Exploring the art and coteries of the artist Jess (1923–2004) and the poet Robert Duncan (1919–1988), An Opening of the Field celebrates the vibrant household of two extraordinary men who lived together as lovers and collaborators at the epicenter of the San Francisco Bay Area’s glory years of artistic ferment.
For Jess and Duncan, the term “household,” consciously cultivated, represented a thriving, sociable locus in which to create art and nourish friendships—a demarcated world where the daily act of making things could be at once ordinary and magical. In such a household, all objects were of interest, from Duncan’s hand-drawn wallpaper to Jess’s paste-up “No Smoking” signs and their vast collection of art and books, upon which this show draws.
Jess was a painter and collagist who, from the early 1950s until his death in 2004, created works of vertiginous complexity and joyous wit. Among his contemporaries, painters such as Jasper Johns, David Hockney and R.B. Kitaj were longstanding devotees; of subsequent generations, artists as dissimilar as Martha Rosler, Sherrie Levine and Jane Hammond have also been admirers. A Californian native raised by Theosophist parents, Robert Duncan was a leading poet and theorist of the “New American Poetry” and an unabashed advocate of the Romantic tradition, who found his closest colleagues in the poets Jack Spicer, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley and Charles Olson—whose “composition by field” he developed in the 1960 volume from which An Opening of the Field takes its title.
To orient Jess and Duncan by the arts for which they are best known seems almost clumsy in the light of this superb show, however, for the couple shared the pleasures of painting and writing with an ease that was remote from career strictures, and both built up substantial visual and literary oeuvres. (In fact, for sheer syntactic adventurousness, Jess as a word artist was frequently bolder than Duncan, as his famous collage comics such as Tricky Cad testify.) This rare ease with all forms of making naturally attracted a lively milieu, including Bay Area figurative and abstract painters such as Edward Corbett, Hassel Smith and David Park; Black Mountain abstractionists and poets such as Tom Field, Paul Alexander, and the aforementioned Olson and Creeley; the San Francisco Renaissance poets Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser; Californian assemblagists Wallace Berman, George Herms and Bruce Conner; and filmmakers such as Kenneth Anger, Larry Jordan and James Broughton. Works by these diverse artists adorned the walls and shelves of Jess and Duncan’s household, which provided an oasis of sanity for their circle.
Implicated in this ideal of the household is a set of artistic values that is rarely stated overtly, although a small hand-lettered placard in Jess’s studio is suggestive: “The Seven Deadly Virtues of Contemporary Art: Originality, Spontaneity, Simplicity, Intensity, Immediacy, Impenetrability, Shock.” From this credo, one can infer a quietly defiant preference—shared by many of Jess and Duncan’s Bay Area contemporaries—for charm over swagger, intimacy over epic scale, abundance over austerity and delight over angst. Every step in the house at 3267 Twentieth St, where the couple spent most of their life together, proffered instances of this stance, from the living room, where—across from the “George Herms Corner”—a jigsaw was often underway, to the kitchen where one might encounter a stained glass window by Duncan or a revelatory abstraction by Edward Corbett.
For this viewer, the most dazzling works in the show were paintings, and special mention must be made of those by Virginia Admiral, Lyn Brockway (particularly her Vuillardesque “Breakfast in a Paris Lodging”), Nemi Frost and Edward Corbett. Corbett is represented by two wonderful abstractions—a large slate-grey oil painting that once hung in the kitchen stairwell to the basement, and a more evanescent charcoal and pastel drawing that inevitably conjures the fog rolling into the Bay Area from the Pacific. Jess’s early paintings, closely informed by Corbett, synthesize these qualities with the mythic themes that also saturated the household he built with Duncan (“you can’t take a piss in this house without getting hit with a myth,” Duncan once told an interviewer).
Curators Michael Duncan and Christopher Wagstaff have created a thrilling, inspiring portrait of an era with An Opening of the Field—both the show and the catalogue, which includes a “Photo Album” appendix with images of the couple, their friends and the homes they shared over the course of their 38 years together. Throughout, there is palpable evidence of lives led and work made at a deliberate critical remove from the cultural machinations with which art-making is now almost identical.