The story of the Grateful Dead is a chapter in the long history of San Francisco bohemianism. Ever since its Gold Rush days, the Bay Area has been a magnet for artists, writers, painters, and bohemians of all stripes; after the Civil War, writers such as Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Ada Clare cemented the connection, crowning San Francisco the Bohemia of the West. In the 1950s, Beat writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Michael McClure renewed the City’s bohemian subculture; in time, they would become peers and avatars for the Haight-Ashbury’s emerging musicians and artists. The California School of Fine Arts (later the San Francisco Art Institute) was one of the incubators of this post-war artistic renaissance, where a young Jerry Garcia studied painting with Wally Hedrick and Elmer Bischoff. This unpublished monoprint shows Garcia’s debt to Bischoff. Years later, Hedrick recalled, “At that time [the 1950s] there were two major directions the school was going, stylistically. One of them was abstract expressionism. But Jerry was more taken with the so-called California figurative style, which hadn’t been named at that time, but several people on the faculty were sort of known for starting it.”

Like their literary colleagues, Beat artists were famous for their eclecticism, and mixed media sculptures called assemblages were a powerful artform that Beat artists such as Bruce Conner embraced in the 1950s. Collage was the two-dimensional mirror of assemblage, and posters for Beat readings often used collage to convey a visual sense of the literary aspirations animating Beat writing. The music most associated with the Beats was jazz, but as the fifties waned, folk music began its ascendency, softening some of the darker edges of the Beat sensibility and paving the way for the ecstatic transformations of the Haight.

Bay Area coffee houses and folk music venues reflected that artistic heritage, advertising concerts with posters that often played off of—and with—the eclectic potential of collage, mixing metaphors and messages in a way that subverted rules and questioned norms. It was a precursor to the psychedelic art that would suddenly explode in less than a year.

Further reading:

Albright, Thomas. Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-1980: An Illustrated History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

Beat culture and the New America, 1950-1965 / Lisa Phillips, with contributions by Maurice Berger ... [et al.]

Image courtesy of George Michalski Collection.