INTRODUCTION

Ricco/Maresca is excited to present the first gallery exhibition ever to be mounted of the work of Grant Wallace (1868–1954). Over the Psychic Radio features 31 works from a collection that was recently discovered by the artist’s great-grandchildren. 

Only ten works by Wallace have been previously seen by the wider public. They were exhibited between 1997 and 1998 at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore as part of The End Is Near! Visions of Apocalypse, Millennium, and Utopia and are illustrated in the eponymous catalog, published by Dilettante Press. The exhibition and publication were curated and authored by Roger Manley.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Grant Wallace was born in Hopkins, Missouri, in 1868, one of 9 children. He set out for New York City at age 19, where he studied and developed his interest in the occult. Wallace eventually made his way to California, where he worked as an editorial illustrator and reporter for the San Francisco Examiner and San Francisco Chronicle. He graduated to editorial writer for the Evening Bulletin and covered the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 among a group of war correspondents that included Jack London and Richard Harding Davis.

Just before World War I, Wallace settled with his family in Carmel, California, where he began experimenting with telepathy, or what he referred to as "mental radio.” Over the next two decades, he channeled his visions and messages into elaborate portraits, texts, and complex diagrams and calculations. Through his work, Wallace endeavored to prove reincarnation, extraterrestrial life, and the coexistence of the living with the dead. 

Over the Psychic Radio is accompanied by a print catalog with an introduction by the artist’s great-grandson and family curator Matt Berger, and an essay by the critic and scholar Lucy Sante. Both texts are reproduced below to provide context on Wallace’s exceptional biography, larger-than-life persona, and important oeuvre.

All artwork images © The Berger Wallace Art Collection

THE LIFE AND WORK OF GRANT WALLACE
By Lucy Sante

To understand Grant Wallace (1868–1954), it is necessary to transport oneself back to the nineteenth century and the nearly unlimited opportunities for self-invention and reinvention the United States offered, at least to white men with iron self-confidence and, if possible, nearly suicidal daring. Wallace was born on a farm in Missouri (his father, who became a judge, had been a '49er); acquired several sorts of education; ran a business college; became a newspaper cartoonist, then reporter, then editorial writer, then daredevil war correspondent. After that he vagabonded around the Southwest, wrestling mountain lions and repairing funicular cables. According to his New York Times obituary he then edited a movie magazine, wrote humor pieces for the New York Sun, explored archeological sites in the Southwest for Everybody's Magazine, undertook horticultural projects under Luther Burbank, helped found the writers' colony at Carmel, California, and made animated films in a San Rafael studio. He was nevertheless never truly secure financially, and he took big if often star-crossed chances with investments while he raised his impossibly perfect family in Carmel. Meanwhile he was tuning in to the astral plane, which brought him a bevy of chatty correspondents from the beyond, a number of whose portraits by Wallace and texts ostensibly dictated to him are illustrated herein.

Wallace's serpentine road of life, punctuated by dramatic choices, was fully in keeping with his time and place. His journalistic career, with its flamboyance and daring in the Russo–Japanese War, can be seen as reflecting the career of the much more famous Richard Harding Davis (1864–1916), just three years Wallace's senior, who during the Spanish–American War, the Boer War, the Russo–Japanese War, and the early years of World War I regularly undertook reckless, headline-grabbing reportorial missions, all the while serving as the probable model for Charles Dana Gibson's "Gibson Man" (counterpart of the Gibson Girl) and launching the popularity of the clean-shaven look. (He died of a heart attack while on the telephone.) The list of Davis's publications is long, but the list of (mostly silent) films based on them is longer. He was a star, the idol of millions, the toast of society, the prototypical journalist-hero. So Wallace might also possibly have been, with a bit more sustained effort, but East Coast glamour wasn't for him, anyway. He was a true citizen of California, then a distant and untamed province in the minds of the rest of the country.

The flipside of California's provincial unimportance was that it allowed the state to become a laboratory for all sorts of wild ideas and heterodox beliefs. Of course, nonconformity of a spiritual sort had been a feature of the American landscape since the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The low-church frontier had resented the high-church Eastern cities since the eighteenth century. There had long been periodic targeted outbreaks of spiritual excitement and innovation, such as the "Burnt-Over District" phenomenon of western New York state in the mid-nineteenth century, which yielded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in addition to various utopian social experiments, such as Fourierist phalansteries. Spiritualism, which focused on communicating with the dead, began with the Fox sisters in Hydesville, New York, in 1848 and went on to sweep the Western world, quickly reaching all social classes, including artists, intellectuals, and members of the established clergy.

By the later nineteenth century California, with its sunny skies, diverse topography, and end-of-the-rainbow remoteness, began to appear as the natural home of the spiritual avant-garde. Large properties were plentiful and cheap, and the place kept filling up with trainloads of the spiritually malnourished, escapees from the industrial East and the agrarian Middle and South, who were ready to go all in on any promise of heaven, preferably with an earthly component. The first cult was established by the faith healer William Money, who moved to Los Angeles in 1841, and over the years the roster filled up with the kinds of sects Nathanael West was to mock in The Day of the Locust: New Thought, in Los Angeles from 1904; Aimee Semple McPherson's Four Square Gospel, 1918; Guy and Edna Ballard's I AM, 1932; Arthur Bell's Mankind United, 1934; not to mention such more or less fleeting manifestations as the Great White Brotherhood, the Temple of the Jewelled Cross, and the Ancient Mystical Order of Melchizedek.

But it was Theosophy that truly captured the Californian imagination. The Theosophical Society was founded in New York City in 1875 by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Henry Olcott, and William Quan Judge, who insisted that it was not a religion but an overarching way of seeing that encompassed religion, philosophy, and science. It sampled many of the world's religions, incorporating such concepts as reincarnation and karma, but claimed to derive its precepts from the teachings of a number of enlightened and immortal Ascended Masters, hovering over Tibet; its spiritual discipline was undemanding and rich in pageantry. After Blavatsky died in 1891, Olcott and Judge diverged. In 1900 Judge's follower Katherine Tingley ("the Veiled Mahatma," "the Purple Mother") established a vast Moorish-style complex on 500 acres at Point Loma, near San Diego, where 300 devotees of 25 nationalities disported themselves in "Grecian" costumes. Olcott's disciple Albert Powell Warrington set up Krotona on fifteen acres in Los Angeles in 1911, although in 1920, when the location turned out to be in the middle of Hollywood, he and his affiliate Annie Besant moved it to the Ojai Valley, east of Santa Barbara, where their celebrated messiah, the remarkable Jiddu Krishnamurti, soon moved for his health. It did not hurt either group's fortunes that around that time the anthropologist and eugenicist Ales Hrdlicka published a magazine article predicting the advent of a new "sixth sub-race," suggesting its birthplace might be California, since school tests had revealed many child prodigies in the state.

Wallace absorbed all these currents, and more. He was, for example, editor of the San Francisco Esperantist at a time when the "universal language" Esperanto was as much de rigueur among California visionaries as vegetarianism and nude bathing. In the 1920s he undertook calculations by which he attempted to prove such matters as extraterrestrial life, the reality of reincarnation, and the possibility of communicating with the dead. He gave Spiritualism a modern sheen when he began receiving "sublimated telepathic" messages from the beyond and referred to the process as "mental radio." His early list of astral contacts includes Egyptians, ancient Greeks, Vikings, Atlanteans; Hippocrates, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, and the sociologist Harriet Martineau, all of whom might have figured in other Spiritualist address books. Before long, however, he began receiving communications from farther afield, beginning with the other planets of the solar system. He compiled alphabets in Mercurian, Venusian (two social levels), Martian, Jupiterian, Saturnian, Neptunian, and Titanian, pertaining to the largest moon of Uranus. And then he began hearing from entities in the "ninth planet," Azoth, and eventually from beings on planets of the star Altair, the Pleiades star cluster, and the Andromeda galaxy.

Wallace had an agile pen, which he deployed in his editorial cartoons; "Professional Jealousy," 1925, has vigor, precision, and a dancing line not unlike Robert Crumb's. Naturally, his visualizations of his spirit contacts were bound to be rather more elaborate than the usual run of psychic art, with its predictable altars, temples, and symmetries. He laid out many of his pages like trompe-l'oeil bulletin boards, with statements, maxims, and aperçus from figures living, dead, and extraterrestrial appearing on what look like individual scraps of paper, each in a different style of penmanship. In this they are very reminiscent of the compilations of worthy thoughts of the great that were artfully published at the beginning of the century by the Roycroft Press of East Aurora, New York, Elbert Hubbard's attempt to emulate William Morris's Kelmscott Press.

But Wallace's otherworldly correspondents also transmitted their images via his psychic radio, giving him rich material for his portraits. The portfolio on display begins with a beautifully lettered title page that suggests Wallace would have been equally at home with fin-de-siècle Symbolists and Decadents and with the San Francisco psychedelic poster artists of the late 1960s. Indeed, there's more than a little psychedelia in these works. The figures have immense Margaret Keane–sized eyes, are crowned with laurels or turbans or towering hair or bejeweled headdresses or helmets or rays of power, surrounded by writings in scripts sometimes so outlandish they might be mistaken for the Mercurian alphabet. He was clearly an admirer of William Blake, whose arched compositions and ways of expressing phosphorescence he liked to adapt. In profile his women, whichever planet they are from, tend to exhibit the ample dimensions and plumply rounded chins associated with bustles and hobble skirts. Across the board, his correspondents are positive and uplifting and quite in favor of universal harmony and world peace—much like the Elbert Hubbard school, which held that art was a sort of spiritual vitamin, needed to arm mankind for its march into the future. This applies equally to Wallace's extraterrestrials, who seem to live in enlightened worlds where the language is dense with Zs: Zarruez, L'Zouree, Zuraleo, Zazuilly, Zozomilea, Zingomar (weirdly like the French cinematic archvillain Zigomar, 1913–1915; zigomar is French slang for "rando").

Wallace's psychic radio pulled in strong signals from around the universe. Naturally, they were subject to the observer's gloss, that thing we can never get away from, which causes us to interpret alien information according to terms that are sunk so deep within us we don't notice they are there. Just as medieval European travelers to China made the place look like a version of Italy, so Wallace, steeped in the American nineteenth century, would see his Pleiadeans in terms established by Lillian Russell and the Ziegfeld Follies. The hardware and accessories come from Greek mythology and Edgar Rice Burroughs. But that is all surface. Just look into the giant eyes of Zaerruez or Zuraleo, their pupils reflecting glittering mechanisms—as you try to understand them you fall into the vastness of those eyes and have to confess that there are unknown psychic emanations at work here, shooting from some distant star straight into your pineal gland.

A HISTORY OF THE COLLECTION
By Matt Berger *

Earth is the Greatest Haunted House. Hourly you walk among crowds of semi-conscious gaseous “ghosts.” To them you are the gaseous folk, while they are the visible and substantial realities. Men’s ignorance of this fact does not change the fact.
—With our thanks to you, who are our Ghost Writer.

This message is written in thick black pencil on a scrap of paper that I keep in a handmade wooden box near my bedside, along with various keepsakes and good luck charms. It was written by my great-grandfather Grant Wallace (1868–1954), who in every sense of the word was one of history’s most famous ghostwriters.

Growing up in my conventional family household in the 1980s, my siblings and I lived in blissful innocence when it came to the otherworldly accomplishments of our mom’s dad’s dad. We did not know much about him being a spiritualist philosopher and medium to past lives, alien life forms, and spirit worlds. We mostly knew of him by my mom’s description—a famous newspaper man who collected a famous circle of friends.

Grant died in his Berkeley home when his grandchildren were young. My mom, Deirdre Wallace, was just seven years old. Her younger brother, Brian, was five. Two decades would pass before I was born, the fourth of the great-grandkids, with the surname Berger.

What I knew about Grant was mostly lore, told to me by our mom in her giddy nonchalance. In ninth grade, when I checked out Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat from the school library, she explained that the author wrote the novella while flopped out on Grant and Margaret’s living room couch for weeks in their tiny Carmel bungalow . . . she thought. “Or was it The Red Pony?” she wondered.

When we’d hike the local trails in the nearby Berkeley hills, my mom would remind us that Grant and his writer friend Jack London once invested in a eucalyptus tree importing company, until the hardwood scheme went bust and dried up our family savings account.

As an aspiring journalist, I pored over old San Francisco morning and evening edition paper newsclips by Grant that were around the house, assigned to Grant by his editors and publishers, including Fremont Older and William Randolph Hearst.

But my mom didn’t tell us much about Grant’s other journalistic endeavor—his lifelong pursuit to document “the secret structure of reality’s nine dimensions and in general set mankind straight through rational scientific method.” This I would learn from my grandfather Kevin Wallace, who detailed our family story in an unpublished memoir I found in a box in our garage when I was a teenager.

Kevin recounted Grant’s journey from his childhood home in Missouri—where Grant first reported an ability to communicate with the spirit world, once even ridding his mother of demonic possession by a monk from the time of the Spanish Inquisition—to the epicenter of late nineteenth-century modernism: New York City:

Grant zoomed off to see Tom Edison’s bright new lights on the cobblestones of New York. He tested Greenwich Village’s lively Ouija boards, hypnotic telekinesis, telepathy, clairvoyance, theosophy, karma and hypnotic soirées, seances, reincarnation sessions, and pieced them into Darwinism.

Where evolutionary theory let individuals die off, depriving them of substantial progress, Grant’s revised theory gave some point to everybody’s otherwise inane classroom work, courtship, housekeeping, bread-winning, and dying off.

Incarnations were semesters and astral intervals holidays when ghosts with nothing better to do could communicate telepathically with those on earth and if the latter weren’t careful, hypnotize them.

That last line says a lot about Grant and his position in the family unit. Despite tuning in to the outside world (sometimes more than to his own domestic responsibilities) Grant always managed to keep one foot in this world.

Many years after his first trip to New York and living an exceptional life—settling in Carmel, California, at the suggestion of his group of friends, including Sinclair Lewis and Mary Austin; marrying a second time and starting his second family (mine)—Grant went back to Manhattan to present his most important body of work, produced under the influence of automatic writing.

But the Great Depression loomed, and Grant’s collection of bookplates and astral portraits delivered to him through “mental radio” by Pleiadian Light Bringers with names like Zu-la-zu-le, was not what his New York editors were ready to bank on.

Still, Grant continued to devote much of his life to documenting and promoting their voices. His openness as a medium, his dedication to truth, his editorial wits, and his devout family support system enabled Grant to immerse himself in his pursuit of this higher truth.

Perhaps that’s where I get it. I’ve been consumed by the resurrection of my family story for more than thirty years now, sometimes at the expense of my domestic responsibilities.

At times I wonder if it was the groundwork that Grant laid with his spirit friends that has delivered his Big Work back to New York City for this posthumous exhibition 100 years after he first presented it here. After all, it traveled a perilous journey for over a century, across country and back again, through death and inheritance, bad weather and ex-husbands, in many attics and basements. It was nearly lost entirely to a California wildfire that tore through the Sierra Nevada Mountain town where it had been stored for decades but was saved after the fire miraculously changed course.

Other times, I remember he was also among the greatest of ideas men, visionaries, and marketers of his time. Maybe this was his plot all along.

*Matt Berger is a writer, producer, and third-generation descendant of Grant Wallace based in Santa Cruz, California.