Satty
By Jim Harter
Satty was a legendary collage artist from San Francisco’s psychedelic era known for his psychedelic posters and book illustrations. He was born Wilfried Podriech in Bremen, Germany on April 12, 1939. Although fascinating, Satty’s story is very much a cautionary tale. As an artist and illustrator of the fantastic he experienced fame and success, had two beautiful wives and many friends. But like Edgar Allan Poe, whose work he admired and illustrated, Satty suffered drug and alcohol addiction, and ultimately a tragic end.
As a young child during World War Two he endured the destruction of his city by Allied bombers. These traumatic experiences, plus the surreal ruins and deprivation in the war’s aftermath, all left lasting impressions on him. Satty later described the ruins as “a big surrealistic playground.” He and other children explored through the debris in search of valuables. Tunneling into a cellar on one occasion, he encountered two skeletons.
In his German schooling Satty received training in heating and air conditioning systems. Having an adventurous spirit, he worked for a time as a steward on a merchant ship and then in Brazil’s new capital, Brasilia. Satty arrived in San Francisco in 1961. He had a design job with BART, the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, before becoming an artist.
Fellow artist Michael Bowen recalled that beginning with his first loft on the waterfront embarcadero, Satty showed an unusual gift for creating unique and protective home environments. Perhaps a compensation for his early childhood traumas, these bunker like sanctums provided a safe space for him to express his powerful imagination. Satty’s final apartment at 2143 Powell Street became famous and was the scene of many large parties attended by such luminaries as Truman Capote, Michael Douglas, Jack Nicholson, Francis Ford Coppola, Herb Caen, German film directors Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders, rock bands like the Grateful Dead and the Tubes, and Fillmore poster artists Wes Wilson and David Singer.
Art critic Thomas Albright commented on this scene. “He staged huge parties where socialites and hippies mingled, in a subterranean basement of the pre-earthquake building where he lived on Powell Street. He had converted the basement into a surreal environment that resembled a cross between Mrs. Havisham’s parlor in “Great Expectations” and something out of Luna Park…. The basement was divided into a warren of variably weird compartments like the different rooms in Hesse’s Magic Theater. The building had almost as many levels, and ladders, as a Hopi Indian pueblo – a ladder from the second floor to the attic; another that afforded the only access to the basement; a third that led from the basement to a musty windowless chamber on a kind of mezzanine that was like a movie-set version of an alchemist’s library, lined with ancient books and presided over by a human skull.”
Some of Satty’s framed collages were exhibited in the reception area, and old engravings were scattered all over his workplace. The dimly lighted basement was long and narrow, and was filled with mirrors, ancient stuffed birds, antique dolls, mannequins, aging overstuffed furniture, and floor lamps with fringed shades from the 1920s or before. Satty had gathered most of this from trash bins in Pacific Heights.
From an early time in his artistic development he turned to making collages. By 1966 he began creating non-advertising psychedelic posters that were sold by East Totem West. Experimenting with printing and color techniques, Satty sometimes printed engravings in different colors over each other. On occasion he might paste a color half-tone image into the mix and then print over that. Soon Rolling Stone Magazine, which had begun publication in San Francisco, featured a black and white Satty collage in each issue. However, being more mystical and visionary than Ernst’s work, they reflected the new LSD-fueled zeitgeist. Rolling Stones new publishing house, Straight Arrow Books, published two volumes of Satty’s work, The Cosmic Bicycle in 1971, and Time Zone in 1973.
Satty’s collage technique was essentially one of taking existing visual material and recombining it to form something new. This probably appealed to his interest in alchemy, because he was transmuting base images into a higher surrealistic synthesis. This worked as long as the combined imagery produced a certain symbolic magic. Max Ernst, pioneer of this technique, made his first tentative collage experiments around 1921. In 1929 he began creating his famous collage novels from nineteenth-century wood engravings. A few of Ernst’s surrealist contemporaries also experimented with collage and the related technique of photomontage. This group included Raoul Hausmann, Paul Eluard, Paul Citroen, Hannah Hock, and John Heartfield. Heartfield’s political montages, published in Germany savagely lampooned the rising Nazi party. However he was forced into exile in 1933. Later on French surrealist Max Bucaille continued work in the Ernst method, and like Ernst, had some books of his collages published.
Satty began collecting old books in his first travels abroad, and in his later expeditions through San Francisco’s antiquarian bookstores turned up many other treasures. All of this provided raw material for his “image bank.” It mainly consisted of wood engravings, many of European origin, but there were also halftone illustrations, steel engravings, color images, and a few woodcuts. The woodcut process was the earliest technique developed for printing images, and dates back centuries. It involved carving an image in negative on a block of wood. The block would then be inked and prints made from it. The wood engraving technique was a refinement of this process. It made possible a much more detailed depiction of the image. Wood engraving became the dominant method for pictorial representation in nineteenth-century publishing.
Steel engraving, another nineteenth-century technique, was similar to wood engraving, but it was done on metal plate and rendered in finer detail. Costlier to produce, it also required a higher grade of paper to print on. The halftone technique, perfected around 1890, made possible the reproduction of black and white photographs. It involved a screen that turned subtle shades of gray into tiny dot patterns of solid black or white. As this was a much cheaper process, it quickly made the other techniques obsolete.
Normally using wood engravings, Satty created his collages by cutting out images and juxtaposing them in various ways until he found interesting symbolic combinations. Compositions could then be improved by adding other images until the desired result was achieved. Some of his collages were simple but others quite complex. If unable to find suitable wood engravings, he would turn to halftones, steel engravings, or rarely, wood cuts. However the clash of textures in these collages could be disconcerting. On occasion he also created color collages.
Beautiful, mysterious, and sometimes melancholy, the best of Satty’s images, much of which appeared in his first book, The Cosmic Bicycle, had an ancient yet timeless quality. Combining human figures, animals, architecture, natural backgrounds, and other elements, they expressed his deep feelings and idealistic utopian sentiments. Always surreal, they were like poetic dreams, and in some respects were similar to images that one might see in drug-induced states. These works seemed to embody a European visionary spirit, bringing to mind ancient alchemical illustrations, and works by artists like Arcimboldo, Albrecht Durer, Henry Fuselli, William Blake, Caspar David Friedrich, Gustave Moreau, and Arnold Bocklin.
While The Cosmic Bicycle collages clearly stood on their own as surrealist works of art, Satty’s later published collages mainly had an illustrative purpose. In the case of Time Zone, a philosophic work, they symbolically portrayed various zeitgeists in an attempt to show a cyclical pattern of time. Following this, Satty arranged with book publishers to undertake some very innovative illustration projects. The Annotated Dracula, published by Balantine Books in 1973, had seventeen Satty images. He also illustrated Fritz Ludlow’s classic The Hashish Eater, published by San Francisco’s Level Press in 1975. Most successful was The Illustrated Edgar Allan Poe, published by Clarkson N. Potter in 1976, which had about eighty haunting images.
Satty first married Mary Wagner, and later Martha McKay. By the mid-1970s his drug use began to take a toll. In later years alcoholism also became a problem and he made three unsuccessful attempts at drying out. Satty passed away on January 31, 1982 at the age of 42, falling from one of his ladders while inebriated.
Years after his death, some of his earlier visionary work was commissioned for illustrating Terence McKenna’s The Archaic Revival, published in 1991 by Harper San Francisco. Visions of Frisco, a surreal depiction of San Francisco’s early history, was begun in the mid-1970s. It was eventually published by Regent Press of Berkeley in 2008, largely through the efforts of Walter Medeiros.
famous empty sky
love his work. as a collage/mixedmedia artist, i really appreciate his complexity and coherence.
Antje Clarke
Fantastic, I love Satty’s work. I have three of his originals, but would love to buy some more.
Success to the Gallery.
Cheers Antje
dan castello
Beautiful.