19 Facts About Wallace Berman

Wallace "Wally" Berman was an American experimental filmmaker, assemblage, and collage artist and a crucial figure in postwar California art.

Wallace Berman was born in Staten Island, New York in 1926.

Wallace Berman attended classes at Jepson Art Institute and Chouinard Art Institute in the 1940s.

Wallace Berman married Shirley Morand and they had a son, Tosh, in 1954.

In 1957, Wallace Berman moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco, where he mostly focused on his magazine Semina, which consisted of poetry, photographs, texts, drawings and images he assembled.

Wallace Berman started his series of Verifax Collages in 1963 or 1964.

Director Dennis Hopper, a collector of Wallace Berman's work, gave Wallace Berman a small role in his 1969 film Easy Rider.

Wallace Berman produced work until his death in 1976 in a car accident caused by a drunk driver.

Wallace Berman's art embodied the kind of interdisciplinary leanings and interests that, in time, would come to help characterize the Beat movement as a whole.

Wallace Berman created Verifax collages, which consist of photocopies of images from magazines and newspapers mounted onto a flat surface in collage fashion and mixed with occasional solid areas of acrylic paint.

Wallace Berman was influenced by jazz music, rock music, poetry of his Beat circle, Surrealism, Dada, and the Kabbalah.

In 1957 Wallace Berman had his first exhibition of his artworks at the newly opened Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles.

Wallace Berman was convicted of displaying lewd and obscene materials.

At the summation in the courtroom, Wallace Berman wrote on the blackboard "There is no justice, only revenge".

Wallace Berman's mail art publication Semina was a series of folio packages that were limited edition and sent or given to his friends.

Wallace Berman created a six-minute 8mm silent experimental film, Aleph, that he worked on from 1958 to 1976.

Wallace Berman began work on it soon after the release of the first issues of Semina, and it incorporates techniques from collage and painting.

Wallace Berman's likeness appears on the album cover of the Beatles' 1967 Sgt.

In 1992 Wallace Berman's papers were donated to the Archives of American Art by his son Tosh Wallace Berman.