Modern & Contemporary Art 
20 October 2022
Modern & Contemporary Art 
212

Wallace Berman 1926–1976

Semina 9

1964
mixed media artist's publication 5⅝ h × 3⅛ w in (14 × 8 cm)
estimate: $1,500–2,000
result: $5,250
follow artist
own a similar item?
free evaluation

Semina 9 is an altered photograph of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald depicting a twinned image of the agent guarding Oswald. Semina 9 also features a poem by Michael McClure, a contemporary San Francisco poet, novelist, and playwright, written in response to Berman’s image.
Signed ‘W.B.’ with stamped title and date to envelope ‘Semina 9 '64’. This work is from the edition of unknown size printed and published by the artist.
provenance: Joan and Monty Simon, Beverly Hills | Private Collection, Los Angeles
literature: Semina Culture: Wallace Berman & His Circle, Duncan and McKenna, pg. 69 Wallace Berman: Support the Revolution, Institute of Contemporary Art exhibition catalog, pg. 68

This work will ship from Los Angeles, California.

print

Art is Love is God

Semina and the Bohemian Subculture of Wallace Berman

Wallace Berman in a work from Semina No. 7

Semina was an experimental journal comprised of only nine issues, self-published by Wallace Berman from 1955 to 1964. Berman was a poet and artist who worked outside of the mainstream art world and was part of the counterculture milieu of musicians, writers and artists in and around Los Angeles in the 1950s and 1960s. He was inspired by jazz, drug and hippie culture (even appearing in Easy Rider), Romanticism, European avant-garde art movements, pornography and beat writers, and his output reflects the interdisciplinary, “art-as-life and life-as-art” spirit of the era. His visual work includes collage, photography, printmaking, film, early mail art and site-specific works and he also ran a small, shambling open-air gallery called Semina. 

Photograph of Charlie Parker by Walter Hopps, from Semina No. 1 and a poem by Wallace Berman for his son Tosh, from Semina No. 7

In his small part in Easy Rider, Berman is in a commune, sowing seeds. This portrayal reflects how he approached art making, language, imagery, and his role in the artistic community: that of a disseminator, gathering packets of provocations, symbols and words to send to others. Semina was never sold, but simply mailed to friends and artists, dispersed like seeds, spreading the anti-art, romantic notions of this bohemian arts community in the secluded Topanga Canyon. 

Semina was a cult magazine. It meant to reveal the possibility of the emergence of a new way of feeling. Cult means the cultivation of something…Wallace Berman gathered writers and artists he knew that gave him a sense of his own personal identity.

Robert Duncan, poet

212