1974.49, Wallace Berman, Untitled, 1964, verifax collage | DMA Staging Content Management System

GENERAL DESCRIPTION

Wallace Berman created his most important work in Los Angeles and was part of that city's Beat Generation artists and writers. His collages of pictures from newspapers, magazines, and other popular sources may seem reminiscent of those by fellow Californian Jess [1977.15], but Berman is ascetic and precise by comparison. His early forays into popular culture's trove of imagery roughly paralleled those of Andy Warhol, who in the late 1950s began the photo-mechanical investigations that resulted in the pop art explosion of the 1960s. Wallace Berman investigated the same territory, but for very different ends and with radically different and idiosyncratic results.

Berman used an early photocopy machine, the Verifax, to reproduce his carefully selected cutout images; often they appear solarized, or reversed in tonality. Berman then lay down these images in a regular grid that suggests some rationale, but definitively states none. Interested in the Kabbala, a text of Jewish mysticism (hence the small Hebrew letters placed around his pictures) Berman seems to be sending some kind of supernatural message; we see it transmitted by the small transistor radio framing the images. The radio appears in the hand of the artist, attesting to the work's creation and a trace of a human presence. Berman's mysterious work lets us consider our everyday culture as an archive for the future. Here he has already begun to codify it according to his own enigmatic system, which we can only intuit.

Excerpt from

Charles Wylie, "Untitled," in Dallas Museum of Art: A Guide to the Collection, ed. Charles Venable (New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press, 1997), 279.

NOTES

updated provenance; updated geo x ref (Los Angeles, based on Charles Wylie's general description)

Catalogue essays

Artist/designers

Cultures

Geography

Process/materials

Historical periods

Individuals

Subject terms

RELATED OBJECTS

PROVENANCE

1964-1974: Collection of Wallace Berman,

From 1974: Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, purchased from the artist [1]

[1] The name of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, founded in 1933, was changed to the Dallas Museum of Art in 1983.

AUDIO ASSETS

VIDEO ASSETS

IMAGE ASSETS

WEB RESOURCES

Art in America~Read a review of a 2016 Berman retrospective, "American Aleph" at the Kohn Gallery in L.A.
Metropolitan Museum of Art~View another work by Berman.
Radio KCRW~Listen to a summary of "American Aleph."

ARCHIVAL RESOURCES

FUN FACTS

TEACHING IDEAS

RULES

Apply to objects where number equals 1974.49

General Description

Wallace Berman created his most important work in Los Angeles and was part of that city's Beat Generation artists and writers. His collages of pictures from newspapers, magazines, and other popular sources may seem reminiscent of those by fellow Californian Jess [1977.15], but Berman is ascetic and precise by comparison. His early forays into popular culture's trove of imagery roughly paralleled those of Andy Warhol, who in the late 1950s began the photo-mechanical investigations that resulted in the pop art explosion of the 1960s. Wallace Berman investigated the same territory, but for very different ends and with radically different and idiosyncratic results.

Berman used an early photocopy machine, the Verifax, to reproduce his carefully selected cutout images; often they appear solarized, or reversed in tonality. Berman then lay down these images in a regular grid that suggests some rationale, but definitively states none. Interested in the Kabbala, a text of Jewish mysticism (hence the small Hebrew letters placed around his pictures) Berman seems to be sending some kind of supernatural message; we see it transmitted by the small transistor radio framing the images. The radio appears in the hand of the artist, attesting to the work's creation and a trace of a human presence. Berman's mysterious work lets us consider our everyday culture as an archive for the future. Here he has already begun to codify it according to his own enigmatic system, which we can only intuit.