Jess

Visual artist Jess, long-term partner and collaborator of poet Robert Duncan, was born Burgess Franklin Collins in Long Beach, California. In 1942, Jess began studying chemistry at CalTech but was drafted into the Army Corps of Engineers in 1943. He worked on the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, until 1946 before completing his chemistry degree at CalTech. In 1948, within months of experiencing an apocalyptic dream, he radically altered the course of his life by leaving his career as a chemist and dedicating himself to art, moving to San Francisco, California, and taking up his new name: “Jess.”

Jess studied at the California School of Fine Arts and developed a presence in the San Francisco artistic community, which led to his first solo exhibition at the Helvie Makela Gallery in 1950. He met Robert Duncan at a poetry reading at Berkeley in 1949, and they courted each other with a shared appreciation of Gertrude Stein, L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, mystical literature, and each other’s work. Jess was greatly inspired by Duncan’s gift to him of Max Ernst’s 1934 Une semaine de bonté, a book of surrealist collage. Collage, or “paste-ups” as he called them, became a pillar of Jess’s body of work. Despite living together and having many shared interests, the only project Jess and Duncan worked on together was Caesar’s Gate (Divers Press, 1955), in which Jess’s illustrations were included with poems by Duncan. 

Jess’s artwork was featured in a number of solo and group exhibitions, notable among them The Art of Assemblage at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1961, Pop Art U.S.A at the Oakland Art Museum in 1963, and Paste-Ups by Jess at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1968. A retrospective of Jess’s work, Jess: A Grand Collage 1951–1993, traveled the United States between 1990 and 1994. 

When Duncan was diagnosed with kidney dysfunction, Jess devoted all his time and energy to his partner, who died in 1988. The two had been together for 37 years. 

Since Jess’s passing in 2004, his work has been featured in shows including Mythos, Psyche, Eros: Jess and California (2019) at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and Their Circle (2013) at the Crocker Art Museum and several other locations; and Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture (2011) at the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian.

The trust that administers Jess’s estate also holds the rights to Robert Duncan’s work. The archive that holds Jess’s papers is located in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley.