By Michael Rogers

Several years ago, a glossy museum catalog appeared in the Caltech public relations office. No one remembers how it got there, but it landed on the desk of Heidi Aspaturian, the editor of Caltech News, and she, knowing that I was then completing my MFA (master of fine arts), passed it along to me. It was the catalog for a major U.S. touring retrospective of the San Francisco artist who went by the name of Jess. He was not well-known to the general public but, as the catalog indicated, his obsessively detailed collages and often dream-like paintings could be found in numerous museums throughout the United States and Europe, and he was highly respected among artists, curators, and critics. Leafing through the pages, I was particularly struck by a catalog photo that showed Jess laboring over a painting in blinders, the better to concentrate on his work.

As I read on, I discovered that Jess had been, of all things, a Caltech student. His name back then was Burgess Collins, and he had majored in chemistry (graduating with honor in 1948) and had worked on the Manhattan Project. After leaving the Institute, he spent about a year at the Hanford nuclear facility in Washington State. Then came a dramatic career shift: he turned his back on his scientific training and embraced a career as an artist.

Jess eventually became one of the most influential San Francisco artists of his generation. His meditative and nostalgic paintings and complex collages can be found today in the collections of nearly every major U.S. art museum, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden of Washington, D.C., and New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art, and his work has been shown in many other prestigious institutions. In March of this year, a national traveling exhibition of his work opened at the San Jose Museum of Art. In October it arrived at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, where it will remain on view until January 6, 2008.

Not long after I first saw the catalog, I managed to track down Jess’s San Francisco address and I wrote to him, requesting an interview. Jess was reportedly extremely private, so I had slim hope of a reply, and after a few weeks without a response, I forgot the matter. Then, one day a card arrived adorned with a hodgepodge of clipped images—a unicorn, a reindeer, and an old woman seated by a pond. The artwork and the card were from Jess. He said that it “bemused” him to think back to his days at Caltech and in science and asked that an interview be postponed until the following spring when he might have more time.

I wrote again early the next year, but when I finally heard from my correspondent about six months later, he had apparently had second thoughts. “Many (maybe most) artists leap enthusiastically at a chance to verbalize on art and life; where I shy away. Added to that characteristic, I have now in my seventies a most unsettling weakness of memory.” The letter ended on a more hopeful note, inviting me to visit if I ever were in town. “Let me know,” he wrote, “and this old recluse will answer the door.”

But the months passed, and I never did make it up to San Francisco. And then, in January 2004, I opened The New York Times and saw Jess’s obituary. It began, “Jess, an artist whose idiosyncratic paintings and collages made him a cult figure in American art, died on Jan. 2 at his home in San Francisco. He was 80.”

Beyond the door above, Jess lived and produced art in a hermitic world, rarely venturing outside the San Francisco neighborhood known as the Mission. The picture above right from the Big T is one of the few known photographs of Jess from his years at Caltech. The image wrapping the text on these pages is Jess’s painting, titled If All The World Were Paper And All The Water Sink, made in 1962.

In the Bay Area, where Jess had lived and worked for more than five decades, his passing received widespread attention. “He was the essential San Francisco artist,” Harry Parker, then the director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and now retired, told the local papers. “His political views and his quirky artistic style, his association with the poetry scene, his advocacy of gay rights—all the issues that came into his work were so representative of the San Francisco perspective. Only here could you imagine work like his being made.”

The news of Jess’s death once again piqued my interest in this former Caltech student turned reclusive yet prolific artist. I gave Parker a call, and he elaborated a bit on the interplay between Jess’s personality and his artwork, telling me, “Jess was extremely gentle, totally unpretentious, curious, and extremely original. He had quite an impact on other artists. Of the generation of post–World War II artists in San Francisco, Jess may well emerge to have been the best of the bunch.”

Some months after this conversation, I got in touch with a Bay Area writer named Christopher Wagstaff, who had become a friend of the artist late in his life. I had plans to be in San Francisco that summer, and Wagstaff offered to give me a tour of the now-empty home that Jess had shared since 1967 with his longtime companion, the poet Robert Duncan, who had died in 1988. The four-story Victorian clapboard house was located on a side street of a working-class but now gentrifying San Francisco neighborhood called the Mission, where the trendy coffee shops and boutiques were just starting to encroach on the pawn shops, thrift stores, and mom-and-pop grocery stores. From the sidewalk, a set of stairs led up to the front door. The bell did not appear to be working, and a security gate prevented me from knocking on the door. I was about to give up when Wagstaff opened the door.

Inside, the house was dark, bare, and in some disrepair. Most of the furniture was gone, and the walls, which Wagstaff said were once completely covered with art, were now empty. Sheets of paint were peeling off the walls, and in a few places crumbling plaster had exposed the wood lath underneath. It looked to me like a demolition job was under way, but Wagstaff explained that this was how Jess and Duncan had lived. “They believed that the house was an organic thing and should age like people,” Wagstaff said. “They didn’t do normal cosmetic work. They felt that the house should be let be.”

The “essential San Francisco artist” was actually a product of Long Beach, California, where Jess grew up in the 1930s. He later told friends that he had little interest in art as a youth and showed few signs of precocious talent. Instead, like his father, who worked as a civil engineer, his focus was on science. Jess spent his freshman year at Long Beach Junior College, transferring to Caltech in 1942. The 1943 edition of Caltech’s yearbook, the Big T, has a single picture of him grouped with those students who lived off campus, but his name and image do not appear elsewhere in the book with any of the clubs or sports teams.

“He told me that he enjoyed his studies,” says Michael Auping, the chief curator of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, who between the early 1980s and early 1990s had spent hours interviewing Jess in preparation for two shows and the accompanying catalogs on the artist’s work. “He was comfortable with science and math, and going to Caltech was a perfect fit for him.”

In February 1943, Jess was drafted into the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. After training in the chemical warfare service, he was assigned to a branch of the Manhattan Project, monitoring the production of plutonium at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, from April 1944 until his discharge in January 1946.

“When he was at Oak Ridge, there was a convocation to report on what happened at Hiroshima,” says Wagstaff. Physicist Edward Teller showed a newsreel of the destruction, and “it was overwhelming for Jess to see what had actually happened. He knew they were working on a weapon, but he said that they had no idea exactly what kind of weapon. He felt ill watching the newsreel and had to leave the room.” Says Parker, “Jess felt guilt about being associated with nuclear weapons. His liberation was turning to art.”

However, Jess did return to Caltech in 1946 and graduated two years later, afterward taking a job as a control chemist at the Hanford Atomic Energy Project in Washington. He had also begun to dabble in art on the weekends.

It was at Hanford, Jess later told Auping, that he had a vivid dream that the world would destroy itself by 1975. “We know that it didn’t happen,” Jess told Auping, who later wrote about the incident in a catalog essay. “But at the time I had a strong feeling this would occur. I decided that if that was going to be the case, I wanted to do something that was truly meaningful to me. Art was far more meaningful than making plutonium. So I set about learning more about art.”

In 1949, Jess moved to the Bay Area and enrolled at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Soon afterward, he dropped his surname, truncated his first name, and cut off all contact with his family. “He felt he had been forced to follow his dad and do something practical,” says Harry Jacobus, a San Francisco artist who befriended Jess in art school. “His father was strict about Jess not being an artist.”

By 1951 Jess had also dropped out of art school and begun living with Robert Duncan, who would be his partner and most significant creative influence for the rest of his life. Duncan, whose work would eventually become quite well-known, had published his first book of poems, Heavenly City, Earthly City, in 1947 and was part of a circle of Bay Area poets. Through him, Jess became acquainted with this group of writers and intellectuals.

“Duncan was the verbal person while Jess was withdrawn and serious,” says Jacobus. “I don’t remember him ever telling a joke. He was quiet. He was private. He didn’t talk about his art. I don’t think he ever worked at it with any intention of making it big.”

Jess’s mature style first began to surface in the works he created in the late 1950s and early 1960s. At a time when the art world was dominated by the paint-splattered canvases of abstract expressionism—championed by artists like Jackson Pollock—Jess continued to follow his own idiosyncratic path. His artworks focused defiantly on people and landscapes, and his canvases, far from being impersonal and brash, explicitly incorporated literary, scientific, and historical themes. “At a time when the art world was rejecting the past, Jess was always looking toward the past,” says Jacobus. An avid reader of fantasy books, including the classic Wizard of Oz series, Jess remained convinced that the past offered vast possibilities for the type of artistic exploration that could still engage a contemporary audience. “It is all about rescuing or resurrecting images,” he once told Auping. “The stories or images that can be created and pulled through time seem endless.”

In the 1950s, with little of his work selling, Jess got a job creating posters for the Berkeley Cinema Guild, one of the first theaters in the United States to showcase what would today be considered indie films. The manager of the theater, who also hired him to paint murals throughout her house in Berkeley, was Pauline Kael, who would later become the celebrated film critic for The New Yorker.

Jess persevered in his art, and by the early 1960s he had begun to exhibit a few works in museum shows, the typical first step toward recognition. In the mid-1960s, he got a rare break. As is often the case in the art world, it takes an independent respected voice to champion an artist’s work before the powers that be catch on to it. In this case, it was a painter named Irving Petlin, who saw Jess’s work during a trip to California and recommended him to the New York art dealers Federico Quadrani and Odyssia Skouras. Quadrani visited Jess, and in 1968 the duo agreed to start showing his work. That same year, Jess had a solo museum show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

By the early ’70s, thanks partly to the promotional efforts of Skouras and Quadrani, Jess’s work had begun to attract notice among critics, curators, and collectors and to appear in shows at major institutions, including the Hayward Gallery in London, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. During the 1970s, Jess had solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. His success continued throughout the 1980s, leading to a retrospective organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo in 1993, which traveled to several museums, including the Whitney.

Jess’s painting, titled The Sun: Tarot XIX, top, shows his continued interest in science even after leaving the field, while his collage, On the Way to Rose Mountain, is shown below it.

While museum showings occasionally grouped Jess with pop artists like Andy Warhol because of his affinity for using clippings from popular magazines, he remained impervious to fads and his work is rarely associated with a particular artistic school or movement. The distinctive personal style that he had developed by the 1960s often included images from scientific publications, including various types of instrumentation and medical illustrations. Children and mythological characters were also among his favorite subjects.

“It’s true that Jess left a career in science for art, but he never really left science,” Auping says. “He transferred the information of science into his own visual alchemy through literature and found imagery.”
Today, Jess is most highly regarded for his collages, which he preferred to call paste-ups. Sometimes working with almost mural-sized canvases, he painstakingly crafted fantasy worlds out of a blizzard of clippings from popular magazines, scientific journals, and art books. He could take years to complete a collage while he waited for the right image to appear in a magazine or book.

Auping has described Jess’s collages as “a visual roller coaster ride,” adding, in the vernacular of art criticism, that they constitute “an activated field of interlocked, free-associated images that vaguely resemble the painterly explosions and gestural coupling of action painting.” Perhaps reflecting his earlier life as a scientist, Jess favored a more basic explanation for his working method. He told Auping that he considered collage a practical way of creating images that he wanted to make but couldn’t produce because he felt he lacked the technical skills. “I didn’t start out as a child or young man to develop skills with the hand and eye,” he said. “When I was 28 and becoming an artist, I no longer had the ability to learn these things. So collages were the sensible answer to the problem.”

To his penchant for the practical, Jess also brought a passion for narrative flow. “Story books are important to me,” he told Auping. “I wanted to be able to look at a canvas and read something happening like a novel or adventure story.” Sometimes his interest in a story was direct, reflected in paintings that incorporate many motifs from children’s books. More obscure narratives can be deciphered in the collages, which often resemble dreamscapes and frequently feature pensive central characters gazing at the scene almost like avatars for flesh-and-blood viewers. While the astonishing range and variety of images can induce a feeling of sensory overload, the images all seem to cohere into lucid if otherworldly landscapes. In Auping’s view, this visual sweep and harmony likely has its roots in Jess’s scientific background. “Science is about discovering patterns, and Jess’s art is about discovering patterns,” says Auping. “Nothing in his art is coincidental.”

Despite his growing acclaim in the art world—or perhaps because of it—Jess retreated more and more into his quiet life with Duncan. “As far as recognition goes, I can’t say it was important to him,” says Skouras. “He just wanted to be able to work.” “He didn’t like crowds,” says the poet Joanna McClure, one of his friends. “At one point, he had a big show coming up at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. We had been out to lunch. There was a big banner for the show on Van Ness Avenue. It was raining and he slipped on wet leaves and broke his wrist. He blamed himself for being clumsy. Then he said, ‘I’ll do anything to get out of an opening.’”

A panoramic view of Jess’s studio during the artist’s lifetime shows works in progress.

In later years Jess became increasingly disinclined to leave his home except to shop, go to lunch with a friend, or to collect material for his paste-ups and the sculptures that he created from items scavenged from the streets or purchased at thrift stores. In his free time, Jess loved to assemble intricate jigsaw puzzles, and, not surprisingly, this hobby eventually found its way into his art. He created complex constructions out of a profusion of jigsaw puzzles, often layering pieces from different puzzles on top of each other and interleaving them to create wildly colorful and amusing scenes. It was an art form that he had all to himself. His work in this genre can be found today in the Metropolitan and the Whitney museums in New York.

In 1984, Duncan developed kidney disease, and Jess turned much of his attention to caring for him until his death four years later. By 1997 Jess had stopped making art altogether. “He stopped working when he was struggling with a failure of memory,” says Wagstaff. “He wasn’t able to work. I think that troubled him and he missed it very much. He’d say, ‘I wish I could work. I should work.’ He worked for 47 years without interruption. I’d tell him, ‘You’ve done it.’”

Shown in his studio in a photograph taken in 1983, Jess would often work wearing blinders, so he could concentrate better.

While many artists who abruptly gain fame are as quickly forgotten, there seems to be a growing consensus among art professionals that Jess has a secure place in the history of American art. “With other artists, once you’ve deciphered the message, that’s all there is to it,” says Parker. “With Jess’s work, I always felt that there were multiple ways to read it and a child’s interpretation would have the same merit as an art historian’s. The appeal of Jess’s work is its multiple readings. That’s part of the reason that it will survive the test of time.”

Jess’s view of his art as a medium for pulling tales through time came back to me as I wandered through his house that June day back in 2004. My guide Wagstaff showed me the music room, the library collections that included Jess’s complete set of the Wizard of Oz books, and the telephone room—a small, windowless space housing a four-sided bookshelf on wheels. When we came to Jess’s studio, I was surprised to find that the artist’s workspace was still largely intact. His wood worktable, covered by brushes, paints, and other art supplies, stood against one wall. Across the room, an easel held a large board filled with old photographs clipped from books and magazines.

Next to the studio was the storeroom in which Jess had stockpiled dozens of the jigsaw puzzles that he enjoyed putting together when he wasn’t raiding them for his art. Beyond that was Jess’s “clipping room,” where old wooden filing cabinets vied for space with boxes of magazine clippings stacked from floor to ceiling. I was startled to see how meticulously the contents of each box were classified, with labels such as “vegetation: grass, meadow, glades, fields, marsh, bog, jungle, palm, oak, cypress, pine, redwood.” It seemed that Jess had organized his clippings as carefully as an entomologist might catalogue his insect specimens.

Toward the end of the tour, we visited the kitchen. Both Jess and Duncan had been inventive cooks, and I recalled how Jacobus had told me that in the kitchen Jess seemed to revert to his earlier incarnation as a chemist. “All the ingredients had to have certain properties. There had to be contradiction and contrast, he’d say. That’s when his scientific background came out.”

The kitchen was old-fashioned and featured a sunny dining area with a view of a back garden, now overgrown. Glancing outside, I noticed a visiting orange cat sitting placidly on the patio, gazing up at us. It seemed perfectly at home amid the overgrown tangle of brush, weeds, and other vegetation, looking for all the world like the enigmatic cat that appears in Jess’s 1976 collage, Arkadia’s Last Resort. For a moment there, I had the odd sensation of having landed in a Jess composition. But when I looked again, the cat was gone.

For more information on the Jess exhibit in Pasadena, go to www.pmcaonline.org. The Jess estate is represented by the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York.