cultural symposium series at Provincetown (Forum 49). He also became involved with the so-called the Irascibles, a group of controversial artists led by Robert Motherwell and other prominent Abstract Expressionists who boycotted a modern art exhibit sponsored by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Kees, though quite active in protesting the conservative jury's selection in his Nation column, became estranged with both the cultural scene in New York and many of its figures. Although invited to pose in Life magazine's famous group photo of the Irascible 18, Kees and his wife Ann had already driven cross-country to San Francisco in late 1950. San Francisco Renaissance and disappearance Renting an apartment in nearby Point Richmond, California, Kees took a job at the Langley Porter Psychiatric Clinic at the University of California, San Francisco, where he worked alongside the anthropologist Gregory Bateson making data films for a study of nonverbal communication. Kees also continued to paint and write poems—and use his film camera to make experimental movies, as well as scoring a film, The Adventures of Jimmy (1951), directed by the poet and filmmaker James Broughton. From 1951 to 1954, Kees also made many new contacts as well as renewed old ones in the San Francisco Renaissance, among them Kenneth Rexroth and the founder of City Lights Bookstore, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Kees's poetry, however, did not embrace the kind dionysiac character and became increasingly sardonic and confessional in poems such as "1926." Restless and often estranged from his poetry, Kees began to collaborate with the jazz clarinetist Bob Helm in 1953 on ballads and torch songs (some written for the singer Ketty Lester). Helm had played with Lu Watters and Turk Murphy, both prominent figures in the San Francisco's New Orleans Revival Movement, which Kees preferred over Bebop. Despite how much energy he put into this venture, which he hoped would bring him some commercial success, Kees found time to produce a fine series of collages. He even had two more one-man shows in New York as well as shows in San Francisco, including an impressive installation at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor. He had also exchanged his film camera for a still camera, and began taking the photographs that would illustrate the book Nonverbal Communication (Berkeley:, University of California Press, 1956), which he wrote with Jurgen Ruesch, psychiatrist and semiotician. Many of these photographs would qualify as art photography as