Bruce Conner at SFMOMA
minded souls in high school, Conner and his coterie got up to art-world mischief early on when they staged a mock heist of an Albert Pinkham Ryder painting from a local museum.
Conner was 20 when he went to New York for the first time, found the painter Robert Motherwell’s name in the phone book and wrangled an invitation to Motherwell’s apartment for conversation and a glass of wine.
Bruce and Jean Sandstedt met when they were art students at the University of Nebraska. On their first date, they went to see a Spanish-language version of “Robinson Crusoe.”
“Bruce was involved in art all the time,” Jean said. “He tended not to attend classes. He was always in the art building, drawing and making prints.”
The couple married in 1957 and moved to the Bay Area, where McClure and some friends from Lincoln were already living. “I thought it would be an adventure,” said Jean of the West Coast.
They both worked various jobs to sustain themselves as artists — he as a teacher, janitor and manager of an Indian imports shop on Haight Street, she as movie usher and hospital clerk. Each had a studio but rarely shared what they were doing.
“Bruce believed that if you were an artist, you should know if it was good or not,” Jean said.
Although Conner may have been solitary in his work habits, he pursued an active and engaged life in the Bay Area’s fast-changing art scene. He was a co-founder (with Jay DeFeo, Wallace Berman, Joan Brown and others) of the Rat Bastard Protective Association. He helped get the Batman Gallery going and started making experimental films in the late 1950s.
One of them, the foundfootage collage “A Movie,” set to a lush Ottorino Respighi score, remains one of his most enduring works.
The Conners, who had one son, moved to Mexico and Massachusetts, the latter for a somewhat ill-starred alliance with Timothy Leary and a quasi-commune in which the women had no voting rights. They always found their way back to San Francisco.
Jean ticked off some of the artists Bruce loved: Rembrandt, Rodin, the pre-Raphaelites, Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst. His musical tastes were similarly broad — chamber music, gospel, punk. Of those bands he photographed at the Mabuhay Gardens and other San Francisco punk clubs, Jean said with a smile, “Bruce liked them best before they got famous.”
“The personality of the artist is a limiting factor,” Conner once said, and often toyed with his own identity. He credited one show of his to “the late Bruce Conner” and tried to attribute another to his friend Dennis Hopper. When he did sign his own work, he often did so on the back of a piece or in a script so small that it could barely be read.
Conner continued making art, even as his physical restrictions mounted. Jean recalled him toiling on a collage on the living room floor, directing herself and several of their artist friends where exactly he wanted things to be.
“When it was finished,” she said, “he had all of us sign it.”