Wallace Berman has long been one of my cultural heroes—both for the visionary brilliance of his art making and for his ability to balance the at-times-conflicting impulses of the domestic and the avant-garde. The perspective is one I find compelling, revolutionary in the most fundamental sense of the word. By emphasizing family as a complement, rather than an impediment, to the creative life, after all, Berman challenged the status quo from the ground up, approaching parenthood through the lens of play, of the imagination, rather than that of patriarchy. It’s an ideal to which I also aspired as a father, and even though my children are both grown now, Berman’s example continues to resonate with me.
“He did art, and only did art,” his son, Tosh Berman, notes in his 2018 memoir, Tosh: Growing Up in Wallace Berman’s World. “He was a family man, but that doesn’t adequately express who he was.” For the younger Berman, then, the idea is not to explain his father so much as to give a series of portraits of who he was.
This article appears in Issue 34 of Alta Journal.
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Such a strategy—to construct a memoir as an extended collage, or assembly—is oddly fitting, not least because the senior Berman was a genius of assemblage. Among my favorites of his projects is Semina, the assembly magazine he published between 1955 and 1964, which featured, among others, Michael McClure, William S. Burroughs, David Meltzer, and Philip Lamantia. Each of its nine issues was, his son writes, “handmade, individually numbered and signed, and only given out to friends or people he admired.” It was a project steeped in a commitment to collaboration, or perhaps I should say community.
Tosh functions out of a related sensibility, which should come as little surprise. Unfolding over 50 chapters, most no longer than a handful of pages, it develops by way of a sequence of sketches of people, places, and ideas. There are the author’s parents—his mother, Shirley, was a force in her own right—whose meeting opens the book. There are artists and actors such as Andy Warhol and Dean Stockwell and spaces including the Ferus Gallery, founded by Walter Hopps and the painter Ed Kienholz, where the elder Berman has his first show, in 1957, only to be arrested for obscenity. And then there is the artist’s death, in 1976, on the night of his 50th birthday, in a car accident in Topanga Canyon.
This is where Tosh ends: 50 chapters for 50 years. And yet, the legacy of the father lingers, not least in the insistence on a different approach to work-life balance, one in which the work is integrated directly into the life. “I never knew a time,” his son writes, “when Wallace was not an artist. I still have strong memories of his working on the left side of the living room in Beverly Glen.… I often think of my dad’s artworks in more of a textural context than a visual one.… As a two-year-old, I was never told not to touch something, so I remember touching the paintings and feeling the layers of paint and glue over the work itself.” There’s profundity in that image, beginning with its generosity. Art as gift or art as gesture, art as a conversation shared across the years. Something similar is in play throughout this deeply moving memoir, this love letter to a father from a son.•
