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LOS ANGELES TIMES

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Wallace Berman, circa 1964. "If there was a guru, he was it - the high priest, the holy man, the rabbi," Dennis Hopper recalls.

BERMAN

Continued from F18

Morand. Her soulful picture on the cover of Semina 4 sets a tone of bohemian romanticism for a generation fascinated by Hermann Hesse and Antonin Artaud. They met waiting in line to see a Cocteau film at the old Coronet Theater. "I fell in love immediately," she recalled later. "He was a vacuum cleaner when it came to poetry."

Berman's acquaintances came to bracket the underground. He knew nature-cultist Jim Baker, who opened successful health-food restaurants like the Aware Inn and wound up as a '60s guru named Yod. He knew James Dean and Dennis Hopper, setting a long-standing mutual attraction between Hollywood and L.A. art. He played a bit part as a sower of seeds in Hopper's film "Easy Rider." Very apt.

Hopper, reached by phone, said: "He affected and influenced everybody seriously involved in the arts in L.A. in the '50s. If there was a guru, he was it - the high priest, the holy man, the rabbi."

Berman's charismatic personality and artistic use of the Hebrew cabala lent him a mystical aura. His image comes across like Allen Ginsberg's "angel-headed hipster" or young Bob Dylan's blend of hostile dodger and Old Testament prophet. But he was also into the occult, which he found through the truly reclusive Pasadena artist Cameron, a votary of the diabolist Aleister Crowley. Cameron was actually the maker of the drawing that got Berman arrested - an Aubrey Beardsley-like psychedelic image of a copulating couple she'd done on a peyote trip. Aldous Huxley's book "The Doors of Perception" was influential at the time.

Berman and Alexander played catalytic roles in the establishment of the Ferus Gallery launched by Kienholz and Hopps. After Berman's humiliating arrest, his next Semina announced: "I will continue to print Semina from locations other than this city of degenerate angels."

He moved first to San Francisco, then to a houseboat in nearby Larkspur. He was thick with the Bay Area art crowd. Hallucinogenic drugs seemed to play a key role in these relationships. According to John Maynard in his book "Venice West," Berman gave hashish to visiting L.A. poet Stuart Perkoff and introduced McClure to peyote, inspiring his "Peyote Poem." An excerpt made up the whole of Semina 3.

Cynics have suspected Berman of supporting his artistic habit by dealing drugs. Herms says: "I never saw him sell to anyone. His magic had little to do with drug. He was a dealer in art and poetry.

"This is not the time to glorify drugs. But 30 years ago drugs and madness were considered doorways to experience. The church had stopped satisfying spiritual hunger. Narcotics were a way of altering consciousness. Wally thought it would be a better world if all students at the police academy took peyote on graduation day."

Berman's mental landscape included both magical perception and flinty realism. Both are evident in Semina and in Berman's life. His motto was "Art Is Love Is God." Since childhood he'd believed he would die at 50. Before returning to Los Angeles in 1961 he wrote in Semina:

Spurred by what reason
Do I leave this ark
for the city degenerate
angels 500 miles south other than to die.

He did, exactly on cue.

The artist was killed Feb. 18, 1976, near his home in Topanga Canyon, on his 50th birthday. He was struck down by a driver sodden on substances Berman had held in reverence.