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Wallace Berman’s contribution to American art at mid-century is only now beginning to be evaluated, but his central role as inspiration to many Los Angeles artists cannot be disputed. Artists as disparate as Ellen Brooks, Robert Heinecken, George Herms, Edward Ruscha and Jack Butler have acknowledged his influence.

In the foreword to the only thorough attempt at a retrospective examination of Berman’s work, Hal Glicksman writes, “The order and meaning that we can bring to Berman’s work in an exhibition is necessarily a shadow of what is itself a shadow.”¹ Largely neglected during Berman’s lifetime, much of the work has been lost or destroyed over the years. Much of it is undated, whether because Berman consciously sought to confound art history or, more likely, because such conceits as signatures and dates are by tradition part of the world of art sales and marketing—a world in which Berman played little part. (The approximate dates accepted here were provided by the artist’s widow, Shirley Berman.)

Berman made several untitled works now referred to as “faceless faces” around 1963. These share affinities with work by Llyn Foulkes of about the same time and anticipate later pieces by Ilene Segalove, John Baldessari and others. In all these works, generic, appropriated portraits are both grievously effaced and pathetically ennobled.

1. Hal Glicksman, “Foreword,” in Wallace Berman: Retrospective (Los Angeles: Fellows of Contemporary Art, 1978), 6. ↩︎