Los Angeles: Gemini G.E.L. 1974. First edition. Limited to 50 copies, with 10 artist’s proofs, signed by Berman on the title-page. “Berman’s most important and compelling works, and the ones that secure his reputation as an artist of lasting significance, are the so-called Verifax collages. The Verifax was an early form of copier machine, developed by Kodak from research begun in the 1940s. It employed a wet-print process of making copies, using a disposable negative and treated paper. The Verifax was technologically out-dated when Berman began to use it to make art in 1964. It is worth pointing out that, while many since the 1960s have tried and many have failed, Berman is to date the only artist to have used a copier machine to make substantial and unequivocally successful works of art. The Verifax was an ideal medium for his developed aesthetic. . . . The principal image in Berman’s Verifax collages is almost always the same: a right hand holds up an AM-FM transistor radio, which is about the size of a cigarette pack. The face of the radio is flat, coincident to the surface of the collage, and a photograph has been inserted in the place where its speaker would be. . . . . the Verifax collages have the feel of being instant artifacts (some are even embellished with Hebrew letters). But there is a difference. These are not artifacts from history . . . but artifacts from the immediate present, as copier machines, transistor radios, and the encyclopedic list of pictures makes plain. Their form and content are seamless: mechanically made pictures (the Verifax copies) of an electronic machine (the transistor radio) that transmits machine-made pictures (the internal photographs). . . . As with his earlier attempts to create visual equivalents of jazz, sounds are transformed into pictures by the depiction of a transistor radio pulling visual images from the aether and broadcasting them to viewers. The Verifax collages comprise a body of work extraordinary for its dense cohesion and its resonant simplicity. . . In Berman’s oeuvre, the tradition of the artist-as-copyist finds its most sophisticated pronouncement in the Verifax collages, works of art made with a copier machine.” Christopher Knight, in Support The Revolution: Wallace Berman (Amsterdam: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1992), pp. 42-47. A very fine copy of this stunning portfolio.