Jess, 1923-2004 - Artworld - Obituary

Jess, 80, a quietly independent artist and poet who in his paintings, collages and sculptures developed a complex synthesis of art and literary history, died Jan. 2 of natural causes in his San Francisco home. Born Burgess Collins in 1923 in Long Beach, Calif., Jess was trained as a chemist and worked during World War II on the production of plutonium for the Manhattan Project. Experiencing extreme anxiety over the ramifications of his atomic energy work, he abandoned science and his surname in 1949, and moved to San Francisco to enroll in the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute), then in its heyday with a faculty that included Clyfford Still and Edward Corbett. In 1951, Jess met poet Robert Duncan and embarked on a domestic relationship of shared esthetic concerns that lasted until Duncan's death in 1988.

Duncan and Jess came to artistic maturity together, ever expanding and refining a study of world literature and art focused on myths, symbols and archetypes. The pair became crucial participants in the burgeoning Bay Area poetry and art scenes, developing particularly close friendships with Jack Spicer, Helen Adam, Wallace Berman, Patricia Jordan, Jay DeFeo, Michael McClure and Bruce Conner. Along with painter Harry Jacobus, Jess and Duncan ran the King Ubu Gallery in 1952-53, hosting exhibitions of work by Elmer Bischoff, David Park, Hassel Smith and Jess. The couple's Victorian house in the Mission District was a kind of haven dedicated to their collection of books, esoteric lore and the art of their friends.

Jess's early collages used advertising images and slogans to present a satirical, absurdist view of sexuality and politics. Later, more intricate works juxtaposed layers of jigsaw puzzle pieces and cutout images to create protean narrative landscapes. Jess's self-reflexive style of image-making was most powerfully conveyed in "Translations" (1959-76), a group of 32 paintings of odd images appropriated from photographs, prints and drawings, rendered in the manner of schematically outlined and colored paint-by-number canvases. This quirky, sumptuous body of work presaged the ideas of many postmodernist image manipulators.

Jess was inactive in recent years, his final project being the 6-by-5-foot drawing Narkissos (1976/91), a tableau of dense imagery spun off from the symbolic meanings of the Greek myth. In reexamining myths through a synthesis of art and literature, Jess's work remains a crucial repository of the meaning of our times. His career was last surveyed in a traveling exhibition organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (1993-94).

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