The Inner Eye

This is an original lithograph published and printed in 1968. Published by East Totem West out of Mill Valley, CA, it was printed by Orbit Graphic Arts. Wilfried Sätty was a German-born San Francisco-based visual artist who was one of the best-known poster artists of the late 1960s psychedelic era. His works have been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the National Museum, Warsaw.

East Totem West was a short-lived (1967-1968) poster and notecard publisher whose artists tried to recreate the LSD Experience in print – an enviable task but about 40 significant psychedelic posters by founders Joe and Irene McHugh, Sätty, Nick Nickolds, John Hamilton (who famously pained Janis Joplin’s Porsche), Phil Bird and others were the result. These posters were sold in dedicated poster stores like the Print Mint in Berkeley and San Francisco’s Postermat and eagerly bought up by teenagers papering their walls.

Sätty was born Wilfried Podreich in 1939 in Bremen, Germany. He spoke about the war-torn city where he grew up as "a big surrealistic playground." He was schooled in architecture, engineering, and design, and spent some time working in Brasilia before he settled in San Francisco in the early 60's. It was the threshold of the psychedelic era, and Sätty soon began making posters, developing an extraordinary collage technique that brought together both the technological and surreal sides of his background.

One of the better-known poster artists when the psychedelic era was in full flower in the 60's. Sätty was associated and hung with the other San Francisco rock poster artists in particular David Singer with whom he collaborated on a few rock posters. For a few years, his life was one long summer of love. He staged huge parties where socialites and hippies mingled, in a subterranean basement of the 2042 Powell Street that he had converted into a surreal environment that resembled a cross between Mrs. Havisham's parlor in "Great Expectations" and something out of Luna Park.