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 domestic and the avant-garde. By emphasizing family as a complement, rather than an impediment, to the creative life, Berman challenged the status quo from the ground up, approaching parenthood through the lens of play, of the imagination, rather than that of patriarchy.
“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 but to construct a memoir as an extended collage, or assembly. It is an oddly fitting strategy, not least because the senior Berman was a genius of assemblage.
This article appears in Issue 34 of Alta Journal.
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Unfolding over 50 chapters, most no longer than a handful of pages, Tosh develops by way of a series of portraits 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. And then there is Wallace Berman’s death, in 1976.
This is where Tosh ends: 50 chapters for 50 years. And yet, the legacy of the father lingers. “I never knew a time,” his son writes, “when Wallace was not an artist.… 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.•
