolf? That the artist!s
157
Duncan, “Semina as Art,” in Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and His Circle, 30.
40
immediate family is prominently featured even in a somber toned periodical, one that
mostly pays tribute to artists who have recently fallen - into addiction, institutionalization,
or death – speaks to the prominent and important roles that Tosh and Shirley played in
Wallace!s work. Another poem, called “Boxed City,” illustrates this point. It makes into
poetry out of what was probably a fairly typical Berman household scene, wife and son
busying themselves while Berman works “To separate seeds/ From the bulk.”
3. AFTER SEMINA 7 - STEPPING INTO THE LIGHT
Today, Tosh Berman works as the book buyer for “Book Soup” an independent
Los Angeles bookstore. He continues his father!s communicative ways, keeping an
active online presence and welcoming a dialogue about his Dad. He writes that Wallace
Berman treated Aleph "...as a creative notebook, and like a true diary, it has no
beginning and no end.”158 To my inquiries he wrote,
“My Dad loved the DADA and Surrealist artists/poets. And playful is an important
part of his work as well as his personality. The mood in the Semina 7 is dark, but
that wouldn't describe the man. My Dad always thought of himself as an artist,
period. He had no interest after Ferus being part of a gallery or the gallery
system. [But] I don't see the Larkspur period of time as a retreat at all! Yes of
course he was very disappointed with the Ferus experience, but it didn't scar him
at all. He got over it and went on. My Dad was very much a control freak when it
comes to his work. That was more important than anything else. The Ferus
Gallery bust was important, but it wasn't something that made him angry or feel ill
towards that world.”159
Tosh disagrees somewhat with this paper!s premise -- that the somber quality of
Semina 7 is a reflection of the end of his father!s most underground moment in 1961.
158
159
Tosh Berman, email with the author, 9 February 2011.
Ibid.
41
Still, from Tosh!s description of his Dad as a control freak we can be reassured that it
is not by accident that Berman eulogizes figures with extremely similar biographies.
While the artist worked to disguise his intentions in order to provide a subjective viewing
experience, he certainly had reasons for his creative choices. Michael Duncan, who
organized the Semina Culture exhibition and wrote an essay for its catalogue, also
questioned my thesis. He wrote me that,
“Berman is such a rich and enigmatic artist and Semina 7 is probably the
most coherent "self-portrait" he made…[after Semina 7] he was interested
in making a living - but beyond that there was no gamesmanship or
career-hustling. Yes the Verifax works were more "commercial" -- and
there is a certain amount of repetition. But they are dark, deeply felt,
spiritually connected artworks. I don't agree that Semina 7 reveals an
imminent change in his work. It seems all of a piece to me.”
Wallace Berman always remained something of a cult figure, someone who inspired
people by his very presence, and he would continue to self-publish Semina from Los
Angeles. The final issue, # 9, (1964) is comprised of just two pieces: a brash McClure
poem called “DOUBLE MURDER!,” about JFK!s assassination, and an image on the
mailing envelope of a subtly altered photo of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald.160
The Verifax works mentioned by Duncan are perhaps Berman!s most recognizable
imagery (fig. 13). They combine his interest in the sublime with pictures from pop
culture, and set the results in a Warholian grid of repeating, subtly altered imagery. They
are indeed strong and interesting works, but the lack of variation among them and the
repeated use of pop imagery suggests different creative intentions from those which
inspired Semina 7 just a few years earlier. Perhaps we might understand something of
160
Duncan, “Semina as Art,” in Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and His Circle , 69.
42
Berman!s new motivations from the fact that upon arriving back in Los Angeles the
artist took work designing posters for a film festival.161 These activities suggest an artist
looking for opportunity, newly engaged in a broader swath of his own culture.
By 1964 Berman!s creative network was vast and strong, and its constituents
were growing increasingly successful. Upon returning to Los Angeles Berman would
find Dennis Hopper, whom he knew from the 1950s as a young photographer and actor,
cleaning himself up to receive major parts, including a role in the 1965 John Wayne film
The Sons of Katie Elder -- a role Hopper credits with saving his career.162 Hopper said
that, “Wallace was an influence to everybody that he touched. He was an incredible
man.”163 Also in 1965, Berman!s San Francisco colleague Joan Brown was garnering
worldly success, receiving the prestigious Louis Comfort Tiffany Award. Berman had
been a frequent visitor to Brown!s San Francisco studio and she respected him
tremendously: “Berman was one of the most supportive people to me, without any kind
of overt encouragement…I was tremendously influenced by Wally Berman. But by him
as a person, not by his work. He just stood, for me, as the whole idea of the
individual.”164 The question I would raise in response to these flattering statements is:
couldn!t Berman have been as influenced by these great artists as they were by him? If
so, it provides a reason, beyond materiality, for his new creative tact, one perhaps best
161
Starr, “Assemblage Art in California,” 111.
Dennis Hopper, The Charlie Rose Show, 21 December 1994. accessed via
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/7142
163
164
Ibid.
162
43
summed up by Berman!s own words to Defeo in 1963 that, “[I] am coming out of
retirement and turning pro.”165
According to Rebecca Solnit, after the last issue of Semina, Berman, “would
seldom take such a self effacing approach to art making.”166 She suggests that upon his
return to Los Angeles the artist approached his work and career differently, writing,
“Recognition came quickly once he let it.”167 She recounts how 1960s Los Angeles was
a booming art center, and that it quickly became the second most important cultural
center in the country.168 Opportunities were many, and Berman began to take advantage
of them. In 1965 he received the William and Noma Copley Foundation Award
(Duchamp was then one of the foundation!s 6 Officers and Directors), and in 1966 a
National Council of Art and Humanities Grant.169 In London, The Robert Frazer Gallery
held an exhibition titled Los Angeles Now, and the Bermans attended the opening
reception.170 It was here that Berman met the artist Michael Cooper who put him in the
rogue gallery of celebrities on the legendary 1967 cover for the Beatles Sergeant
Pepper album cover. And in 1969 Hopper included Berman in his movie Easy Rider, as
a farmer sowing seeds in the rural commune scene, a nod Solnit describes as, “an
ironic tribute to his real-life role as a disseminator of art and spirit.”171 In 1968 Berman
had solo exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Jewish Museum
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
Ibid, 105.
Ibid, 105.
Ibid, 106.
Ibid, 2.
Ibid, 106.
Ibid, 106.
Ibid, 106.
44
in New York. To suggest a complete change in Berman!s intention would be to
overstate the case. The artist seems to have taken a cyclical approach to publicity, as
evidenced by his 1969 decision to show less work publically, and to instead return his
attention to domestic life.172 Until his untimely death, struck by a drunk driver on his 50th
birthday in 1976, Berman would manage to find a balance between his righteous
underground hideout and the public eye. In an interview with New York Times critic
Grace Glueck he said that his shows and sales, “have been happening, somehow at
just the right time. But I only want a taste of it. This may be the last show I!ll have so
why interview me? I really don!t make this scene.” Berman appreciated his success
most because it meant that his wife could stop working.173 Candida-Smith writes that the
artist, “did not spurn buyers, but he had little patience for planning exhibitions,
interviews, and projects. He did not want to be, as he put it to another reporter, part of
the "straight art hustle wearing beat clothes.!”174
CONCLUSION
The modern notion of the non-conformist artist perhaps begins with the poet-critic
Baudelaire, and has strong roots in Paris, with Apollinaire, Breton, and Gertrude Stein.
Breton!s Surrealist publication Litterature embodies this spirit with its insistent
exploration of every possible avenue, and in its refusal to conform to one particular
artistic practice or cultural stereotype. More important than the variety of its contents is
172
173
174
Ibid, 213.
Ibid, 213.
45
the idea that it is not one thing, but instead either everything or nothing, or in some
way perhaps both simultaneously. Like Breton, Berman!s artistic hybridity seems to
have thrived on the mystery and contradiction that are inherent in Surrealism, and his
nine issues of Semina, more than any other of his works reveal this fact. As are the
other issues, #7 is itself a transitional document, not meant to hang on a wall, but to be
circulated among friends. Amidst its dark and foreboding iconography the artist offers a
nod towards an unknown, but boundless future. The faceless cover image shows a
woman caught in the transitional moment, between life and death, her rubbed out
features blurring her individuality with the divine. Transitional imagery necessarily entails
contradiction because, like a complex freeway interchange, its related conceptual traffic
flows simultaneously in many directions. Such is the case with the artist!s self-portrait,
signed by his alter ego of self-destruction, and dedicated to both John Birch and Karl
Marx. Still, in the context of so many memorials to artists with whom Berman seems to
have sympathized, the limp self-portrait begs a new reading. This previously neglected
image pays tribute to, and bids adieu -- it eulogizes -- the secluded but holy artist
aboard his “ark.” Taken as a whole Semina 7 can also be seen as transitional in the
course of Berman!s life. It marks the end of the artist!s time in San Francisco, and
denotes a shift in his creative intentions. While Berman always had his ear to the
ground,175 after Semina 7 he began to garner and embrace grants, museum shows, and
international gallery exhibitions. Perhaps inspired by his friends, many of whom were
flourishing in the newly vibrant Los Angeles art market, Berman toned down his
175
Tosh Berman, email with author.
46
language of hermetic resistance and could be seen, on occasion, cautiously mingling
with the proverbial crowd. The bringing together of diverse elements was one of
Berman!s major contributions to the creation of a new culture, and after Semina 7 he
would see to it that this cocktail included a strong shot of worldly success.
47
FIGURES: SEMINA 7!S (1961) CONTENTS plus A VERIFAX IMAGE.
Fig. 1: Cover photographic still of actress Susan Hayward depicting Barbara Graham
from I Want to Live (1958 directed by Robert Wise. Graham was the first woman
executed in the state of California).
48
Fig. 2: View inside the folder of cards in envelope pocket.
49
Fig. 3: Photograph of still life featuring images of Cocteau, Nijinksy, and a PreRaphaelite painting; accompanied by Wallace Berman!s Untitled Poem.
50
Fig. 4: Photographic collage (Hebrew Aleph and Patricia Jordan in mask in George
Herms! Larkspur studio; image of Billie Holiday added to wall).
51
Fig. 5: Photographic collage (Hebrew Aleph and large pendant hanging over nude
female torso.
52
Fig. 6: Photographic collage with self-portrait credited to “P. Xantos” with text and
inscription.
Fig. 7: Photographic collage of tenor saxophone with Hebrew Aleph
53
Fig. 8: Photographic collage with image of Charlie Parker.
54
Fig. 9: Mailer to David Meltzer: Wallace Berman, Photograph of John Wieners;
handwritten text: John Wieners, “The Windows of Waltham,” poem.
55
Fig. 10: Photographic collage with Aleph and marijuana plants.
56
Fig, 11: “Fairytale for Tosh,” poem.
57
Fig.12: Photographic collage with Aleph and Tosh Berman with toy gun.
58
Fig 13: Untitled, 1967, Wallace Berman, Color Verifax collage, 13 x 14 inches.
59
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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62
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Seitz, William C. The Art of Assemblage. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961.
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63
Starr, Sandra Leonard. “Assemblage Art in California, A Collective Memoir 19401969,” in Forty Years of California Assemblage. ed., UCLA Art Council. Los
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64
Burton, Johanna. “Semina Culture: Wallace Berman & His Circle, Grey Art Gallery.”
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65
Kimmel, Adam. “For the Moment, A Semina Artist.” New York Times, January 8,
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66
WEBSITES:
Hopper, Dennis. The Charlie Rose Show, 21 December 1994. accessed 21 February
2011. http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/7142.
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MUSEUMS AND ARCHIVES:
Berman, Wallace. Semina 7, George Herms 1992 reprint, collection of the Museum of
Modern Art, printed ink on paper, dimensions variable.
New York, NY. Smithsonian Institute of American Art Research Center. Wallace
Berman!s papers. Microfilm reels 5282-5284.

WALLACE BERMAN, SEMINA 7 (1961): A Portrait of the

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