Biography

[Excerpted from an obituary written by Susan Landauer]

Born in Boston in 1932 to Russian-Jewish immigrants, White moved to Los Angeles in 1945 and attended Fairfax High School, where he befriended artist Wallace Berman, often considered the spiritual leader of the Southern California Beats. In his senior year White developed a serious interest in music and met the songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who wrote Elvis Presley’s “You ain’t Nothin’ but a Hound Dog” – contacts that helped land him a position as record librarian at KFWB, one of Los Angeles’s earliest jazz radio stations.
After serving in the Korean War, White abandoned his career in the music industry to become a painter. He studied at the Otis Art Institute on a fellowship in the mid-1950’s and took a storefront studio in Venice Beach on Ocean Avenue, which became a gathering place for artists Berman, Edward Kienholz, and John Altoon.
Venice was then Los Angeles's counterpart to the North Beach Beat scene, and White began writing poetry and became a regular at Lawrence Lipton’s Sunday evening “literary salons,” where poetry readings and wide-ranging discussions were attended by poets such as Stuart Perkoff, Bruce Boyd, Tony Scibella, and Charlie Foster. White became one of the figures on which Lipton based his best-selling book, The Holy Barbarians (1958), which became a primer for aspiring Beatniks.
In 1957, White was invited to read and record his poetry at Ruth Witt-Diamont’s San Francisco Poetry Center. The rhythms of his jazz-inspired work caught the attention of Kenneth Rexroth and Kenneth Patchen, who invited him to read with them in North Beach. Perhaps the height of White’s poetry career was his participation in a series of ground-breaking jazz-poetry performances in 1957 at the Los Angeles Jazz Concert Hall, where he, Rexroth, and Patchen read poetry accompanied by Shorty Roger’s jazz band.
Although White continued throughout his life to write poetry, publishing sporadically, he concentrated on painting and printmaking. White died in 2003 at the age of 70. This will be the first piece by the artist to enter San Jose Museum of Art’s permanent collection. (SJMA Collections Committee, 2005)

Under the mentorship of Willem de Kooning in the early 1960s Saul White became convinced of the permanent viability of expressive abstraction, regardless of the dictates of fashion. In the ensuing decades, even though painting itself became anachronistic in the eyes of the art world, White continued to explore his chosen style of abstraction. This exhibition presented a small group of White’s work from 1980s and ’90s, selected in conjunction with the artist shortly before his death in May 2003. (Saul White, A Memorial Exhibition, SJMA, 2003)

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