The Estate of Wallace Berman
Wallace Berman was an American artist - a self-taught modernist, hipster, and poet-mystic, who worked at a time of extraordinary socio-political and cultural change.
— Claudia Bohn-Spector
Selected Works
Past Exhibitions
Selected Press
About the Artist
Wallace Berman was an American artist - a self-taught modernist, hipster, and poet-mystic, who worked at a time of extraordinary socio-political and cultural change. Born shortly before the Great Depression, he came of age in the aftermath of World War II, when the horrors of global warfare, the Holocaust, and atomic bombings lingered vividly in people’s hearts and minds. Far from the traditional centers of art and culture, Berman matured as an artist in Los Angeles, on the creative frontier of the American West. His was a reality bifurcated by the clash of an old world and a new, in which lifestyles born of war and deprivation coexisted with unparalleled prosperity, economic growth, and technological innovation. In the 1950s and ’60s, Berman witnessed the rise of the enthusiastic consumerism and militarized bureaucracies of Cold War America, soon to be challenged by the countercultural revolutions of the civil rights, antiwar, and women’s rights movements. He died before the global information age had fully formed, his prolific career cut short by a drunk driveron the eve of his fiftieth birthday in 1976. In the half-century of his all too-short life, America - and, indeed, the world - transformed dramatically, rushing to the brink of a new technological era that few could have envisioned or anticipated.