Better known as an artist and as a guru of the beat generation Berman also wrote and published poetry in the influential journal Semina. Wallace Berman was born, of Russian Jewish parents on Staten island, NY in 1926. His family moved to Los Angeles when he was only 9 and he was raised within the Jewish community there. He left school early having been expelled in the early ‘40s for gambling but he did spend a little time at the both the Jepson Art School and the Chouinard Art School but found both too academic for his taste.

In 1949 whilst working in a furniture factory he began to experiment with scraps of wood and other materials and make them into ‘sculptures’. By the early ‘50s he had become a full-time artist and was an active figure in the Los Angeles and San Francisco “Beat” community and from his work and influence at this time he gained the accolade “father of the assemblage movement”. His fame spread because of the circulation and influence of the publication he edited with the help of two others, the artist and poet Robert Alexander and the photographer Charles Brittin. Semina was a home produced small circulation pamphlet which only ran to 9, once a year, issues but it contained articles, stories, poetry and pictures by a wide spectrum of influential people.

Berman was a gregarious character who held open-house for the artists of the area and arranged one-day shows for many of them although he was shy about exhibiting his own work. He was arrested for displaying lewd images in the very first edition of Semina in 1957, not for one of his own works but for a picture of a couple having sex drawn by a friend, Marjorie Cameron Parsons Kimmel (1922-95). Copies of the publication were strewn on the floor of the gallery at one of the exhibitions and that was what led to the arrest.

He was a conduit for the ideas of many different artists and shared his thoughts happily. He had the happy knack of sparking hidden aptitude in those he met and many people started writing and painting as a result of having met him.

In 1963 he moved to Topanga canyon, LA and began working on collages, mainly of printed material and paint. He continued this sort of work interspersed with rock assemblages, until his death, aged 50, in 1976. He was killed after being hit by a drunk driver!