Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era

by Rebecca Solnit, Bill Berkson (Foreword)

Secret Exhibition chronicles a vital California art movement, focusing on six artists — Wallace Berman, Jess, Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo, Wally Hedrick, and George Herms — who broke new ground with provocative work, especially in assemblage and mixed-media projects. This important though relatively little-documented 1950s avant-garde flourished on the West Coast, where the artists were free to create art that was as subversive as it was uncommercial. The story of these artists and their close associates — Beat Generation poets, experimental filmmakers, and musicians who were also breaking away from formalism and convention — is told here against the backdrop of the Korean and Vietnam wars, postwar growth, and the rise of a vigorous counterculture. With first-hand accounts by writers and artists, passages from letters, poems, and ephemeral publications, Secret Exhibition brings together a complex picture of an exciting era; and more than a hundred illustrations in black and white and color make it a visual record of an essential chapter in contemporary American art.

Genres: Art

146 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering  and walking, hope and disaster, including Call Them By Their True Names (Winner of the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction), Cinderella Liberator, Men Explain Things to Me, The Mother of All Questions, and Hope in the Dark, and co-creator of the City of Women map, all published by Haymarket Books; a trilogy of atlases of American cities, The Faraway Nearby, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, and River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award). Her forthcoming memoir, Recollections of My Nonexistence, is scheduled to release in March, 2020. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a columnist at the Guardian and a regular contributor to Literary Hub.

Reviews

[Juliano · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The way that the doors lead back to the surface and to the viewer’s reflected image is typical of his work: it makes a search for solutions fruitless, celebrating mystery instead.” Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era was the final book by Rebecca Solnit which I had left to read, and incidentally was her first book, published thirty years ago! Writing on the Californian artists Wallace Berman, Jess, Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo, Wally Hedrick, and George Herms, Solnit’s first book is more straightforward art history than any of her subsequent books; with threads of sociopolitical history running through, it’s almost the inverse of the style Solnit has since become renowned for. The lives and works of these artists, mainly during the period between the late 1940s and early 1960s, are laid out with clarity and energy, and even thirty years ago Solnit is capitalising on connections, layering her work intricately but never obtusely. Exploring what defines these artists both in relation to and distance from such contemporaries as the Beat poets, experimental filmmakers, musicians, and so on, Solnit makes a convincing case for a Californian unity and a kind of aesthetic vigour made possible (or at least greatly facilitated) by their working neither in New York nor in the public-mainstream. This group of overlapping avant-garde artists working largely in the underground and counterculture, a product of and reaction against the Cold War era, has as much to say as their more famous associates – and luckily for us, Solnit was just the writer to communicate that fact.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

what ain't to like

[Sammy Ginsberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting and insightful into the avant garde art scene in California.