"Jess 1923-2004: Paintings and Paste Ups," May 23-July 31, 2008, at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 724 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016
"1968/2008: The Culture of Collage," June 12-Aug. 8, 2008, at Pavel Zoubok Gallery, 539 West 23rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10011
"Manufactured Unreality: The Art of Collage," May 16-June 27, 2008, at Francis Naumann Fine Art, 22 East 80th Street, New York, N.Y. 10021
Don’t get me wrong. I love collage. It’s one of the most fertile and flexible formal innovations of the 20th century. But before I saw the current exhibition of Jess’ collages and paintings at Tibor de Nagy, I usually found his super-obsessive and idiosyncratic "paste-ups" super creepy. Now the gallery has done a wonderful job of pulling together some of this image hoarder’s most impressive work, producing what amounts to a mini-retrospective and proving that the artist’s best pieces deserve high praise. The exhibition shows that it’s time to take a closer look at this mid-century California romantic who has remained more of a cult figure than a household name.
Jess died four years ago at age 81. In our Photoshop age, his scrupulously handmade works on paper seem touchingly antique in their madly labor-intensive cutting and pasting, His visual stream of consciousness forever embodies the bohemian 1950s of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady as well as the libertine psycheldelic ‘60s. In fact three-quarters of the 27 pieces on display at Tibor de Nagy were made between 1952 and 1972, the artist’s richest and most productive period.
Jess’s back-story is complex. Born as Burgess Collins in Long Beach, Ca., in 1923, he was educated as a chemist. During the Second World War he was drafted and worked for the Manhattan Project. After he was discharged in 1946, Collins was employed at the Hanford Atomic Energy Project in Richland, Wash. He painted in his spare time, but his escalating hatred of atomic weapons led him to abandon his scientific career and focus on his art. In 1949 he went back to school at Berkeley. He then enrolled in the California School of the Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) where he studied with Clyfford Still. Becoming estranged from his family (perhaps because he was gay), he soon began referring to himself simply as "Jess,"
A cultural fixture in San Francisco for decades, he also wrote poetry and maintained a lifelong relationship with the poet Robert Duncan (who died in 1988). Both were key players in the formation of the lively 1950s San Francisco art and literary scene. In 1952 in San Francisco, Collins, along with Duncan and painter Harry Jacobus, opened the King Ubu Gallery, named in homage to Jarry’s absurdist anti-hero. The gallery immediately became a galvanizing venue for the emerging local alternative art world.
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