Jess Collins (August 6, 1923 – January 2, 2004), simply known today as Jess, was an American visual artist.

Biography

Jess was born Burgess Franklin Collins in

Long Beach, California Long Beach is a city in Los Angeles County, California. It is the 42nd-most populous city in the United States, with a population of 466,742 as of 2020. A charter city, Long Beach is the seventh-most populous city in California. Incorporate ...

. He was drafted into the military and worked on the production of

plutonium Plutonium is a radioactive chemical element with the symbol Pu and atomic number 94. It is an actinide metal of silvery-gray appearance that tarnishes when exposed to air, and forms a dull coating when oxidized. The element normally exhibi ...

for the

Manhattan Project The Manhattan Project was a research and development undertaking during World War II that produced the first nuclear weapons. It was led by the United States with the support of the United Kingdom and Canada. From 1942 to 1946, the project w ...

. After his discharge in 1946, Jess worked at the Hanford Atomic Energy Project in

Richland, Washington Richland () is a city in Benton County, Washington, United States. It is located in southeastern Washington at the confluence of the Yakima and the Columbia Rivers. As of the 2020 census, the city's population was 60,560. Along with the nearby c ...

, and painted in his spare time, but his dismay at the threat of

atomic weapon A nuclear weapon is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either fission (fission bomb) or a combination of fission and fusion reactions ( thermonuclear bomb), producing a nuclear explosion. Both bom ...

s led him to abandon his scientific career and focus on his art. In 1949, Jess enrolled in the California School of the Arts (now the

San Francisco Art Institute San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) was a private college of contemporary art in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1871, SFAI was one of the oldest art schools in the United States and the oldest west of the Mississippi River. Approximately ...

) and, after breaking with his family, began referring to himself simply as "Jess". In the late 1940s, Jess met Robert Duncan and the painter Lyn Brockway, and became active in numerous exhibitions, poetry gatherings, and creative endeavors through their circle. He met Robert Duncan in 1951 and began a relationship with the poet that lasted until Duncan's death in 1988. In 1952, in San Francisco, Jess, with Duncan and painter Harry Jacobus, opened the King Ubu Gallery, which became an important venue for alternative art and which remained so when, in 1954, poet

Jack Spicer Jack Spicer (January 30, 1925 – August 17, 1965) was an American poet often identified with the San Francisco Renaissance. In 2009, ''My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer'' won the American Book Award for poetry. H ...

reopened the space as the Six Gallery. Many of Jess's paintings and

collage Collage (, from the french: coller, "to glue" or "to stick together";) is a technique of art creation, primarily used in the visual arts, but in music too, by which art results from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole. ...

s have themes drawn from

chemistry Chemistry is the science, scientific study of the properties and behavior of matter. It is a natural science that covers the Chemical element, elements that make up matter to the chemical compound, compounds made of atoms, molecules and ions ...

alchemy Alchemy (from Arabic: ''al-kīmiyā''; from Ancient Greek: χυμεία, ''khumeía'') is an ancient branch of natural philosophy, a philosophical and protoscientific tradition that was historically practiced in China, India, the Muslim world, ...

, the

occult The occult, in the broadest sense, is a category of esoteric supernatural beliefs and practices which generally fall outside the scope of religion and science, encompassing phenomena involving otherworldly agency, such as magic and mysticism a ...

, and male beauty, including a series called ''Translations'' (1959–1976) which is done with heavily laid-on paint in a

paint-by-number Paint by number or painting by numbers are kits having a board on which light markings to indicate areas to paint, and each area has a number and a corresponding numbered paint to use. The kits come with little compartmentalised boxes where the ...

style. In 1975, the

Wadsworth Atheneum The Wadsworth Atheneum is an art museum in Hartford, Connecticut. The Wadsworth is noted for its collections of European Baroque art, ancient Egyptian and Classical bronzes, French and American Impressionist paintings, Hudson River School lands ...

displayed six of the "Translations" paintings in their ''Matrix 2'' exhibition. In the late 1950s, Jess also filled

Pauline Kael Pauline Kael (; June 19, 1919 – September 3, 2001) was an American film critic who wrote for ''The New Yorker'' magazine from 1968 to 1991. Known for her "witty, biting, highly opinionated and sharply focused" reviews, Kael's opinions oft ...

's home on Oregon St in Berkeley, CA, with fantastical and Romantic murals, which still adorn the walls today. Collins also created elaborate collages using old book illustrations and

comic strip A comic strip is a sequence of drawings, often cartoons, arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions. Traditionally, throughout the 20th and into the 21st ...

s (particularly, the strip ''

Dick Tracy ''Dick Tracy'' is an American comic strip featuring Dick Tracy (originally Plainclothes Tracy), a tough and intelligent police detective created by Chester Gould. It made its debut on Sunday, October 4, 1931, in the ''Detroit Mirror'', and it ...

'', which he used to make his own strip ''Tricky Cad''). Jess's final work, ''Narkissos'', is a complex rendered 6'x5' drawing owned by the

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a modern and contemporary art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art, and was ...

. A Jess retrospective (''Jess: A Grand Collage, 1951–1993'') toured the United States in 1993 to 1994, accompanied by a book of the same title. The book included pictures of some of the paintings and collages from the tour. Interspersed between the pictures were essays by various contributors including poet Michael Palmer who wrote an extended piece on Jess's ''Narkissos.'' Sections of Jess's paintings 'Arkadia Last Resort' were used by

Faithless Faithless are an English band that formed in 1995, with its core members being Rollo, Sister Bliss and Maxi Jazz. Their first album, '' Reverence'', was released in 1996 and their most recent, ''All Blessed'', in 2020. They have sold millions ...

in 2004 for the front covers to their single " I Want More". In 2008, an exhibition of Jess's drawings was held at

Gallery Paule Anglim Anglim Trimble Gallery, formerly Gallery Paule Anglim, and Anglim Gilbert Gallery, is a contemporary commercial art gallery which is located at Minnesota Street Project, 1275 Minnesota Street, San Francisco, California The gallery was founded by P ...

in San Francisco.

Museum collections

* San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA * The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA * The di Rosa Collection * The Museum of Modern Art, New York City, NY * The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, NY * The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. * The Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA

References

External links

Jess Collins TrustSan Francisco Art Institute: Jess Collins, BFA 1951
from San Francisco Chronicle, January 7, 200

by Kenneth Baker
Ask/ART: Jess
exhibition of Jess's impastos from his "Translation" series together with many of his collages and designs, as well as the books and magazines in which they were reproduced
Guide to the Jess Papers
at

The Bancroft Library The Bancroft Library in the center of the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, is the university's primary special-collections library. It was acquired from its founder, Hubert Howe Bancroft, in 1905, with the proviso that it retai ...

Pulled Through Time: A "Caltech News" Reporter Traces the Life of an Elusive Artist

*
"Jess: Master of Collage Aesthetic"
by Michael Duncan at Siglio Press {{DEFAULTSORT:Collins, Jess 1923 births 2004 deaths Gay artists LGBT artists from the United States People from Long Beach, California Artists from California San Francisco Art Institute alumni Artists from the San Francisco Bay Area LGBT people from California 20th-century LGBT people

Biography

Museum collections

References

Further reading

External links