While visiting the recently-opened Counterculture Museum, near the intersection of Haight and Ashbury, I stumbled across a new book on the life and art of Sausalito’s favorite bohemian: Jean Varda: The Renaissance Man.
The lavishly-illustrated 208-page book was lovingly compiled by John Natsoulas and Sarah Poisner, who operate a gallery in Davis. It contains many vivid color photos of Varda’s artwork and details his life history from his childhood in Greece, his years in Paris during the era of the Lost Generation following WWI, and eventually here to our little town in the late 1940s.
In his introduction, Natsoulas discusses Varda’s influence as an educator and mentor throughout his careeer. As for the artist’s eventual home in the Bay Area, he notes:
Between 1950 and 1960, several artist-run galleries in San Francisco offered a distinctly Californian perspective on life and art, reshaping the national artistic landscape. The galleries marked a definitive break from European-centric to American-centric creative visions, showing remarkably resilient works in distinctive formats. Many of my mentors in life and in the gallery served in the Korean conflict, and then they received their arts educations through the GI Bill. They made it clear to me that between 1946 and 1957, their artistic development was influenced significantly by a figure and cultural icon named Jean Varda.
Sarah Poisner adds this observation: “Varda’s influence as a teacher has been largely ignored, but his influence on the many institutions where he taught was widely acknowledged by his students who would go on to define the Beat movement.”
Later, Natsoulas quotes Varda’s ferry-mate, Alan Watts describing Sausalito in the mid-twentieth century: “So far as I am concerned this is the American Mediterranean… We have succeeded, more than anywhere else in the United States, in curbing the oppressive White Anglo-Saxon Protestant subculture of the nation, though our slight margin of victory requires incessant vigilance. Now it is curious that wherever there flourishes what may loosely be called a bohemian style of life, the affluent bourgeoise are filled with envy and want to move in, so that the land values go up and the artists, writers, hippies, and other weird characters who gave the place its color can no longer afford to live there.”
Natsoulas adds:
Throughout its explosive growth in the 1950s, Sausalito attracted the non-conforming and those who wished for a community that was like-minded in its dedication to the arts. The area full of often hand-crafted house boats became known as Gate 5. In 1969 during his project documenting the area, [photographer] Pirkle Jones’ images conveyed a sense of unbridged joy, a tender wilderness and a new exuberance through which to photograph. The very space inspired. And at its very heart floated the S.S. Vallejo.
The new book covers much of the same ground as Sausalitan Betsy Stroman did in her 2015 tome Varda. But it includes enough unique material to serve as a worthy companion piece for those who can’t get enough of the Varda legend. Currently, it is available online and through the Counterculture Museum or its sister gallery, the Beat Museum at 540 Broadway in San Francisco. There is also a copy in the collection of the Sausalito Historical Society.