The Work of Salvage: Jess, Allegory, and the Atomic Bomb

This chapter considers the work of the artist Jess (1923–2004), whose career unfolded almost entirely in San Francisco and whose interlocutors included Bay Area artists and poets. The chapter opens with a close reading of a 1974 work by Jess titled The 5th Never of Old Lear, an allegory of catastrophe and madness made in the postwar era of the atomic age. Trained as a radiochemist, Jess was drafted into the US Army Corps of Engineers in 1943 and served on the Manhattan Project monitoring plutonium production. He moved to San Francisco in 1949, where he pursued an art career and eventually shed his last name, Collins. Jess's collages are an attempt to piece together an image of the world from its wreckage and debris—a process he called salvage, which is bound up with his experience with atomic energy as a nuclear chemist in the 1940s.