Santa Monica metal collage artist Tony Berlant dies at 85

Tony Berlant, an artist who spent decades calling Santa Monica home, died Tuesday following a long illness with Alzheimer's disease. He was 85 years old. His longtime gallery, L.A. Louver, confirmed the death of the figure widely considered a seminal influence on the West Coast Pop Art movement of the 1960s.

Berlant developed a distinct style by constructing large-scale collages from shards of printed tin rather than paper. He secured these metal pieces using thousands of shiny nails instead of traditional glue. The works frequently incorporated vintage metal street signs and advertisements. In his later years, Berlant printed personal photographs onto the metal surfaces, adding autobiographical narrative structures to the colorful compositions.

The artist's recent public appearances included a fall 2018 exhibition at Hollywood’s Kohn Gallery. That show featured cut metal collages that blended assemblage, Pop Art, and abstraction. Berlant also created metal cube sculptures that observers described as quilt-like. Beyond his own studio practice, he served as a curator and collector of ancient Southwest pottery and Paleolithic stone objects.

He co-curated two major museum exhibitions during his career. These included “First Sculpture: Handaxe to Figure Stone” at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and “Decoding Mimbres Painting: Ancient Ceramics of the American Southwest” at LACMA. Berlant was also a founding member of the Mimbres Foundation, an archaeological conservancy dedicated to studying and preserving ancient Native American pottery.

In the 1960s, Berlant was a central figure in the Ferus Gallery art scene in Los Angeles. This group, known as the “Cool School,” included artists such as Ed Moses, Robert Irwin, Ed Ruscha, and Larry Bell. The gallery served as a hub for experimentation that helped connect the city's disparate art communities. Berlant participated in “Pop Art USA” in 1963, one of the earliest museum exhibitions of the movement, held at the Oakland Art Museum. He showed his work alongside Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and Claes Oldenburg.

In a 2018 interview, Berlant defended the creative spirit of Los Angeles against claims that commercial focus had eroded its artistic roots. He stated that New York friends often viewed the 1960s as a lost golden moment. “But I think L.A. is [still that],” he said. “It never left. I just assume that there’s all kinds of fantastic artists working that I’ve never heard of because they pop up here and there, and I see them, and I’m just really excited by that.”

Berlant’s work is held in the permanent collections of LACMA, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, and the Art Institute of Chicago. He is survived by his wife, Helen Berlant; his daughter, comedian Kate Berlant; and his brother, Jeff Berlant.