Lyrical Vision: The Six Gallery, 1954 – 1957, at John Natsoulas Gallery, Davis, CA

Jack Jefferson, Mission #9, oil on canvas, 58 X 52 inches, 1956.

By Kelly Jean Egan & Matt Gonzalez

From 1949 to the 1960s, San Francisco spawned a number of smaller experimental galleries that have managed to leave their mark on history, despite relatively short life spans, due to their eloquently capturing the vibrant energy and art scene of the  period. Often referred to as student-run galleries (although that wasn't exclusively the case), they, with the benefit of historical hindsight, successfully helped catapult and encourage so many of the artists from the period whose reputations are secure today. Metart, King Ubu Gallery, East and West Gallery, Spatsa, Dilexi, Batman, and Green Gallery all shared student energy from the California School of Fine Arts (later the San Francisco Art Institute). They mutually rejected staid establishment galleries, just as those galleries mostly rebuffed their artists, with a commitment to forge a new path in art, partly influenced by European movements such as Dada and Surrealism. Their emphasis included experimentation with abstraction and new media such as assemblage. What they lacked in cohesion and dependability, they made up for with creativity and the establishment of a support network for emerging artists. Most of the aforementioned galleries survived only a handful of years, yet their influence was powerful, evidenced by the fact that each is still being written about today.

Perhaps the most famous of the group is the Six Gallery (sometimes also spelled 6 Gallery). The legendary Howl reading that took place there on October 7, 1955 helped solidify their reputation. Allen Ginsberg, along with a cohort of other poets who launched the Beat Generation (Philip Lamantia, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Michael McClure), read that evening (with Kenneth Rexroth, Jack Kerouac, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti among those in attendance). Ginsberg read from his now famous poem, a daring work that challenged convention through its candid treatment of sexuality, racism, and drug use. What Ginsberg did in poetry is what the artists were attempting to do in the art world, namely, challenging aesthetic limitations. The Howl event is often seen as the night that heralded the Beat Generation and set the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance in motion.

John Natsoulas Gallery has assembled a formidable exhibition of the Six Gallery, Lyrical Vision: The Six Gallery, 1954-1957, paying homage to the artists and poets  who conceived and carried out its diverse program. Following up on his exhibition 36 years ago, where he first published a history of the gallery with an accompanying exhibition, Natsoulas reprises that effort and presents an even wider array of obscure ephemera (including posters, gallery announcements, poetry journals) and paintings from its key participants.

The Six Gallery, located at 3119 Fillmore Street, was officially launched on Halloween 1954. Five California School of Fine Arts students, Wally Hedrick, Hayward King, Deborah Remington, David Simpson, and John Allen Ryan, plus the poet Jack Spicer,  who taught English literature and drama at CSFA, comprised the artists and poets who founded the venture. Situated in the location abandoned by the King Ubu Gallery, which had been opened by Robert Duncan, Jess, and Harry Jacobus in late 1952 and survived only a single year, the space was both new and old. Once a stable and carriage house, it was turned into a gallery, and now had its second run as such. Notably, for part of its duration, it was across the street from the nascent East and West Gallery, which opened in 1956 and was located at 3108 Fillmore Street. The Six Gallery sought to present a wide range of creativity: art, poetry, and experimental theatre.

Many of the artists included in the exhibition, in addition to its founders, will be familiar names; although they weren’t at the time. Joan Brown, for instance, was only 17 years old when she first exhibited. Bruce Connor, Hassel Smith, James Weeks, Jay DeFeo, Manuel Neri, Bruce McGaw, Roy De Forest, Jess, Wally Hedrick, Leo Valledor, and Fred Martin were among the gallery's roster of artists.

The exhibition showcases an array of wonderful pieces, including:

Madeleine Dimond Martin, Truman, oil and mixed media on canvas, 36 x 30 inches, 1953.

Sonia Gechtoff, Happy Birthday Madeleine, oil on canvas, 44.5 x 70.5 inches, 1953.

Madeleine Dimond Martin’s Truman and Sonia Gechtoff’s Happy Birthday Madeleine form a quietly charged dialogue within the Six Gallery exhibition. Dimond Martin’s work, layered in dense violets and reds, carries an inward pulse. Its rough textures and partial collage text fragments evoke both secrecy and confession; a coded language of memory and temperament.

Gechtoff’s painting, dedicated to Dimond Martin, serves as both homage and offering; by titling it Happy Birthday Madeleine and adopting a palette and compositional rhythm that echo Truman, Gechtoff creates an intimate artistic gift, one that mirrors and celebrates her friend’s sensibility. Exhibited side by side, the two works reveal a rare glimpse into the dialogue of influence and affection that was common among the Six Gallery artists. Truman’s brooding introspection meets Happy Birthday Madeleine’s assertive expansiveness, together capturing a shared visual vocabulary of abstraction despite Dimond Martin’s greater reliance on negative space.

Manuel Neri, Woman Bath, mixed media on canvas, 42 x 56 inches, 1955.

Manuel Neri’s Woman Bath (1955), a painting made in part with portions of Bruce McGaw’s own shirt, sits in a space between figuration and abstraction, where form becomes both subject and surface. The contoured body, rendered in textures of ochre and red against a cool blue ground, suggests a figure caught between motion and stillness, vulnerability and strength; that moment when you trip but stop yourself from falling. The tactile buildup of material, creased, torn, and pressed, reveals Neri’s early exploration of the human form as an emotional landscape rather than an anatomical study. In this work, gesture replaces narrative; the figure’s bowed posture and vivid coloration evoke an introspective state as much as a physical one.

Woman Bath exemplifies the intensity and immediacy that would come to define Neri’s sculptural and artistic language, merging fleshly presence with painterly abstraction. His fascination with presenting the female form, later fully explored in plaster sculpture, is obvious here. Woman Bath exemplifies how the Six Gallery circle was not monolithic, but included artists who straddled movements of expressionism, figuration, and material experimentation.

Also included in the exhibit is one of the original doors from the  Audiffred Building at 9 Mission Street (courtesy of the San Francisco Beat Museum). It housed artist studios in the 1950s, including many who exhibited at the Six Gallery. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Joel Barletta, James Kelly, Phil Roeber, as well as the aforementioned Hedrick, DeFeo, Smith, Gechtoff, and Diamond Martin all worked there; thus , its inclusion in the show has a special resonance. The door is covered  with various artists' names, reminding us that these artists we admire once lived and worked just as contemporary artists do. A mundane door, whose significance is amplified by celebratory adornment and mark-making, helps bring the presentation to life.

(L - R) (1) Fred Martin, Architecture, oil on masonite, 10.5 x 14 inches, 1955. (2) Jess, Untitled, oil on canvas (with velvet frame), 17 x 21 inches, 1957. (3) Jay DeFeo, Untitled (Berkeley), tempera and acrylic with paper collage on rag board, 22 x 28 inches, 1953. (4) Wally Hedrick, Untitled, oil on board, 39.5 x 33.5 inches, 1952. (5) Leo Valledor, Jainos, oil on board, 18 x 14 inches, 1956.

The exhibition is accompanied by the republication of a book cataloging the rich history of the Six Gallery: Lyrical Vision: The 6 Gallery, 1954 – 1957 (2nd revised  edition). (Davis, CA: John Natsoulas Press, 2025) which includes essays by Natsoulas that help to contextualize the importance of the gallery and this particular period in West Coast art. It also includes various essays by other writers, historians, and Six Gallery participants such as Michael McClure, Fred Martin, John Allen Ryan, Bruce Nixon, and Rebecca Solnit.

John Natsoulas deserves special recognition for his decades-long effort to preserve the history and legacy of one of San Francisco’s most iconic art venues. This production, bringing together so many of the original artists and artworks of the period, is museum-worthy. The opportunity Natsoulas has created to witness the artwork and still vibrant energy of this seminal gallery, which opened over 70 years ago and remained active for just three years, is unequivocally essential for art enthusiasts.