Wilfried Sätty and the Cosmic Bicycle

Listen, Sleep, Dream (1967), a poster by Wilfried Sätty.

Continuing the San Francisco theme, twenty years ago today I was visiting the city myself. Jay Babcock, Richard Pleuger and I had driven up there from Los Angeles to research some of the history of Wilfried Sätty (1939–1982), master collagist, psychedelic poster artist, record cover designer and book illustrator. We spent 24 hours driving around the Bay area: up to Petaluma, where we met Sätty’s friend and artistic collaborator, David Singer, a fine collage artist in his own right; then to Berkeley to talk to Walter Medeiros, custodian of the Sätty estate and one of the leading scholars of the psychedelic poster scene; finally to North Beach, where we found the house in Powell Street where Sätty was living and working in the 1960s and 70s.

Sätty and an unknown woman in the artist’s basement pad/studio at Powell Street, a place he referred to as “the North Beach U-boat”. This was from a magazine feature that I photographed at David Singer’s house. I forget the source, it may have been from a 1972 TIME article about San Francisco artists.

The trip was a dizzying experience, but fascinating for what it revealed about Sätty and his work. From David Singer we learned, among other things, that the name “Sätty” had been chosen as a pseudonym by the former Wilfried Podriech for its echo of Ancient Egypt; the pronunciation, when you pay attention to the umlaut, conjures the word “Seti”. Walter Medeiros showed us stacks of original Sätty artwork, including all the collages intended for the artist’s final book, Visions of Frisco, a visionary history of the city which was published in 2007. Medeiros later emailed me a few additional notes which I have filed somewhere, correcting my guesswork in the piece I’d written about Sätty for Strange Attractor Journal earlier in 2005. At the time the only information I had to hand was the scant biographical information in Sätty’s books, the interview that he gave to Man, Myth and Magic in 1970, and a few web pages devoted to the artist which someone had put together in the late 1990s then never updated.

The house at 2143 Powell Street as it was in 2005. Those trees have grown considerably in the past 20 years.

All of which had me looking last week to see whether Sätty had a more substantial web presence today. Happily, he does, with this dedicated site maintained by Ryan Medeiros, Walter’s son. I’m saddened to read that Walter Medeiros is no longer with us but it’s gratifying to discover his family continuing his efforts to preserve Sätty’s legacy. Sätty is often reduced to a minor figure in the history of San Francisco poster art but he was more than this: a book creator as well as an illustrator, and a collage artist who extended Max Ernst’s engraving collage into new dimensions, using printing presses to multiply and overprint his assemblages.

Sätty’s first book, The Cosmic Bicycle, was published in 1971 by Straight Arrow Books, the publishing imprint of Rolling Stone magazine. This is a collection of collages, a few of them in colour, in which the compositions have a distinctly Surrealist quality. Sätty’s subsequent work downplayed the wild juxtapositions in favour of greater compositional control. His subsequent collection, Time Zone (1973), is a wordless “novel” in the manner of Max Ernst’s collage books.

The Cosmic Bicycle is also the title of a 4-minute animated film which brings to life some of Sätty’s pictures from the book. I linked to a copy of this years ago but that link is now defunct so here it is again, an odd little film which runs the artwork through a solarisation process then moves pieces of them around to the accompaniment of an electronic score. (As usual with Vimeo today, you have to log in to see it.) The film was directed by Les Goldman, an animation producer who was mentioned here recently in relation to The Hangman (1964), a short film he made with Paul Julian. Goldman’s own film seems almost amateurish in comparison but the music is by Moog pioneers Paul Beaver and Bernie Krause, credited here as Parasound Inc. Beaver and Krause’s Gandharva album features one of Sätty’s finest cover designs, with title lettering by David Singer. The film score isn’t the duo’s finest by any means—I’d even describe it as rather annoying—but it’s good to see their Sätty connection reinforced.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The original Gandharva
• The Occult Explosion
• Wilfried Sätty album covers
• Nature Boy: Jesper Ryom and Wilfried Sätty
• Wilfried Sätty: Artist of the occult
• Illustrating Poe #4: Wilfried Sätty