VISION BECOME
The Artists of the Six Gallery, San Francisco 1954-1957

It is these small things… that when brought into vision become an inferno (“The Mystery of the Hunt” by Michael McClure poem read along with “Howl” at Six Gallery on Oct 7, 1955)

The artist cooperative 6 or Six Gallery is remembered by some as an idea or perhaps even an ideal. The San Francisco art critic Alfred Frankenstein called it “a place where ideas are given their fling,” but it was much more.1 It was a test lab for social and creative experimentation where painting, poetry, sculpture, music, film, and performance were alchemized by a generation hell bent on defining itself on its own terms. In that vein, some also view it as ground zero for the Beat movement with the Allen Ginsberg “Howl” reading in October 1955 that also included poets McClure, Rexroth, Lamantia, Whalen, and Snyder. It was an event that has been described as “the first audible rumble of an immense underground river that had been building in volume and force for years.” 1a 

The gallery was founded in 1954 in a converted garage space at 3119 Fillmore Street in San Francisco by young artists who exhibited “complete indifference to the horse-trading and mutual back-scratching whereby reputations are cooked up.” 1b These founders were mostly a group of friends from Pasadena City College who called themselves the Progressive Art Workers – Wally Hedrick, Hayward King, Deborah Remington, John Allen Ryan, David Simpson with the addition of letters man, Jack Spicer. The artists in the group were associated with the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA now SFAI) as were other notable Six Gallery students and teachers such as Leo Valledor, Roy De Forest, Richard Diebenkorn, and Joan Brown who had her first exhibit there. Spicer connected with the eventual Six co-founders in an English class that he taught at CSFA. As the author Rebecca Solnit notes, Spicer “had them make paintings in response to poems and instigated scandalous happenings with theatrical lighting, nudity, and jazz. The class was outrageous even by the tolerant standards of the California School of Fine Arts and so Spicer and five students decided to leave the academic context.” 1c

The exhibition Vision Become examines paintings and sculpture from the years of 1952 to 1957 with several of the works shown at the Six gallery. Along with painting and sculpture, the Six space played host to counterculture photography, film, and performance. The root of these aesthetic activities can perhaps be found in the city itself with its “go for broke” and “wild at heart” Gold Rush history. This mentality may have provided distant groundwork for both the progressive curatorial program at SFMOA (now SFMOMA) under Grace McCann Morley, and the direction of Douglas MacAgy at CSFA with teachers Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Ansel Adams, and others. 

Like cosmic jetsam, the aesthetics of the Six Gallery artists often interconnected, but could also follow their own gravitational forces. These “cross-pollinations were so central”2 and Joyce Rezendes, who was asked by Manuel Neri to show at the gallery, described the creative process as “friends talking to friends.”3 The interactions extended the walls of the gallery to CSFA on Russian Hill, and the bars and hangouts of North Beach that often showed the latest art works on walls and shelves. The Six Gallery scene also extended to living arrangements such as the Fillmore hive of “Painterland” artist couples such as Bruce and Jean Conner, Sonia Gechtoff and James Kelly, Joan Brown and William H. Brown, and Wally Hedrick and Jay Defeo who became the unofficial secretary of the gallery. 

A touchstone painting in the exhibit is the 1955 Wally Hedrick self-portrait titled I’m The Director. It could be said that all of Hedrick’s paintings have some layer of autobiography, but perhaps none are so tethered to a single time and place. One of the key members of the city’s exuberant North Beach beat scene, Hedrick’s art has been described as idea based that often imagined powerful and original art of protest. I’m The Director was created around the same time as Hedrick’s legendary Xmas Tree sculpture that was to become part of a notorious ruckus at a San Francisco Museum opening. In 1956, Hedrick related that “the act of painting is for myself, the finished paintings are for others, and I become an other.” 4 He reportedly gifted I’m The Director to a stranger at the end of an exhibition many decades ago.

Although not shown at the Six, but seemingly present in concept, Clay Spohn helped bring a form of Dada to the Bay through his exhibition ”Museum of Little Known and Unknown Objects” at CSFA in 1949. Thomas Albright noted that his work “set the tone for much of the funky art that was to appear in the 1950s.”5 Spohn pressed that only nature was eternal, but that human imagination could offer interpretative guideposts through the “noetic quality of perception.” 6 Like Spohn’s “unknown objects”, spontaneous new ideas and expressions were actively embraced at the Six as Manuel Neri noted that “we were all presenting ideas as fast as we could get them down.”7

Andre Breton in his Surrealist Manifest (1924) offered further hints to the Six Gallery creative process by posturing that “to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner” is the “real function of thought.” This seems to well encapsulate Fred Martin’s Six Gallery era work as it explored the idea of place, dreams, and alternate realities. One of Martin’s wood sculptures hung from the ceiling above the “Howl” poetry proceedings that was later re-created in Kerouac’s Dharma Bums. Martin’s sculpture was constructed as he says from the detritus of an Oakland dwelling he was repairing.8 

Vision Become also includes an important early work by Ronald Bladen who would later gain recognition as an influential Minimalist NYC sculptor. Bladen who described himself as a “painter among poets”9 was also present the night of the “Howl” reading. His untitled work features brushy paint strokes implying a mist hovering about a void. It is a classic early ABEX work with a nod to William Blake and American Symbolist Albert Pinkham Ryder. After moving to NYC in 1956, Bladen would reconnoiter distant shores with Six alums Dean Fleming, Leo Valledor, and Peter Forakis through Paula Cooper’s Park Place Gallery of the 1960s. Fleming is represented in the exhibition with a wonderful off-beat painting titled Cacophony of Night Birds.

Six Gallery artist Charles Safford is considered by some to be one of the original beat artists with his lone sojourns to the desert and meditative forays on the open rail lines years before studying with Hans Hofmann in NYC. Safford was also an organic bridge between the poets and painters, with their shared reverence of the natural world. Artist and curator Mary McChesney memorialized him as the “legend of the free man” and as an “escape artist … in his life; and the American myth, with its hang-up on the frontier – moving on, travelling light – needs that hero.”10 Safford’s powerful abstract paintings were described by Albright as “raw intensity and bluntness as well as persistent forms and spaces of the natural landscape.”11 He was recently recognized with other CSFA luminaries, some famous some not, in a David Best temple at SFAI.

Like Safford, the painter Peter Shoemaker has often been overlooked in this case as an early Abstract Expressionist in CA and NM. His 1954 work titled Old World offers layers of hidden striatum with automatist line qualities that seem to evoke his formidable teacher Stanley William Hayter. Shoemaker’s work was included in the opening exhibition at the Six.

There are several other notable abstract expressionist works in the Vision Become exhibition. Deborah Remington is represented with a rare painting from 1953 that typifies her period work with “dark, shadowy, amorphous spaces in which cryptic shapes seemed to teeter on the verge of definition.”12 Other abstract additions include mid-fifties paintings by Relf Case and William H Brown with some exuberant anything goes color. As well, James Kelly strikes a major note with a 1957 work representing his most stoic non-objective stance in a work that was exhibited at Staempfli Gallery in NYC. Hayward King and Peter Forakis are represented with shimmering geometric abstract paintings that would have landed easily on the walls of the Six.

Additional paintings include a work by Madeline Dimond and works by Ralph Du Casse, Art Grant, and Julius Wasserstein. Several sculptures by Peter Forakis, Manuel Neri, and Miriam Hoffman are also included. Artist Paul Beattie is represented with a painting from 1955. Beattie was a saxophonist in the Studio 13 Jass Band (formed at CSFA in the 1940s) and introduced DeFeo and Hedrick to the “Painterland” building at 2322 Fillmore Street where they moved during the momentous month of October 1955. 13 

Openings at the Six were remembered as raucous Jazz and wine filled happenings with art and poetry sharing the same wall space. In between openings, few visitors seem to have wagered on the uneven operating hours, but that rarely seemed to dim the artistic enthusiasm and ambition. These fertile and vibrant few years of the Six were sandwiched between earlier artist run galleries such as Metart and King Ubu, and later Spatsa, Dilexi, and Batman. And yet the Six Gallery seems to have left a true impression on the cultural landscape. As writer Richard Candida Smith offered, these “artists attending to their own interests served a transcendent public good….”14

In December 1957, the gallery Secretary Beverly Pabst sent out a closure letter and reflected that the space “has always been open to resounding defeats as well as moments of excitement and inspiration.”15 As with any innovation, the impact of the gallery can be registered in both absolute and less visible threads some with multiple meanings. The “Howl” reading of October 1955, was described as a sort of “communion” with the poet articulating “the semi-unknown for the tribe.”16 This early happening would ultimately slip a chain reaction toward free expression of the published word. 

In the visual arts, the Six Gallery artists had a measurable impact on the art of the Bay Area and southern California. In the south, this came in part through inclusion in Walter Hopp’s influential Action exhibitions beginning in 1955 at the Santa Monica merry-go-round building. The Action 1 exhibition was described as “pivotal in transforming the cultural landscape of Los Angeles” 17 and Hopps related his belief that “most, though not all, of the really interesting art was being created in the north.” 18 The Six Gallery artists of the Action exhibitions would also include Relf Case, Jay DeFeo, Sonia Gechtoff, James Kelly, Fred Martin, and Hassel Smith among others. It was also a major prelude to the founding of Ferus Gallery in 1957 with its first solo artist Sonia Gechtoff.

The legacy of the Six Gallery continues to emerge at times through subtle manifestations and fits and starts. It was a resoundingly creative and energetic space that liberated artists of disparate gender, color, age, socio-economic and sexual orientation to closely mingle and share ideas and engagements. It is an approach that sounds contemporary if not visionary to the here and now.

copyright 2023, David Keaton, Modern Art West

NOTES 

1 Alfred Frankenstein, “A Glimpse of the Art Galleries,” This World, San Francisco Chronicle, November 13, 1955 

1a Poets of the Cities New York San Francisco 1950-1965, E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1974, Unscrewing the Locks: The Beat Poets, John Clellon Holmes, 67

1b Alfred Frankenstein, “A Glimpse of the Art Galleries,” This World, San Francisco Chronicle, November 13, 1955

1c Rebecca Solnit, Secret Exhibition, Six California Artists of the Cold War Era, City Lights Books, San Francisco, 1990, 47

2 Beat Culture and the New America 1950-1965, Lisa Phillips, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1995: Contributor Rebecca Solnit, 71

3 Telephone interview with Joyce Rezendes September 2021

4 Quoted in exhibition catalog. Wally Hedrick, Editor, Isabel Hood. SFAA Gallery at CSFA, San Francisco, November 16 through December 7, 1956

5 Thomas Albright, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area 1945 – 1980, University of California Press, 42

6 Poets of the Cities New York San Francisco 1950-1965, E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1974, Unscrewing the Locks: The Beat Poets, John Clellon Holmes, 22

7 Thomas Albright, “Manuel Neri: A Kind of Time Warp.” Currant, Apr-May 1975, 13

8 Written interview with Fred Martin September, 2021

9 Bill Berkson, “Bladen: Against Gravity,” Art in America January 1992, 82

10 Rolling Renaissance: San Francisco Underground Art in Celebration: 1945-1968, Intersection 1968, Charles Safford – “The Only Way to Live”, 22

11 Thomas Albright, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area 1945 – 1980, University of California Press, 310

12 Thomas Albright, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area 1945 – 1980, University of California Press, 52

13 Anastasia Aukemon, Welcome to Painterland: Bruce Conner and the Rat Bastard Protective Association, University of California Press, 2016, 4

14 Richard Candida Smith, Utopia and Dissent: Art Poetry, and Politics in California: University of California Press, 1995, 160

15 The Beat Generation Galleries & Beyond, John Natsoulas Press, 2010, 91

16 Gary Snyder, The Real Work: Interviews and Talks, 1964-1979 (New York: New Directions, 1980). From Rebecca Solnit, Secret Exhibition: City Lights Books, 1990 17 “The Anti-Square Merry-Go-Round Show: Action and Politics in Los Angeles” Serge Guilbaut. Pacific Standard Time: Los Angeles Art 1945-1980. The Getty Research Institute and the J. Paul Getty Museum, 65

17 “The Anti-Square Merry-Go-Round Show: Action and Politics in Los Angeles” Serge Guilbaut. Pacific Standard Time: Los Angeles Art 1945-1980. The Getty Research Institute and the J. Paul Getty Museum, 65

18 “Walter Hopps Hopps Hopps” Interviewed by Hans-Ullrich Obrist, Artforum, February 1996