Explore the Era

Delve into the postwar Los Angeles art world in this online archive, which provides additional material related to the exhibitions on view at the Getty Center. Learn about hipsters and happenings, and the venues across the city where all the action took place through images from the archives and first-hand accounts with the artists.

Pam Beale

Pam Beale

Pam Beale, 1971, Allan McCollum. Dyed and bleached canvas with caulk. 103 x 103 in. Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, Gift of Anne V. Champ, 1974. © Allan McCollum

One of a series of “constructed” paintings made in the early 1970s, Pam Beale consists of three-inch-wide strips of torn and dyed canvas held together with industrial caulking. In this work, McCollum deconstructed and examined the means and materials of making a painting. But despite its emphasis on process, Pam Beale also has a figurative element: the artist placed the unevenly dyed strips in such a way that darker, more saturated pieces form a large diamond pattern. The work’s title, an homage to a cocktail waitress at the Troubadour nightclub in West Hollywood, near where the artist worked, adds another layer of meaning.

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  • Allan McCollum with "Constructed Paintings"

    Allan McCollum with one of his Constructed Paintings in his studio on Brooks Avenue in Venice, California, ca. 1971. Photo by Frank J. Thomas. Courtesy of the Frank J. Thomas Archives

  • Allan McCollum assembles Constructed Paintings

    Allan McCollum assembles a group of his Constructed Paintings in his studio at Brooks Avenue and Speedway in Venice, California, 1972. Image courtesy of and © Allan McCollum