(Much of this page was gleaned from orphan newspaper clippings—both fragments and articles often without dates or provenance—this is a pastiche of reportage and paraphrase, my own journal fragments—as well as some of my memories of Pat telling the stories of the artist colony that made Big Sur famous. Journal entry notes were collected from various sources, Pat Wall, his daughter Micaela, and other friends of Pat’s over the years.)
In the late 1970s, early 1980s, I also edited several of Rosalind Sharpe Wall’s manuscripts, one eventually became a book. When the Coast was Wild and Lonely: Early Settlers of the Sur 1987. The manuscript was a right mess as I recall, so her son, Chris, must’ve worked on it too, as it was reprinted. As we went over the manuscript, Rosalind would fly off into tangents on Egyptian scarabs, living Mexico, Henry Miller, the Tarot and John Cooke—scraps of stories with lots of middles, with no beginning, and no ending in sight. Only later, long after Roz died, was I able to make any sense of her stories.
Many of these orphan fragments came from old newspaper articles. I grew fatigued, and abandoned the project, as I had never properly recorded, or lost the sources. Someday I’ll get back to it. Micaela and I were hellbent on recording Pat’s oral history before it was too late. Then it was too late. So these are mostly from Micaela’s scrapbook collection. I was going to shape these notes into a fourth piece on Pat, but too much time had passed, so I can’t reconstruct it from these rough fragments—that strangely create their own story. So it’s a pastiche, a collage of sorts.
NOTES: Patrick Wall said a friend of John Cocteau’s showed up for the art opening. Someone notices something golden shining in the foundation of Pat Wall’s house on 220 Olivier Street in Monterey. Pure gold. Did a rat gnaw a hole in a lost poke hidden between the walls from 150 years ago? They took bags of dirt on over to Ed Rickets’place, who concocted up a batch of aqua regia to dissolve the gold. Rickets says, So, if all your gold disappears when I add the aqua regia a mixture of nitric acid and hydrochloric acid) that proves that it’s gold. But he didn’t know how to get it back from the solution. Easy come, easy go. They renamed the house Casa del Oro. House of gold, and it was a golden time for art and artists on the West Coast.
Someone noted that Varda’s Spontaneous Generation of Women in the Desert was reminiscent of Picasso’s Women, the sun with its jagged edges, a woman with her left hand on her canted hip. Tall shadows. He was miffed. Someone asked what to do with Ellwood Graham’s awful abstraction, Nuclear Picnic, Pat says, put it in the kitchen with the piano. Susan’s piano. Meanwhile, Virginia Varda has been potting like mad. Perhaps a pottery show? What about Poulina Pillon?
Dan Harris got ahold of Pat’s piano and turned it into an art piece when the gallery moved from Carmel to Monterey, but there was no room for it in the new place, so they tossed out the refrigerator and installed the piano. Sweet music. Sour milk.
Sue Wall’s piano was one of the seven art wonders of the peninsula. Wild parties galore were memorable, the stuff of novels, and of dreams, but few painting ever sold. Pat said that he always bought something from every show. Those were his Halcyon days. Pat said he was so fond of Henry Miller, he smuggled in copies of the contraband novel, Tropic of Cancer. He and Rosalind put Henry up and went to the baths at Esalen, and ate horsemeat shish-kebabs under the stars. It doesn’t say who was riding their nightmares across the sky.
Dan’s wife, Gertrude Harris, who also gallery sat, said one time she looked out the window. The dog was barking at Jean Varda standing there at the gate. Don’t be afraid of the dog, she said, he won’t bite. And then she took another look. And there was Varda making a horrible faces at the dog who was shaking in terror, he turned tail and ran away. Yelping furiously.
The Tuesday night opening crowd was smaller than usual at the Pat Wall Modern Art Gallery. Doc Ricketts, Muriel Rukeyser, Jean Varda, Rosalind Sharpe, ace reporter for the Carmel Pine Cone, Barbara and Ellwood Graham. After the after the Guiomar Novaez concert, hordes of thirsty people flowed in for a look at the paintings, and to pay homage to the infamous sherry table. It was a stimulating evening of conversation, with dancing and music until dawn.
Varda’s montages and collages in mirrored mosaic at the Pat Wall Gallery created quite a stir. Muriel Ruckeyser, Robinson Jeffers, and Benny Bufano came to the Christmas opening. It was some bash. Pat Wall’s openings and parties were legendary. They were the biggest social event of the season. It must’ve been the free sherry punchbowl on a bed of ice. You never know what will turn up in one of Varda’s pictures. I found a piece of my old green dress in one, said Nancy Lipton. I don’t think she liked it much anyway. The dress, not the collage. (Was that the party where everybody got so drunk, someone who was leaving at dawn, hit the gas instead of the brake and drove through the gallery?)
A clip from the Monterey Peninsula Herald, dated December 1946: The maddest boat on land or sea. “Yanko” Varda sells a painting and buys a 21-foot fishing boat. He removes the engine, and turns it into an anchor. He rips the keel off, and reverses the boat, making it into a sailing vessel with a stern. With everything switched around, the boat doesn’t know whether it’s coming or going, so he says he’ll have to carve a figurehead for it. She’s good forwards and backwards, said Varda. Varda did a lot of sailing in Greece, he names her the Rima. The cabin becomes a playpen for his daughter. (No, not Agnés, his filmmaker niece, his daughter, Vagadu.)
Sat.Aug. 31, 1946, Monterey Peninsula Herald: Among the new faces is that of Richard Diebenkorn, a young San Francisco artist whose mosaic is priced at $75. Also featured are the paintings of Miller, Graham and Moreau. An article on the Pat Wall’s gallery wall is by Joseph Henry Jackson. Between the lines, he comments on Pat’s statement, gestation over safety, incessant to the temporal magic of the mundane...the art world has its own phraseology, just as the book world has its own, and who are we to complain?
Apparently Sal, as in Salvador Dali, and Henry Miller shacked up at Mrs. Crosby‘s place while she was gone. It was a case of pure loathing at first sight. She returned to a house divided with Dali eating in the living room, and Miller in the kitchen. They were kicked out on their cans and forced to ride together to the station. Miller holding Dali’s paintings on his knee. The reason for the feud? Dali, the painter, had come to write, Miller, the writer, had come to paint. Switched horses midstream, they did. And broke the rulebook.
I think of Frank O’Hara’s Sardines. Or is it Oranges?
Apparently Pat’s mission statement for The Pat Wall Gallery was picked up by the New Yorker with the query: are any of these pictures for sale by the way? From there it was picked up by Time Magazine and it was labeled the best avant-garde gallery on the West Coast. Calling it the new Paris. Well, there wasn’t much else going on in San Francisco or LA by the way. Pat’s little gallery was pretty much the only modern art gallery on the West Coast. The Millard Sheets school still thoroughly dominated the scene.
After the war, Paris became conservative and the artists fled to California. Jean Varda, Graham Elwood, Dan “Zev” Harris, Gordon Onslow-Ford, Anaïs Nin, Benny Bufano. Pat’s place, at 220 Olivier, nothing more than a fisherman’s shack, became a colossal crash pad, he was a de facto landlord for all the artists. Rent was $20 a month. But he went broke, as the money he got for the sale of his farm in Jersey, was gone. The end of an era. The gallery closed. Pat and Ellwood became carpenters. They held one last party where guests contributed whatever alcohol they had to the proverbial punch bowl. Thus ended a four-year-long party introducing avant-garde art in California (1946 - 1960) But they sure made some history. And had a wild time.
Pat and Roz headed down to Mexico in a big black Cadillac. They eventually got married. They probably shouldn’t have. It didn’t last. Their first son Christopher was on his way, and my best friend Micaela was still a gleam in their eyes. I’m not too sure what happened to Sue Wall. She became a mythical being in all the retellings. (See Rosalind’s article in the Herald Weekly, July 15, 1980?)
ARCHIVES: Mentions of artists who exhibited at the Pat Wall Gallery
Jean Varda timeline. 1945-1946 Exhibit at UCLA.Teaches a summer session at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. A daughter, Vagadu, is born to Varda and Virginia. On his way back to California after the end of the summer session at Black Mountain College, Varda stops for a month at Frieda Lawrence's ranch in Taos, has an exhibit at the art gallery of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, and lectures to the students there about Black Mountain. Shortly after his return Varda has an exhibit of collages and mosaics at the Pat Wall Gallery in Monterey.
Architect and engineer, Volume v.172-175 (1948) NEWS AND COMMENT ON ART (From page 8) PAT WALL GALLERY MONTEREY, An exhibit of the work of Dan Harris was recently shown at the Pat Wall Gallery in Monterey, California. Entitled "Reconstructions In Time" some ten subjects were displayed from May 23rd to June 12th.
Edward Weston “During an interview published in The Carmel Pine Cone-Cymbal, October 22, 1948, on the occasion of Weston’s exhibition at the Pat Wall Gallery in Monterey, he said: “In round numbers, I estimated once that I had done 30,000 portraits, from movie stars in the Mack Sennett days in Hollywood—before there was a Hollywood—to the most recent one of Faith Demorgue, who was flown up to Carmel from Hollywood, complete with a hairdresser, to be photographed on Point Lobos.”
Fascinating UCLA Oral history interview with Lee Mullican, poet-painter, he mentions printer Jack Stauffacher, of Greenwood Press! I met Jack at a Greenwood Press book party at his house in SF. Can’t remember the book. Great party. There was no way to pull a short quote, so I left it in original format. I think its housed at the Bancroft, along with my folklore!
MULLICAN: Jack published a book of Henry Miller's, and he used one of my drawings on the cover I mean, on the dust jacket. But he lived in Big Sur, and he was struggling. And I have a postcard in my files from him thanking me for the $5 that I sent him! He was actually asking for money from friends and associates and so forth. At that same time another big influence and absolute delight was Jean Varda, and he was in Monterey at that time. PAUL KARLSTROM: That was before any houseboats in Sausalito. LEE MULLICAN: Yeah, that was when he lived in Monterey. And I had an exhibition in—One of my first exhibitions actually was in Monterey.
Carmel Pine Cone (The scanned archives did not include titles of pieces, nor continuity, many columns merged with each others side-by-side so I had to pick the fragments out in order to find the through lines.)
PAUL KARLSTROM: Why was that? Because of Varda, a connection?
LEE MULLICAN: Well, it was a connection really through (James) Broughton. And there was a painter whose name was ? (Gertrude Harris) Anyway, she ran this gallery in Monterey, and that's where I. . . . She gave Gordon a little show, and then she gave me a little show.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Do you remember the name of the gallery? LEE MULLICAN: It's called the Pat Wall Gallery. PAUL KARLSTROM: Pat Wall?
LEE MULLICAN: Pat Wall. Now I don't know who that was, actually, I can't remember. Her name was Gertrude. . . . [Harris]. Anyway. So there was a connection all up and down, and I remember the Hearst papers, you know, who are notorious, talking about the venom that was being fed into the Bay area from Monterey through Big Sur, up into San Francisco. [laughs]
PAUL KARLSTROM: Okay, what did they mean by that?
LEE MULLICAN: Well, they meant all of this. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Sounds like a polemic of some [type, kind].
LEE MULLICAN: Yeah, they meant all of this rank bohemianism, I guess, or liberal ideas, liberal thoughts probably all of this preceding the sixties generation and all of that. Preceding all the hippie things, because absolute. . . . There was no question that Varda was one of the first, sort of the first great hippie persons, and everybody around him, you know. It was superb.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, Why did this bohemian infection venom come to the attention of the Hearst papers?
LEE MULLICAN: Well, it certainly did, it certainly did. PAUL KARLSTROM: That seems. . . .
LEE MULLICAN: It would be interesting for somebody to check that out, to go back and see that. But it was there, no question.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Because that suggests that there was some kind of visibility for this avant garde or bohemian [activity].
LEE MULLICAN: That's right. Well, it could have been what was going on in the galleries this rank modernism and abstraction or it could be the poems that were being written, the wild music and dancing. I mean, there's no. . . . It had been a very sedate, conservative place until after the war. (Also Internet.
LEE MULLICAN: Well, it was a connection really through (James) Broughton. And there was a painter whose name was ? (Gertrude Harris) Anyway, she ran this gallery in Monterey, and that's where I. . . . She gave Gordon a little show, and then she gave me a little show.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Do you remember the name of the gallery? LEE MULLICAN: It's called the Pat Wall Gallery. PAUL KARLSTROM: Pat Wall?
LEE MULLICAN: Pat Wall. Now I don't know who that was, actually, I can't remember. Her name was Gertrude. . . . [Harris]. Anyway. So there was a connection all up and down, and I remember the Hearst papers, you know, who are notorious, talking about the venom that was being fed into the Bay area from Monterey through Big Sur, up into San Francisco. [laughs]
PAUL KARLSTROM: Okay, what did they mean by that?
LEE MULLICAN: Well, they meant all of this. . . .
PAUL KARLSTROM: Sounds like a polemic of some [type, kind].
LEE MULLICAN: Yeah, they meant all of this rank bohemianism, I guess, or liberal ideas, liberal thoughts probably all of this preceding the sixties generation and all of that. Preceding all the hippie things, because absolute. . . . There was no question that Varda was one of the first, sort of the first great hippie persons, and everybody around him, you know. It was superb.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Well, Why did this bohemian infection venom come to the attention of the Hearst papers?
LEE MULLICAN: Well, it certainly did, it certainly did. PAUL KARLSTROM: That seems. . . .
LEE MULLICAN: It would be interesting for somebody to check that out, to go back and see that. But it was there, no question.
PAUL KARLSTROM: Because that suggests that there was some kind of visibility for this avant garde or bohemian [activity].
LEE MULLICAN: That's right. Well, it could have been what was going on in the galleries this rank modernism and abstraction or it could be the poems that were being written, the wild music and dancing. I mean, there's no. . . . It had been a very sedate, conservative place until after the war. (Also Internet.
Carmel Pine Cone Sept 4, 1946 by Rosalind Sharpe Jeanne D’Orge, Carmel artist, whose paintings will be exhibited for the first time since 1940 at the Pat Wall Gallery In Monterey from October 9 to October 27 says that, “Artists should be anonymous. People should know their work but not the artist” ....The forthcoming exhibit, is “not for artists, not for critics, not for people who know about art. But for people who don’t know about art. For people who want to know about art. For people of the town.”
Carmel Pine Cone Sept 20, 1984 Jeanne was especially at home with the reactions to her work of “housewives, clerks, carpenters, painters and those who work in the canning industry.” This quote is from a review headed “Art for the man in the street” of a 1946 Jeanne D’Orge exhibit at the Pat Wall Gallery in Monterey — a review written by Anita Church.
Carmel Pine Cone 1946-12-13. At Pat Wall Gallery: Although the crowd was smaller than usual at the Pat Wall Modern Art Gallery Tuesday night show, a lot of people flowed in for a look at the paintings and the inevitable visit to the sherry table (this time in a big bed of ice) after the Guiomar Novaez concert. Among those present during the course of a stimulating evening of conversation, dancing and music, were Mr. and Mrs. Edward Ricketts, Webster Street, Dr. Eric Berne, Muriel Rukeyser, Mr. and Mrs. Bud Foster, Gretchen Gray, Mr. and Mrs. Richard Lofton, Philip Pinner, Mr. and Mrs. James Hopper, Henry Meade Williams, Jean Varda, Mr. and Mrs. Ellwood Graham, Remo Scardigli, John Roberts, Angus MacDougal, Mrs. Phil Nesbitt, Rosalind Sharpe, Abel Warshawsky, Mr. and Mrs. Frank Lloyd, Mr. and Mrs. William Fassett, Mrs. Hilda Duarte Brown, Joseph Shoeninger, Sally Fry, Marjorie Warren, Roger Johnson, and many others.
The new group show in the Pat Wall Gallery in Monterey is notable for color that jumps at you when you enter the door. The majority of the pictures are painted in a high, bright key which combines with the color of the gallery to produce an almost strident effect. (Judith Deim) Barbara Stevenson’s Green House is a notable exception. In this canvas, Miss Stevenson paints with solidity and seriousness, and her tones of blue and green and gray produce an effect of balance and maturity. Her canvas makes most of the other pictures in the show seem lacking in depth. Joan Hinchman’s Boat in the back of the gallery has pleasing movement and textural quality, and Ellwood Graham’s Retrospect makes a graph-like curve into an interesting pattern. The show includes canvases by Philip Pinner, Barbara Stevenson, Itogaway, Andre Moreau, George Harris, Ellwood Graham, Lilick Schatz, Dan Harris, Margaret Peterson, Alfred Morano, Joan Hinchman, and Jean Varda.
Original Water Color Paintings by ?hald Ross, Davis Schwartz and Millard Sheets. (Not sure if last sentence was part of this article, scanned columns were jumbled together—Sheets was THE game in town.)
Carmel Pine Cone April 9, 1948 (By 1948 Pat was gossip column material. He was also a carpenter). Pat Wall has been splitting logs these days preparatory to building a home on his new land on Huckleberry Hill (of John Steinbeck fame). PARTY AT BIG SUR Visiting Pat Wall from Lakewood County where he used to own a ranch were Lakewood ranchers Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Tooby, Mr. Joe Watson of San Francisco, and Mr. and Mrs. (illegible Flavin?). Mr. Wall escorted his guests, and Miss Rosalind Sharpe of Carmel, down to the coast for dinner, then onto a square dance at Redwood Camp at Big Sur, (illegible) the party gathered some people together and had a good time anyway. Dr. Martin Flavin, Jr., son of Martin Flavin, has been visiting in Carmel with Mrs. Frieda Sharpe and Miss Rosalind Sharpe and has spent some time on his ranch in Cachagua up the Carmel Valley. CAROUSEL opened with spring gaiety last Thursday, April 1. With a blazing fire, and the golden glow of candles, hung with bright paintings from the Pat Wall gallery, festive with Carrusel colors and with the most unusual bar floor to be found anywhere, the CAROUSEL is perfectionist expression for easeful drinking and dining.
(Californian, and Carmel Pine Cone from the Internet Archives, public domain)
GROUP SHOW August 1946
Henry Miller 1946
Richard Diebenkorn
Ellwood Graham
Andre Moreau, 1946 group show
GROUP SHOW Dec 1946
(Judith Deim) Barbara Stevenson
Joan Hinchman
Ellwood Graham
Philip Pinner
Itogaway?
Andre Moreau
George Harris
Lilick Schatz
Dan Harris
Margaret Peterson
Jean Varda can’t tell if he also had a solo
Alfred Morano, group show 1946
Lee Mullican no date listed guessing 1946
Robert McChesney 1946
Edward Corbett 1946
Jeanne D’Orge 1946
Josef Albers, 1946, 1947
Bernard “Tony” Rosenthal 1946, 1947
Dan Zev Harris 1947, 1948
Poulina Pillin 1948
Edward Weston 1948, he listed 1942 on his archives, I think it’s a typo.
Frederick Heidel 1948
Ellwood Graham no dates listed; I found a painting dated 1954, with a Pat Wall Gallery sticker—so the gallery was still open in 1954. Good bio.
I found microfiche copies of the MONTEREY PENINSULA HERALD 1946 but is is not text searchable.
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