San Francisco and the Second Wave

San Francisco and the Second Wave The Blair Collection of Bay Area Abstract Expressionism, 1945-1965

When:  June 26, 2007 – Aug. 19, 2007
Where:  Fig Garden, Duncan and Hallowell Galleries
Conversation with the Artist: Thu., July 12, 7:00 pm

“Painting is an adventure. To be an adventurer you have to accept a certain mystery about the ends of things. Otherwise, why in the hell bother to do it if you know what it’s going to look like in advance? You’d be too bored if it’s too much according to plan, too much pre-knowledge, too much prescience. I think there was a lot of intense personal curiosity similar to that at the school.”

-Edward Corbett

The Blair Collection of Bay Area Abstract Expressionism showcases paintings that emerged from the second wave of creative life that marked San Francisco’s painting renaissance following the return of American soldiers from the fronts of World War II. This time of postwar ferment and postwar change was charged with an acknowledgement that pre-World War II art forms had lost their power to express or contain their emotional responses to a very different post-war culture. The paintings displayed in this exhibition presents examples of the work created on the West Coast between 1945 and 1965 - this work was informed by an allusion to and recognition of the vastness of California’s elemental physical landscape and the interior landscape of those who had survived the trauma of the recent war. Many of the works are organic in form and have a sense of having been set free from formal considerations. Color is often dark and applied in heavy strokes far removed in style from the Parisian school of painting.

By the late 40s and early 50s, America’s vanguard artists had broken their ties with Europe and were launched on their own path. Their powerful and innovative works became defined as Abstract Expressionism – an article from Magazine of Art, 1953 declared, “Not only in New York, but in Chicago, on the West Coast and even in Boston, artists seem drawn towards a common but elusive stylistic core.” If there were indeed such a thing as the San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism, its birthplace would have been the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) where, between 1945 and 1950, Douglas MacAgy took over as Director of CSFA, immediately making sweeping changes to both the faculty and the educational philosophy. Most of the faculty was replaced with artists who not only experimented with radically new ideas but also encouraged their students to do the same. At this same time there was an influx of ex-G.I.’s into the CSFA’s student body. Changes at the school, along with marked departures in social attitudes of the post-World War II era, combined to reinforce an age that was supportive of radical exploration and passionate expression in the arts.

The high point of Abstract Expressionism in the Bay Area fell between the years 1947 and 1953. Influenced in part by the San Francisco presence of artist Clyfford Still, who as a teacher at CSFA had close contacts with the New York abstract artists. There are those who believe that “He, perhaps, more than any other figure helped to unlearn the subservient attitude that previous generations of Americans had toward European art.” Another prophetic figure from the first generation of New York Abstract Expressionists who taught at CSFA for two summer sessions was Mark Rothko, and who, along with Ad Reinhardt, contributed to the ongoing development of the students. Other important instructors were artists such as Robert Howard, David Park, Clay Spohn, Hassel Smith, Edward Corbett and Richard Diebenkorn.

The forty-five paintings of this exhibition are representative of the many other paintings that comprise the Blair Collection of San Francisco Abstract Expressionism, 1945-1965. The artists included in the Fresno Art Museum exhibition are: William Henry Brown, Charles Safford, John Saccaro, John Grillo, Joan Brown, Jerrold Ballaine, Raimonds Staprans, Bernice Bing, Paul Wonner, Adiele Landis, Horst Trave, Erle Loran, Siegrist Lundy, Bart Perry, Boyd Allen, George Abend, Lily Fenichel, Keith Metzler, Robert Arneson, Karl Kasten, Edward Corbett, Lucille Marie Bichler Paris, Ann Morency, Edward Dugmore, Sonya Rapoport, George Abend, Ernest Briggs, Walter Kuhlman, Clay Spohn, Richard Nelson, George Stillman, Hassel Smith, Fred Martin, Arthur Okamura, John Haley, Nell Sinton, Juan Sandoval, Emiko Nakano, James Budd Dixon, Roy DeForest, Geoffrey Bowman, Robert Downs, Robert Kaess, Ruth Armer, and Thomas Akawie.

Many of the works now on exhibition were first exhibited in the San Francisco Art Association Artist Members’ Exhibition held at San Francisco’s California Palace of the Legion of Honor in 1958 and were collected by The Art Bank. The Art Bank of the SFAA was established with funds from a Rockefeller Foundation Grant in 1958 with the express purpose of making the creative work of West Coast artists available to the widest possible audience. By 1964 the Art Bank had grown to include 185 West Coast artists and had published a number of catalogues that included images of work and biographies of each artist. The Art Bank organized these works into traveling exhibitions consisting of twelve to fourteen works that presented a particular style, theme or concern vital to art of the period. By the 1990s the paintings and sculpture were deaccessioned after having been stored for thirty years in the bell tower of the San Francisco Art Institute. Most of the work was purchased by a single dealer, who, at a later date would convince collector George Y. Blair of the unique opportunity to build an immediate collection of the “Second Wave” by acquiring many of these same paintings.

The Crocker Art Museum first presented the Blair Collection in the 2004 exhibition San Francisco and the Second Wave. This first showing was followed by the Laguna Art Museum’s exhibition of 2005, While Pollack Was Sleeping, also selected from the Blair Collection. And now the Fresno Art Museum’s Board of Trustees, through the courtesy and generosity of LaVona J. and George Y. Blair, is pleased to have the opportunity to present a third exhibition drawn from the same collection, San Francisco and the Second Wave 1945-1965, to the patrons and audience of the Fresno Art Museum.