On horror as art
The art of Burt Shonberg
"Anthony Usher. Thief, usurer, merchant of flesh. Bernard Usher. Swindler, forger, jewel thief, drug addict. Francis Usher. Professional assassin. Vivian Usher. Blackmailer, harlot, murderess. She died in a madhouse. Captain David Usher. Smuggler, slave trader, mass murderer."
The whereabouts of the paintings Burt Shonberg did for Roger Corman's House of Usher are unknown. Roger Corman says that all of them were stolen from his office shortly after the film completed production. Vincent Price may have owned one or two of them, but there were none in his collection at the time of his death.
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Burt Shonberg was born in Revere, Massachusetts, in 1933. He liked horror movies, monsters, and drawing. Drafted into the Army at the age of 18, he spent two years in the military. His superiors noticed that he had an artistic bent, and ordered him to paint a mural for the base dining hall. His work was so exceptional, everyone encouraged him to become an artist when he mustered out. After his service, Shonberg studied art at the Boston Musuem of Fine Arts and the Los Angeles Art Center for three years.
Shonberg likely suffered from borderline schizophrenia. He began self-medicating with uppers and downers in the early 1950s. Hampton Fancher, the screenwriter of Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049, was his close friend and roommate during this time and even then was aware of Shonberg's mental health issues.
Shonberg continued to indulge his love of aliens, horror, monster movies, the occult, and UFOs, and his work reflected these interests. His art was Modernist and very indebted to the "stained glass fragmentism" of Pablo Picasso. His parents supported him with a monthly stipend, but he earned income through portraiture and commercial graphic design. He also drew covers for magazines like Fantastic Science Fiction Stories and Famous Monsters of Filmland.
In 1957, Shonberg met artist/occultist Marjorie Cameron. She was a budding artist who married rocket scientist Jack Parsons. Parsons was a follower of Thelema, the religion created by self-avowed Satanist Aleister Crowley. Parsons died in a workplace explosion in 1952. Mentally unstable, Cameron became a Thelemite after his death, and was friends with movie industry people like Kenneth Anger, Curtis Harrington, Dean Stockwell, and Dennis Hopper. Shonberg and Cameron began a relationship. They moved to a ranch outside Joshua Tree, studied Ufology together, and tried to set up an artists' colony. Cameron introduced Shonberg to peyote, which he began to use regularly. They broke up in 1959, but remained friends.
In 1958, Shonberg, singer Doug Myres, and writer George Clayton Johnson opened the Café Frankenstein in Laguna Beach. It became one of the country's most famous beatnik bars. Shonberg did a Picasso-like painting of the Frankenstein monster for the exterior.
Even as Shonberg created his most public work of art, he was moving away from the Cubism of Picasso and very strongly toward the Fauvism of Henri Matisse.
Roger Corman became acquainted with Shonberg and his work while making A Bucket of Blood in May 1959. Corman and writer Charles Griffith had gone up and down Sunset Blvd. one night to various beatnik coffee houses to soak up atmosphere and get ideas for the film. Corman spotted Shonberg's work in some of these, and looked him up. Corman almost immediately realized Shonberg had mental health and drug addiction issues, but loved his art.
It's not exactly clear when Corman asked Shonberg to paint the pictures for House of Usher, but it was most likely in mid-November 1959. Shonberg had only eight weeks to finish them before filming began on January 18, 1960, at Amco Studios.
Shonberg first experimented with LSD in mid-1960. Dr. Oscar Janiger, an experimental psychiatrist and professor at the University of California, Irvine, was engaged in an eight-year study of the effects of LSD on creativity. For Shonberg, it was a breakthrough. He later said he saw a hidden structure in the universe in which Time was the only reality, and humanity was hypnotized by the "Dream Reality".
Shonberg underwent a second LSD trip under Janiger's supervision in March 1961, during which he believed he saw giants dancing in the sky. Shonberg began taking LSD on his own, and came to believe he was a living embodiment of Baphomet -- a divine androgyne, the unification of light and darkness, male and female, the macro and micro.
Corman commissioned another painting from Shonberg for the 1962 film The Premature Burial.
In the mid-1960s, Shonberg traveled extensively in France and Spain. His companion at the time was Valerie Porter, former lover of Picasso and Man Ray. Shonberg met with Salvador Dali in Ibiza and the elderly surrealist gave him a painting.
Shonberg had the only exhibition of his life in 1967 at Gallery Contemporary in Los Angeles. Not a single piece sold. George Greif, who organized the exhibit, had also organized The Beatles' first U.S. tour. Ringo Starr collected several of Shonberg's paintings in the late 1960s, as did actress Sally Kellerman.
By this time, Shonberg had moved strongly into psychedelic art, his paintings rife with sphinxes, Aztec warriors, movie monsters, lunar landscapes, Atlantis, and pagan and occult figures.
Sadly, Burt Shonberg's mental health deteriorated so badly by the early 1970s that he largely ceased to function. Shonberg now believed his real identity was that of Jack Bond, intergalactic agent from the Time Coast, Fourth Dimension. Shonberg stopped painting to work primarily in pen and ink. He drew everywhere -- napkins, newspapers, store receipts, sheet music. His work consists of cryptic, conspiratorial phrases which, from a distance, form the helmeted figure of humanoid alien Jack Bond.
Shonberg's last major work was the cover illustration for the 1976 album Spirit of '76 by the band Spirit.
In the last year of his life, Shonberg was at work on a book titled Out Here. It was filled with his writings, memoirs, and new art. It was never published, but Shonberg began work on a sequel, Out Here II. It was unfinished at the time of his dead on September 16, 1977. He was just 44 years old.
Shonberg gave half the illustrations from Out Here to a friend and the other half to his roommate, painter Ledru Shoopman Baker III. Baker also was given a large amount of Shonberg's commercial illustrations and unfinished drawings, and several draft sketches from Out Here II.
Author Spencer Kansa, who previously wrote a biography of Margaret Cameron, published a bio of Burt Shonberg in December 2017.
Despite his stellar reputation among art critics and collectors, none of Shonberg's work has been collected by museums. All of it is in private hands. The Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magick in Cleveland, Ohio, organized the first public exhibition of Shonberg's work since 1967. The show opened in August 2021, and ends in November.
