Bay Area Abstraction: 1945 - 1965

bay area abstraction:1945 - 1965Jack jeffersonfrank lobdellcharles strong

november 11 - December 31, 2011

COVER

JACK JEFFERSON

EMBARCADERO #4, 1962, Oil on canvas, 74 X 60"

BACK COVER

FRANK LOBDELL

3 OCTOBER 1963, 1963, Oil on canvas, 48 X 44"

Published on the occasion of the exhibition,

Bay Area Abstraction: 1945 - 1965

Jack Jefferson | Frank Lobdell | Charles Strong

November 11 - December 31, 2011

Curated by David Eichholtz in collaboration with Charles Strong.

Photography: Richard Barger

Price $20.00

ISBN: 978-0-9839312-1-8

Catalogue © David Richard Contemporary, LLC, Santa Fe

Jack Jefferson paintings courtesy and © Martin Foundation

Frank Lobdell paintings courtesy Frank Lobdell and Hackett | Mill, San Francisco, CA

Charles Strong paintings courtesy artist

Edward Dugmore courtesy Manny Silverman Gallery, Los Angeles

Hassel Smith works on paper courtesy Newspace, Los Angeles

Hassel Smith painting courtesy Charles Strong

Robert McChesney paintings © Robert McChesney, Courtesy Charles Strong

Madeleine Dimond © Martin Foundation, courtesy Charles Strong

Lilly Fenichel courtesy artist

Deborah Remington paintings courtesy and © Deborah W. Remington Charitable Trust

Lynn Faus, James Kelly and Michael Kennedy paintings courtesy Charles Strong

David Richard Contemporary and David Eichholtz thank Charles Strong for his

enthusiasm and passion for Abstract Expression and his commitment to the

work and legacy of his Bay Area mentors and colleagues. We also

thank Charles Strong, Lilly Fenichel, Mary Fuller McChesney, Margaret Mathews-Berenson

John Obrecht and Francis Mill for their invaluable conversations, insights

and stories as well as their support and encouragement for this exhibition.

bay area abstraction: 1945 - 1965Jack jeffersonfrank lobdellcharles strong

november 11 - December 31, 2011

CHARLES STRONG, ROCKY MT. QUARTET, 1960, Oil on canvas, 77 X 73"

130 Lincoln Avenue, Suite D, Santa Fe, NM 87501 | p (505) 983-9555 | f (505) 983-1284

www.DavidRichardContemporary.com | [email protected]

GalleRy DirectoRs

David Eichholtz & Richard Barger

Abstract Expressionism domi-nated Post-War American art and was explored in parallel on the two coasts—in New York with notable figures such as Pollock, DeKooning, Motherwell, and Newman, and in San Francisco with painters such as Diebenkorn, Francis, Bischoff, Dugmore, Smith, Jefferson and Lobdell. There were striking simi-larities in the work produced from the two cities in terms of thick ges-tural brushstrokes laid down in bold colors on large canvases. Yet, dif-ferences emerged: the Bay Area abstractionists were less influenced by European tendencies of the time and more by Asian culture, the ethos of the Beat generation, and the expansiveness and new social freedom of California life. Clyfford Still, a common link between the two coasts, was a forerunner of pure abstraction. By the mid-1940s, Still had emptied his paintings of any representation and the titles he gave them were entirely non-refer-ential, consisting only of dates and series numbers. Still taught at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute), where he had a profound influence on many of the students, including Jack Jefferson and Frank Lobdell.

Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of this period at the California School of Fine Arts was the mutual collegial respect between teacher and student, a respect more like that between junior and senior or peer and mentor. These artists shared

a personal chemistry and a pas-sion both, intellectual and visceral for abstract art, and that common cause held the San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism together even more tightly than its New York counterpart.

Jack Jefferson’s quiet and under-stated demeanor, combined with his bold and purposeful approach to art, defined his career and sub-sequent interactions with students when he taught at the California School of Fine Arts. Normally dark and moody, his artwork changed with each new studio location, and the titles he gave them reflected various addresses in and around San Francisco. Frank Lobdell was influenced by primitive cultures and symbols; as a result, his early work, while gestural and abstract, fre-quently incorporated biomorphic shapes and figuration. The unique symbolic “language” that he devel-oped became his way of expressing frustration with man’s inhumanity towards man and the atrocities of war.

Early in his career, while still living in his native Colorado, Charles Strong had the good fortune to meet and interact with Clyfford Still. Strong did not study with Still directly when he came to the CSFA, but under his students Jefferson and Lobdell. He was also influenced by another prominent presence at the school, Hassel Smith. Throughout his oeu-vre Strong demonstrates an unwav-ering commitment to Abstract

BAY AREA ABSTRACTION: 1945-1965BY DAVID EICHHOLTZ

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Expressionism. He developed a dis-tinctive gritty, textured approach that transitioned through the 1960s from dark neutralized colors in blocky abstractions suggesting the rock formations of Colorado’s mountains to fluid, vibrantly color-ful compositions more evocative of volcanic eruptions, hot lava, and deep geological journeys to the earth’s inner core.

Hassel Smith, Robert McChesney, Edward Dugmore—who also stud-ied with Still and was a contem-porary of Jefferson & Lobdell during his time in San Francisco—and several of Smith’s students, including Madeleine Dimond, Lilly Fenichel, James Kelly and Deborah Remington, were notable Bay Area painters of the postwar era in addi-tion to being friends and colleagues

of Jefferson, Lobdell and Strong. Lynn Faus and Michael Kennedy, a couple of younger Bay Area Abstractionists, studied at the San Francisco Art Institute with Jack Jefferson.

The California School of Fine Arts is the common link among all of these artists, demonstrating an artistic lin-eage across three generations that started with Clyfford Still and was perpetuated by Jefferson, Lobdell, Smith, and Strong. Each of them developed an individual style and method of painting that allowed them to have their own voice among the common artistic training and language they all shared in San Francisco.

Santa FeOctober 2011

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San Francisco is a painting town. Only New York, among American art cities, rivals the “City by the Bay” in its passion for and commit-ment to painting. But in New York, long the center of the international art market, audience taste and reception has often obscured the discourse among painters. In San Francisco, although that discourse may frequently be abjured by seri-ous artists, artists still take that dis-course seriously – with little market influence to dissuade them.

However true this is now, it was a given a half-century ago. The medium – and act – of painting embodied a craft, a world view, a way of life and a philosophical redoubt for San Francisco artists working in the postwar period, to an extent that, arguably, even their compeers across the continent did not feel – and of which New Yorkers were little mindful. The very defer-ral to New York that San Francisco showed in its self-conscious land’s-end provincialism – a mixture of admiration and defiance – allowed New York painting to penetrate the Bay Area discourse (mostly through curatorial efforts in local museums), but hardly allowed California to return the favor. Indeed, when San Francisco painters moved to New York, or even showed there, they tended to be absorbed quickly into the community, their origins quickly obscured – and the distinct particu-lars of their common practice dissi-pated in the increasing hubbub of a

burgeoning international scene.

Clyfford Still moved east in the early 1950s, and fought the main-stream from the moment he got there – making the mistake of think-ing he could beat the mainstream at its own game, doing for New York what his pal Mark Rothko had done for San Francisco. Out west, Still could be genuinely ornery and profoundly influential; New York, by contrast, demanded a strategy to one’s orneriness, and Still never got the hang of it. To be sure, his high-dudgeon attitude – not to mention the clear, high vision of his paint-ing – gained him grudging respect in his new home. But Still’s erstwhile students and acolytes, less self-important, blended in better.

As importantly, they left behind a painting scene in San Francisco that continued to flourish, and to main-tain the values Still (and others) had nurtured there. Indeed, one of the things that irked Still so when he moved to the east coast was that, although unacknowledged, the San Francisco School could clearly lay prior claim to at least one of the New York School’s lead-ing principles: the “Americanness” of Abstract Expressionism. In New York, the practical and intellectual models were primarily European. Artistic idioms such as Cubism and Surrealism comprised the backbone of Abstract Expressionist practice in New York; and, while an expan-sive, supposedly ahistorical physical

MEANINGFUL MARKS: THREE PAINTERS AND THE SAN FRANCISCO SCHOOL OF ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISMBY PETER FRANK

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gesture informed such practice – its breadth amplified by the example of pre-war mural painting – it was clearly sourced in Western picto-rial tradition. California Ab Ex was sourced in a western pictorialism of a different kind – one rooted in the American west, devoid of any artistic practice that hadn’t at least been modified to deal with the dra-matic vastness and variety of North America’s terrain.

At least as importantly, so many of the San Francisco School’s partici-pants were themselves products of Manifest Destiny, born and raised either on the Pacific Coast or in the rugged interior. Their sense of space was no more European than was their sense of history or soci-ety or even myth. (Interestingly, the foreign-born New York artists to whom they most responded – Gorky, Rothko, Newman – were also natives of Russian and Caucasian “big-sky country;” and the one central-European artist-teacher to leave a profound mark on Bay Area abstractionists, Hans Hofmann, was a vigorous proponent of landscape painting and responsiveness to available space.) Clyfford Still was himself a native of North Dakota.

The three artists featured in this exhibition, all of whom were more or less directly influenced by Still, are likewise sons of the interior – Jack Jefferson from South Dakota, Charles Strong from Colorado, Frank Lobdell from Kansas City. True, the artists included in the pendant

exhibition do not all hail from the American heartland, but all, having studied in and around the California School of Fine Arts (renamed the San Francisco Art Institute in 1961) – that is, at the epicenter of Bay Area gestural abstraction – clearly evince an embrace of this open, American sensibility. (Historian Barbara Novak identified an earlier American land-scape tendency as manifesting a “still small voice.” Perhaps the sen-sibility at issue here manifested a “large Still voice.”)

This is not to say that Jefferson, Lobdell or Strong entirely aban-dons compositional premedita-tion. Lobdell is noted for his quasi- notational approach, an urgent but playful sense of line, contour, and even inferred symbol that in some ways mirrors the pictographic prac-tices prevalent in New York in years immediately after the War (around the time Lobdell himself emerged in San Francisco). But one of the qualities that most distinguishes Lobdell’s art from that of 1940s Rothko, Newman or Gottlieb is his use of such markings as incipi-ent topographies rather than as incipient alphabets. Lobdell’s lines – abetted by his palette, luminous even at its earthiest – seem to map space rather than document idea or speech.

Similarly, there is a topographic impulse to Jefferson’s tumultuous paintings. Their elements abut one another aggressively, but come together on the canvas with an

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inner logic – a pictorial logic, to be sure, but also a geo-logic, a feeling of land masses and tectonic plates moving coherently, however vio-lently, in response to gravity. Their inferred motion is as ponderous as it is massive, and they seem to be shaping one another with their mutual inexorability. If Lobdell’s col-ors breathe organic vitality into his marks, Jefferson’s endow his with optical, and by inference, physical depth. Most of all, Jefferson’s entire aesthetic proposes a sense of a fluid earth, a globe – and by exten-sion cosmos – that evolves accord-ing to its own natural principles. If anything, this is a kind of Abstract Naturalism.

Charles Strong’s style relates closely to that of his friend Jefferson, and also displays earmarks of Still’s. (Still was Jefferson’s teacher; he had a more fleeting acquaintance with, if still significant impact on, Strong.) Strong captures a very different, much more rapid sense of time and flow. If Jefferson’s elements grind into one another, Strong’s claw at and consume each other, their flux far more vivid and pressing, more chemical than solid. In effect, while Jefferson seems to slow down Still’s crackling patterns, Strong seems to hasten them, investing them with an organic animation – a bio-logic, as opposed to Jefferson’s geo-logic (or, if you would, Still’s eco-logic), time. There is a bio-logic time oper-ating in Lobdell’s work as well, but his formal vocabulary maintains a complexity and intricacy that, you

could say, puts it on a higher biolog-ical order than Strong’s. If Lobdell formulates creatures, Strong con-jures the amino soup from which they emerge – and Jefferson the earthbound processes that forge amino molecules out of carbon in the first place.

What all three painters shared – and shared at least to a certain extent with Still (not to mention their col-leagues represented in the pen-dant show) – was a devotion to a vision that required them to work out beyond themselves. Unlike the New York School (and, for that mat-ter, the European informel paint-ers), the social and artistic attitudes prevailing among San Francisco School painters never emphasized individual career achievement, much less fetishize the superficial distinctions of style. They stressed instead a painter’s discovery of fun-damental conditions, existential or (as evidenced by these three paint-ers) elemental. Gerald Nordland has noted that the painters gathered at the California School of Fine Arts sought “an unpretentious, paint-erly, ‘American’ look.” Intellectually unpretentious, this look was any-thing but unprepossessing. It was, however, extremely painterly – and profoundly American.

Los AngelesNovember 2011

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JACK JEFFERSON

CHESTNUT STREET UNTITLTED, 1947, Oil on canvas, 22 x 28" © Martin Foundation

JACK JEFFERSON

CHESTNUT STREET #2, 1948, Oil on canvas, 32 x 36" © Martin Foundation

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JACK JEFFERSON

CHESTNUT STREET #3, 1949, Oil on canvas, 26 x 33" © Martin Foundation

JACK JEFFERSON

JACKSON STREET #1A, 1951, Oil on canvas, 40 X 70" © Martin Foundation

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JACK JEFFERSON

MISSION STREET #3, 1954, Oil on canvas, 64 X 48" © Martin Foundation

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JACK JEFFERSON

UNTITLED, 1948, Oil on canvas, 46 X 48" © Martin Foundation

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JACK JEFFERSON

JACKSON STREET #4, 1960, Oil on canvas, 71 1/2 X 50 1/2" © Martin Foundation

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JACK JEFFERSON

EMBARCADERO #4, 1962, Oil on canvas, 74 X 60" © Martin Foundation

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JACK JEFFERSON

FRONT STREET HARRINGTON #3, 1964, Oil on canvas, 55 3/4 X 62 1/2" © Martin Foundation

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JACK JEFFERSON

MISSION STREET #12, 1957, Oil on canvas, 72 X 42" © Martin Foundation

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FRANK LOBDELL


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FRANK LOBDELL

17 FEB 1948, 1948, Oil on canvas, 35 3/4 X 29 3/4"

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FRANK LOBDELL

20 JANUARY 1948, 1948, Oil on canvas, 39 1/2 X 31 3/4"

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FRANK LOBDELL

DRAWING II, 1963, Mixed media on paper, 11 3/4 X 17 3/4"

FRANK LOBDELL

DRAWING A, 1964, Mixed media on paper, 17 X 13"

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FRANK LOBDELL


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CHARLES STRONG

ROCKY MT. QUARTET, 1960, Oil on canvas, 77 X 73"

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CHARLES STRONG

HARRISON ST. NOCTURNE (SWIRL), 1963, Oil on canvas, 70 1/4 X 69"

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CHARLES STRONG

COLORADO, 1962, Oil on canvas, 61 X 48 3/4"

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CHARLES STRONG

WHARF ROAD: MARIN VERDE, 1965, Oil on canvas, 47 1/2 X 31 1/2"

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CHARLES STRONG

WHARF ROAD, 1966, Oil on canvas, 91 1/4 X 132 1/2"

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CHARLES STRONG

BOLINAS, 1965, Oil on canvas, 68 1/2 X 68 1/2"

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CHARLES STRONG

HARRISON STREET UNTITLED (FOR CALVIN), 1962, Mixed media on paper, 25 1/2 X 30 1/2"

CHARLES STRONG

BOLINAS NOCTURNE, 1965, Acrylic on paper, 13 3/4 X 19 3/4"

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EDWARD DUGMORE

ASPEN QUARTET, 1961, Oil on canvas, 69 1/2 X 85 5/8"

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HASSEL SMITH

UNTITLED (PAIR), 1961, Ink on paper, 23 X 18"

HASSEL SMITH

UNTITLED (PAIR), 1961, Ink on paper, 23 X 18"

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HASSEL SMITH

#15, 1961, Oil on canvas, 68 X 48

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LILLY FENICHEL

UNTITLED III, 1959, Oil on canvas, 42 1/2 X 62 1/2"

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LILLY FENICHEL

OCHRE RED AND BLUE, 1950, Oil on canvas, 51 1/2 X 68"

LILLY FENICHEL

UNTITLED I, 1962, Oil on canvas, 48 X 36"

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LILLY FENICHEL

UNTITLED II, 1963, Oil on canvas, 47 1/4 X 31 1/2"

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DEBORAH REMINGTON

UNTITLED, 1949, Oil on canvas, 24 X 19 1/2" © Deborah W. Remington Charitable Trust

DEBORAH REMINGTON

UNTITLED, 1949, Oil on canvas, 28 1/4 X 37 3/4" © Deborah W. Remington Charitable Trust

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DEBORAH REMINGTON

UNTITLED, 1951, Oil on canvas, 46 X 38" © Deborah W. Remington Charitable Trust

DEBORAH REMINGTON

UNTITLED, 1952, Oil on canvas, 26 1/4 X 30" © Deborah W. Remington Charitable Trust

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DEBORAH REMINGTON

21 THOUSAND LEAGUES UNDER, 1955, Color litho, 21 1/4 X 15" © Deborah W. Remington Charitable Trust

DEBORAH REMINGTON

GASLIGHT, 1953, Color litho, 21 1/2 X 14 3/4" © Deborah W. Remington Charitable Trust

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JAMES KELLY

LANDSCAPE, 1952, Oil on canvas, 24 X 30"

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LYNN FAUS

UNTITLED, 1965, Oil on canvas, 62 1/2 X 60"

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MICHAEL KENNEDY

UNTITLED, 1960, Oil on canvas, 67 X 68"

130 Lincoln Avenue, Suite D, Santa Fe, NM 87501 | p (505) 983-9555 | f (505) 983-1284

www.DavidRichardContemporary.com | [email protected]

Bay Area Abstraction: 1945 - 1965

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