“Jess: A Grand Collage, 1951–1993” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. September 21–December 4, 1994
The California-based artist known as Jess has been called one of the best-kept secrets in the art world. While he doesn’t have the name recognition of an Andy Warhol, Jess is not unknown in art circles. His work can be found in the collections of major museums, and he has his eloquent supporters, among them the poet John Ashbery. Nevertheless, visitors to the artist’s retrospective at the Whitney will find much about the exhibition that is secretive. Indeed, the work—an amalgam of Dada and Surrealism beholden to neither—is so obsessive and private that comparisons to the more bizarre permutations of folk art are not inappropriate.
Born Burgess Collins in 1923, Jess became an artist after a dream convinced him to abandon a career as a chemist. In 1949 he enrolled in the California School of Fine Arts, where he studied with Clyfford Still and David Park. While Jess shares Still’s visionary tendencies and Park’s obsession with physical surfaces, his oeuvre—his collages and, in particular, his series of paintings called “Translations”—has little precedent in twentieth-century art.
The collages—or, as Jess prefers them to be called, “paste-ups”—are made up of innumerable images culled from a variety of sources: anatomical diagrams, pin-ups, reproductions of famous paintings, and jigsaw-puzzle pieces give only an indication of what the paste-ups contain. By their very inclusiveness, they suggest a philosophical summation of cosmic proportions.