Continuing through January 3, 2026

During its short efflorescence, the Six Gallery was many things, most famously the place where Allen Ginsberg first read his famous poem “Howl” on October 7, 1955. To commemorate and celebrate the 70th anniversary of that reading, this exhibition of 37 vintage paintings, sculpture and works on paper by about half that number of artists who exhibited at the Six was re-assembled and re-imagined from a similarly titled presentation of the same material presented (also at Natsoulas) in 1990. Almost all of the works hail from those years, making the exhibition a treasure trove of rare, early work by artists who were just getting started.

The Six Gallery was an artists’ co-op that took over a Fillmore Street space vacated by the earlier King Ubu Gallery. Its name was derived from the sextet of chief organizers: Wally Hedrick, Hayward King, Deborah Remington, John Allen Ryan, David Simpson and Jack Spicer. One thing this list indicates is the collaborative spirt shared among poets and visual artists, harking back to similar collaborations by the Parisian Surrealists in the late 1920s. This DIY eclecticism flew in the face of media-specific orthodoxies that were being advanced by various manifestations of formalism such as New Criticism and the increasingly prominent theories of Clement Greenberg. If anything, the aesthetics of the Six Gallery program were much more aligned with the intermedia activities of Black Mountain College, imported to San Francisco by Robert Duncan. The interdisciplinary character of The Six’s collective project made a point of willful impurity and an appeal to what poet Charles Olson called “Projective Verse.”  

Many of the artists who cut their teeth at the Six later achieved major art world notoriety, while others fell into relative obscurity. There are some amazing early examples here by the more well-known of these artists, for example, a free-standing female figure in plaster by Manual Neri. The model for this work was Joan Brown, to whom Neri was married in the late 1950s. Another vintage piece is Jay DeFeo’s “Untitled (Berkeley)” (1953), seeming to cross the dark threshold from Abstract Expressionism to a moonlit still-life. Similarly rare early works by Roy DeForest and Jess are also on view. DeForest’s “Freddy” (1957) is a spooky watercolor that is both ominous and subtle, while Jess’s “Untitled” (1957) is a dreamy English garden harking to gloomy Pre-Raphaelite fantasies, while taking a decadent turn owing to its velvet frame. A 1957 piece by Bruce Conner titled “Puzzle” might be one of his earliest assemblage works, made the year that he came to San Francisco. It is small, looking like a microscopic images of insect eyes refracted in darkness. 

Along with these and other very early examples of notable artists are works by artists whose careers have fallen by the art historical wayside, at least in the context of our over-heated too-much-information moment amplified by too-much money and too-little judiciousness. Madeleine Dimond’s “Truman” (1950) is a choice piece of San Francisco Abstract Expressionism, calibrating autonomist and surrealist influences in the kind of thick, dark paint favored by Clyfford Still. A similar observation applies to Sonia Gechtoff’s “Happy Birthday Madeleine” (1953) and Jack Jefferson’s “Mission #9” (1956). 

Works by Hedrick and King evince other influences. King’s lithograph “The Cathedral” (1955) looks like a salute to some of the artists of the earlier Dynaton group, particularly the work of Lee Mullican and Gordon Onslow-Ford, who exhibited at the old San Francisco Museum of Art in 1951. An early, “Untitled” (1952) work by Wally Hedrick looks like a jigsaw puzzle come to life, paying vague homage to Paul Klee. Fred Martin’s painting titled “Architecture” (1955) is a bit of a curveball in that it depicts a seaside building from north Africa (distinguished by the style of the building and its treeless surrounding landscape). Its pale colors convey the sweltering heat of a late summer afternoon, while its date suggests that it may have been on display when Ginsberg first read “Howl.”

One other piece that stirs our long-term memory is a “Self-Portrait” (1956) by Michael McClure executed in red enamel paint. A poet’s folly, it looks like it was executed in about five minutes. It exudes the spirit of the times by obscuring the distinctions between painting and drawing, figure and abstraction and writing and painting.

Augmenting the works in “Lyrical Visions” is a generous helping of archival ephemera such as exhibition announcements and documentary photographs. There is also a door festooned with cryptic inscriptions that turns out to be from 9 Mission, where several of the featured artists had communal studios. We are reminded that the gallery was also a place where experimental films were screened and performance events were staged.

By October of 1957, the writing was already on the wall. Sputnik was launched, ushering in the space race that exaggerated the lingering paranoia of the McCarthy hearings. The Evergreen Review (Volume 1, Number 2, Spring 1957) published a special issue devoted to the San Francisco scene that generated a lot of attention, including the wrong kind. In December, the Six called it quits. Less than two years later, CBS launched its long-running sitcom, “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.” A beatnik character named Maynard G. Krebs, a clownish caricature of the beatnik ethos, led to the subculture becoming a caricature of itself, repeated over and over. But prior to that, there was some real swinging going on, and “Lyrical Visions” gives us a museum-quality taste of what it looked like.