Poster boy for Bohemia

When Mildred Newman first visited California in the early 1960s and saw what her son Earl had made of himself among the poets, folk singers, bongo beaters and scruffy street people of beatnik Venice, she began to cry.

He had rented an abandoned former bar near the beach and dubbed it Gallery Venice. The front room was for the silk-screen printing that soon would establish him as the leading poster artist chronicling L.A.’s folk and jazz Bohemia. He lived in back with his wife, Jean, and their two small daughters -- a son would soon arrive -- in a loft he had built of discarded planks from the Venice boardwalk.

The place was dark despite the skylights he’d installed; there were buckets where the roof leaked. And Newman, a Harvard-educated former art teacher, recently arrived from the Northeast with his unshakable Boston accent, had gone native in beard and sandals.

His mother, a solidly middle-class woman who had married a carpenter and could trace her family line back to the Mayflower Pilgrims, was mortified.

“Earl,� he remembers her saying, “I didn’t raise you to live like this.�

But Newman, freed from the teaching grind and exhilarated by the sunlight and sense of freedom in a developing counterculture, was finally in his element. Combining his teen apprenticeship in commercial art with his fine arts education, he turned poster making into a good living and left a visual legacy of the 1960s L.A. club scene in strokes both bold and subtly detailed. He also created posters idealistically bannering the peace, civil rights and environmental movements of the time, although he didn’t hesitate to apply his quick-sketch hand to more middle-American subjects, such as the San Diego Zoo and Pacific Ocean Park, a Santa Monica amusement zone.

At about 2 feet wide by 3 feet tall, Newman’s posters sold for $1 each. They weren’t advertisements for a given performance but ambience-filled souvenirs of a place or a happening. He deployed color judiciously rather than in the bursting profusion of later-arriving but far more famous psychedelic poster-makers such as New York-based Peter Max and Stanley Mouse, the San Francisco artist who created images for concert promoter Bill Graham and the Grateful Dead.

Newman kept studios in Venice from 1960 to 1972; then he and his family opted for country living in Summit, Ore., where he still resides and works at age 74. He’ll be back in Venice on Sunday, showing his posters and paintings at a booth in the annual Abbot Kinney Festival.

“He really was the poster maker before the whole psychedelic thing came around in ‘67,� says Ed Pearl, owner of the Ash Grove, the seminal L.A. folk and blues club that lasted from 1958 to 1973. “He was the sought-after person.�

Newman learned the art and craft of poster making from the age of 15, when he apprenticed at a commercial studio in Malden, Mass., his hometown. He trained for a career as an art teacher, earning an undergraduate degree at the Massachusetts College of Art and a master’s from Harvard.

Married to a fellow artist, he began teaching at a public school near the Canadian border in upstate New York. But Newman, speaking by phone recently from the 47-acre homestead near Corvallis, Ore., where he has his house and studio, said that the sameness of academic routine got to him, so he looked West. He and his wife packed up belongings, daughters and enough savings to live on for a year, and spent some months camping and painting in Northern California. Then an artist friend needed a ride to Venice, where he had an exhibition, and the Newmans obliged.

“It was the beginning of the ’60. There was a revolution going on. People wanted music and poetry and freedom of some sort,� Newman recalls. He set up his easel in front of the Gas House, a colonnaded oceanfront club that was a fulcrum of Venice’s beatnik culture. A passerby bought the painting before it was dry. “I said, ‘This is the place.’ �

Soon, Newman had drawn a poster for the Gas House, and he and club owner Eric “Big Daddy� Nord were churning out prints on silk-screen equipment somebody had left behind. Nord let Newman keep the silk-screen gear, and he set up shop nearby, making posters for kindred venues, among them the Venice West Cafe, the Insomniac and the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach, McCabe’s in Santa Monica, the Troubadour in West Hollywood, the Ash Grove and Shelly’s Mann Hole in Los Angeles, the Golden Bear in Huntington Beach and the Prison of Socrates in Newport Beach.

Newman’s diversity is evident in his work for the clubs: One poster for the Insomniac is a sweeping, detailed interior view, with band in full swing, done in bold red, white and black. Another Insomniac poster, a homage to French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in delicate colors, zooms in on a chic couple, he in a derby, she with cigarette holder.

“It had to be artistic or people wouldn’t buy it,� Newman says. “And you had to appeal to the imagination. People wanted atmosphere in their pads.�

Newman had his struggles: He and Jean separated for a year, and he took up residence in a Venice filling station, living in the office and hand-printing posters in the bays, usually with two or three helpers to run off prints. Therapy helped him grapple with problems marital and art-related, including his attitude that “if you’re an artist and you’re making money, you’re selling out.�

Newman repaired the marriage -- which lasted until his wife’s death nine years ago -- and grew the poster business. In his most prominent gig, he designed posters for the Monterey Jazz Festival starting in 1963, and he continues to issue festival-sanctioned posters every year. “He’s a little, elfin kind of guy, a down-to-earth guy with a twinkle in his eye,� says Paul Fingerote, the festival’s public relations director.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., has a collection of Newman’s Monterey jazz posters. The acquisitions, dating from the mid-1980s, grew out of a close friendship between a jazz festival board member and John Edward Hasse, the museum’s curator of American music. A 1970 Newman poster of Duke Ellington was included in “Beyond Category,� an international touring exhibition on Ellington that the museum organized in 1993.

“His work always has these great leaps of imagination, a subtle elegance,� says Reuben Jackson, a music archivist at the museum. “They aren’t screaming at you.�

In L.A., the Center for the Study of Political Graphics has collected 20 Newman posters, including a “Free Angela� poster from the early 1970s on behalf of the then-imprisoned black radical Angela Davis, and a poignant mid-1960s image of a man holding a little girl that Newman did for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a leading civil rights group.

“A lot of political posters aren’t the kind of thing you would want to bring home,� says Carol Wells, founder and director of the Political Graphics center. “His are more seductive; they’re very lyrical and beautiful, and they’re made out of a sense of hope. They show children, they show flowers. His are the kind of posters you would want to put on your wall.�

Perhaps his most widely seen work shows a boy and a girl running through a field, with only the legend “Hiroshima� to signal that it’s meant not as an idyll but an outcry. It was part of a collage on the cover of the Sept. 1, 1967, issue of Life magazine, for an article on “The Great Poster Wave.� Newman says his cover image went uncredited. The article made no mention of him, focusing instead on Peter Max and the San Francisco psychedelic crew.

Newman did create a purple-haze vision of Jimi Hendrix at one point, but his rock-related experiments were few.

“They didn’t quite fit me,� he says. “I can create almost anything, but it has to be something I relate to. I kind of haven’t been discovered. That’s not a complaint. I’m just happy to be still doing it.�

Fame eluded him, but from leaky-roofed beginnings in Venice, Newman was able to turn his art into a good living. He still owns several houses in Santa Monica, bought in the 1960s with his poster earnings. The rents have helped subsidize his homespun lifestyle -- he drives a 1983 Dodge van, which he bought used to replace the ’64 model he had for 28 years.

About two years after his mother’s distressing first encounter with beatnik culture, Newman sent his parents plane tickets for a second visit.

This time, he recalls, “everything was happy.� He had moved his family to a nicer home, but he still wore a beard and sandals. And that, he says, has not changed to this day.

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Abbot Kinney Festival

Where: Abbot Kinney Boulevard between Main Street and Venice Boulevard, Venice

When: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday

Price: Free

Contact: (310) 396-3772