Wes Wilson, the artist who helped define the radical visual style of the psychedelic rock era in the late 1960s with his retina-searing posters for bands such as the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Quicksilver Messenger Service, died Friday, Jan. 24, at his home in Aurora, Mo. He was 82.
The news was confirmed to The Chronicle by Dan Bessie, his brother-in-law, though the cause of his death has not yet been disclosed.
Wilson was among the initial wave of artists commissioned by rock promoter Bill Graham to create handbills for his early dance concerts at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco. He also created posters advertising concerts promoted by Chet Helms and the Family Dog at the Avalon Ballroom as well as the artwork for the Beatles at Candlestick Park in 1966, which would mark the band’s final concert.
Inspired largely by Art Nouveau masters and the Viennese Secessionist lettering style developed by Alfred Roller, Wilson developed his own visual language, pairing bright clashing colors and billowing shapes with letters that looked like they were caught mid-swirl.
He was among the “big five” Haight-Ashbury poster artists who defined the iconography of the hippie counterculture scene that took hold around the Summer of Love.
“Wes Wilson did a series of 10 or 12 posters that ignited all of these other artists to get started,” poster artist and collector Chuck Sperry told The Chronicle in 2016. “Stanley Mouse, Alton Kelley, Victor Moscoso and Rick Griffin were breaking all the printing rules by putting colors like red and blue next to each other, which vibrated the eye. You had to be hip in order to even read the posters. It was really a revolutionary artistic statement.”
The posters, which were originally made to advertise concerts in the pre-internet era, soon became collectors’ items. Wilson’s work was featured in Time (which described his style as “Nouveau Frisco”), Life and Variety magazines, and in years since has been featured in retrospective shows at several fine arts museums, including the de Young Museum and SFO Museum in San Francisco, the Smithsonian and Museum of Modern Art in New York.
His posters are also prominently featured in the best-selling book “The Art of Rock,” representing the electricity of the era of be-ins, mind-expanding drugs and wooly rock ‘n’ roll.
“There was the melding together of ideologies (in San Francisco), a kind of idealism, which was in the art,” Wilson told The Chronicle in 2001. “I took the work very seriously.”
Robert Wesley Wilson was born July 15, 1937, in Sacramento. He studied horticulture at a small junior college in Auburn (Placer County) before transferring to San Francisco State University to major in philosophy. He dropped out in 1963 and moved into a hotel in the Tenderloin.
Leaving an insurance company job, he started a small press with Bob Carr called Contact Printing, where he created handbills for the San Francisco Mime Troupe and Merry Prankster Acid Tests. In 1965, Wilson, who was an Army veteran, printed an antiwar poster depicting the American flag superimposed with a swastika on it with the text, “Are we next?,” earning a visit from the Anti-Defamation League.
“I’m glad I did something to significantly express my shock and anguish as an American about such an obviously erroneous and costly ethical ‘mistake’ as was the Vietnam War,” Wilson wrote on his website in 2013.
The stark artwork drew the attention of Helms, who asked him to design the logo for the Family Dog, as well as posters promoting shows by the Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother & the Holding Company and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.
After creating a poster advertising the Trips Festival in 1966, long considered one of the earliest events signaling the emergence of the psychedelic rock scene, he was recruited by Graham to make the iconic posters that defined the seminal Fillmore posters that currently blanket the walls of the poster room at the venue.
His first print for the Fillmore Auditorium was handed out on July 16, 1966, following a concert by the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. Featuring letters in bright orange that looked like searing flames, the 14-by 20-inch poster advertised an upcoming show by the Association and Quicksilver Messenger Service.
Graham personally plastered them around the city on his Lambretta scooter, before he soon discovered that the posters would go missing almost as soon as they went up because they were so coveted. Wilson created 40 posters for the Fillmore before the end of the year.
Wilson stopped working for Graham in 1967 over a royalty dispute, effectively putting an end to what is considered the imperial phase of rock poster art. By 1968, the Avalon closed and a few years later larger venues eclipsed the Fillmore in significance — arenas and stadiums that required more substantial promotional means than posters.
Yet the classic Fillmore posters are still traded by collectors all over the world. A complete set could fetch as much as $250,000, Grant McKinnon of S.F. Rock Posters and Collectibles told The Chronicle. “There’s a small handful that are just brutal to find,” McKinnon says.
Wilson received a $5,000 award from the National Endowment for the Arts for his significant contributions to American art in 1968, but soon after ducked out of public view.
After experimenting with new mediums, such as glass and watercolor, he moved with his family to a cattle ranch in the Missouri Ozarks, where he continued to design the occasional rock poster, most recently for the Bay Area psychedelic rock revival band Moonalice.
Wilson is survived by his wife Eva Christine Wilson; children Colin Wilson, Theanna Teodorovic and Jason Wilson; and 10 grandchildren.