Jess Collins

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

Jess Collins
Born	Burgess Franklin Collins (1923-08-06)August 6, 1923 Long Beach, California
Died	January 2, 2004(2004-01-02) (aged 80)
Nationality	American
Education	San Francisco Art Institute
Known for	Visual art
Partner	Robert Duncan[1]

Biography

Jess was born Burgess Franklin Collins in Long Beach, California. He was drafted into the military and worked on the production of plutonium for the Manhattan Project.^[2] After his discharge in 1946, Jess worked at the Hanford Atomic Energy Project in Richland, Washington, and painted in his spare time, but his dismay at the threat of atomic weapons led him to abandon his scientific career and focus on his art.

In 1949, Jess enrolled in the California School of the Arts (subsequently the San Francisco Art Institute) and, after breaking with his family, began referring to himself simply as "Jess".^[2] 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.^[2] He met Robert Duncan in 1951 and began a relationship with the poet that lasted for 37 years until Duncan's death in 1988.^[2][3] 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 reopened the space as the Six Gallery.

Many of Jess's paintings and collages have themes drawn from chemistry, alchemy, the occult, and male beauty, including a series called Translations (1959–1976) which is done with heavily laid-on paint in a paint-by-number style. In 1975, the Wadsworth Atheneum displayed six of the "Translations" paintings in their Matrix 2 exhibition.^[4] In the late 1950s, Jess also filled Pauline Kael's home on Oregon St in Berkeley, CA, with fantastical and Romantic murals, which still adorn the walls today.^[5] Collins also created elaborate collages using old book illustrations and comic strips (particularly, the strip Dick Tracy, 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.

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 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 in San Francisco.^[6]

In 2014 and 2015, a traveling exhibit titled "An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and Their Circle" toured across the country to warm reception.^[7] The exhibit explored what it was like for the couple to be "young, gifted, and odd" in San Francisco after World War II.^[8] The two men lived and worked for decades from their historic Victorian home in the Mission District, which was lined with more than 5,000 books, 5,300 music records, and countless works of visual art.^[3]

Museum collections

• San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA^[9]
• The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA^[10]
• The Di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, CA^[11]
• The Museum of Modern Art, New York City, NY^[12]
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, NY^[13]
• The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, NY
• The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.^[14]
• The Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA^[15]