Tony Berlant, Santa Monica Artist Who Built Collages From Printed Tin, Dies at 85

Tony Berlant, an influential figure in the West Coast Pop Art movement of the 1960s, died Tuesday after a long battle with Alzheimer's disease. He was 85. His longtime gallery, L.A. Louver, confirmed his death to the Los Angeles Times.

Berlant, who made his home in Santa Monica for many decades, was described as a "master of painting without paint." He developed a signature approach to collage that replaced paper with shards of printed tin and glue with thousands of shiny nails. He frequently worked with vintage metal street signs and advertisements. In recent years, he printed personal photographs onto the metal, giving the colorful pieces a narrative structure and an autobiographical quality.

One of his latest shows, held in fall 2018 at Hollywood's Kohn Gallery, featured cut metal collages that combined assemblage, Pop Art and abstraction. He was also known for metal cube sculptures that have been compared to quilts.

Away from the studio, Berlant collected ancient Southwest pottery and Paleolithic stone objects. 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.

In the 1960s he belonged to the Ferus Gallery scene in Los Angeles, a circle of "Cool School" artists that included Ed Moses, Robert Irwin, Ed Ruscha and Larry Bell. The gallery was a hub of experimentation that helped bring together the city's sprawling art community. In 1963, Berlant took part in "Pop Art USA," one of the earliest museum exhibitions of Pop Art, at the Oakland Art Museum, showing alongside Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg.

Born in New York City in 1941, Berlant moved to Los Angeles with his family at a young age. He attended USC for a year in 1959, then transferred to UCLA, where professor William Brice placed him in an advanced class taught by visiting artist Richard Diebenkorn. He earned three degrees in three years: a bachelor's, a master of arts in painting and a master of fine arts in sculpture. He taught alongside Brice and Diebenkorn from 1965 to 1969.

His first major break came as an undergraduate in 1961, when critic Clement Greenberg chose one of his paintings for an exhibition of Los Angeles artists at LACMA. Three years later, LACMA's Contemporary Art Council awarded him its New Talent Purchase Grant. He then worked between Los Angeles and New York, though he considered Los Angeles "his village." There he met Marcel Duchamp and formed lasting friendships with artists including Moses, Vija Celmins, Ken Price, Chris Burden and Nancy Rubins, as well as architect Frank Gehry. Moses, Charles Garabedian and Diebenkorn introduced him to Peter Goulds, founding director of L.A. Louver, which became his gallery in 1978. His work is held in the collections of LACMA, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Berlant believed the city's creative spirit endured. "My New York friends tend to think of the '60s as a kind of golden moment that's now been erased by commercial focus," he told The Times in 2018. "But I think L.A. is [still that]. It never left."

In Los Angeles he also met his wife, Helen Méndez, a performance artist and set designer. They settled in Santa Monica, where he set up his studio and where their only daughter, comedian, actor and writer Kate Berlant, was raised. Asked in 2018 what he would tell his 20-year-old self, he answered: "Just follow your instincts and do what makes you happy. That's what artists do." Berlant is survived by his wife, his daughter and his brother, Jeff Berlant.