Tony Berlant, a seminal influence in the West Coast Pop Art movement of the 1960s, died Tuesday after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease. He was 85.
L.A. Louver, his longtime gallery, confirmed his death to The Times.
Berlant, a “painterly collage artist” who called Santa Monica his home for many decades, developed a signature style making collages using shards of printed tin instead of paper and thousands of shiny nails instead of glue. He often worked with vintage metal street signs and ads. In recent years, he printed personal photographs onto the metal, giving the colorful works story structure and an autobiographical bent.
One of his most recent shows, in fall 2018 at Hollywood’s Kohn Gallery, featured cut metal collages that blended elements of assemblage, Pop Art and abstraction. He was also known for his metal cube sculptures, which have been called quilt-like.
Berlant was a collector of both ancient Southwest pottery and Paleolithic stone objects. In fact, he co-curated two museum exhibitions: “First Sculpture: Handaxe to Figure Stone” at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and “Decoding Mimbres Painting: Ancient Ceramics of the American Southwest” at LACMA. He was also a founding member of the Mimbres Foundation, an archaeological conservancy that studies and preserves ancient Native American pottery.
Berlant was part of L.A.’s famous Ferus Gallery art scene in the 1960s, a group of “Cool School” artists that also included the late Ed Moses and Robert Irwin as well as Ed Ruscha, Larry Bell and others. The Ferus Gallery was a revolving door of experimentation at the time and helped fuse the city’s otherwise sprawling and disparate art scene.
Berlant was part of one of the earliest museum exhibitions of Pop Art in 1963, “Pop Art USA,” at the Oakland Art Museum. He showed his work alongside Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg.
The L.A. visual art scene may be more established today, but it’s also more commercial and safer in some ways. However Berlant firmly believed that L.A. still retains its defining creative spirit.
“My New York friends tend to think of the ’60s as a kind of golden moment that’s now been erased by commercial focus,” Berlant told The Times in 2018. “But I think L.A. is [still that]. It never left. I just assume that there’s all kinds of fantastic artists working that I’ve never heard of because they pop up here and there, and I see them, and I’m just really excited by that. It’s what makes you feel good about a place.”
Berlant’s work is included in the permanent collection of LACMA as well as the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington and the Art Institute of Chicago.
He is survived by his wife, Helen Berlant; daughter, comedian Kate Berlant; and brother, Jeff Berlant.
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