|
San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism
by Peter Frank
Few exhibitions are as fascinating as those which argue that
someone or something has been left out of the history books, and is (over)due for reconsideration. Russian women avant-gardists,
African-American impressionists, Argentinian constructivists, Czech surrealists, Japanese neo-dadaists, the plein-air schools
of southern Indiana and northern Ontario, these are gold mines
for historians, museums, collectors, and an easily bored public. If the stuff is good, and if the historical research is
thorough, nothing is as gratifying as shows and books about
movements rescued from obscurity. |
 |
A case in point is the in-depth look at the abstract- expressionist school that emerged, and stuck around for quite a while, in San Francisco. Organized by Berkeley-native Susan
Landauer, |
"The San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism"
reclaims a place on the art-historical timeline for Bay Area-based gestural
abstractionists of the 1940s and 1950s. More importantly, the show
demonstrates that abstract expressionists in San Francisco did
not labor in the shadow of their New York counterparts: Although
related, the Californians' work was emphatically distinct
|
Coming west to teach at the California School of Fine Arts for
brief periods, Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt did have a marked
impact. But theirs was modified, and even overriden, by the
continuing example of
|

|
CSFA stalwart Clyfford Still. Landauer
begins her survey with several, choice Still canvases--choice
not simply for their gnarled, fiery beauty but for the
characteristics they imparted to the work of younger Bay Area
painters. Even those artists who did not study under Still
were influenced by his passionate viewpoint and turbid style. The School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco
Art Institute) was the crucible in which the Bay Area version of
action painting was forged (with the local Museum of Modern Art
helpfully stirring the cauldron) |
 |
Had she her druthers, Landauer would have presented a comprehensive overview of San Francisco's postwar gestural
abstraction. She does that in her exhaustive (but by no means
exhausting) feast of a catalogue, but a museum's walls are more
restrictive than a book's pages--especially when the work in
question is heroic in size and scale. As shown in the Laguna
Museum's gracious but restricted (and possibly doomed) galleries,
the exhibition had to be limited to a few, powerful examples by
each artist--and, then, by only 21 of the many artists cited in
the catalogue. (The show will be slightly smaller in its San
Francisco incarnation.) The brooding, lambent fields of Edward
Corbett, Frank Lobdell's gigantic kernels sprouting in air, Sam
Francis' blobs and cells of luminous color, Jay di Feo's alluvial
plains of grayish lava, the angry undulations stirred up by
Sonia Gechtoff, and of course the lines and washes that send the
eye skipping and bumping across Richard Diebenkorn's quasi-
landscapes, all these gobbled up major wall space while churning
the optic nerve into a froth. |
 |
Not all the San Franciscans created immense fields of angry,
clotted pigment. The earlier work in particular, tends to be
easel-sized and clearly post-cubist and post-surrealist. The
paintings of the late-1940s Sausalito Six (including a tyro
Diebenkorn), for instance, maintain a compactness which in some
cases amplifies the struggle to volcanic levels, and
in other cases enervates it. Most impressive among the Marin-
based sextet is James Budd Dixon, the group's senior and most
accomplished member, whose deeply, brilliantly hued swirls and
vertical accents implode Pollock's explosive formula. |
Dixon's contained, muscular painting is one of the show's
most exciting rediscoveries. Also especially welcome back from
obscurity are the vibrant, intricate, and masterfully
orchestrated formal interplays of James Kelly, Jack Jefferson's
similarly rhythmic but much darker and sealike paintings, and the
immense, roiling organisms of Charles Strong. But all
the artists Landauer features in her show, and nearly all she
discusses in her landmark text, are worthy of renewed attention.
After all, they helped build, develop, and modify a movement and
sensibility that more than holds its own in the annals of
American art. |
|