Wallace Berman Art for Sale at Auction

Collage Artist, Photographer, b. 1926 - d. 1976

Wallace Berman was born in New York in Staten Island and moved with his family to Los Angeles, CA. in 1930. After being expelled from high school for gambling, he enrolled in the Jepson Art School and Chouinard. Berman failed however to complete studies there as well. Next, he worked in a factory finishing antique furniture. This gave him the chance to salvage scraps and rejects to make assemblage art sculpture. He also started a mail art publication entitled SEMINA. In 1957 he exhibited works in the Ferus Gallery and became part of the beat community in Los Angeles and San Francisco. In 1960 he started the Semina Art Gallery in Larkspur, CA. He made one experimental film that he never showed to large audiences but only on his studio wall for personal viewing. He used verifax collages that allowed for multiple and serial images at a time when Warhol and others were producing multiple images as an expression of mass culture. In 1976 he was killed -- having being struck by a car driven by a drunk driver on the eve of his fiftieth birthday.