Alma Thomas Paintings

ALMA THOMAS BIOGRAPHY

Alma Woodsey Thomas (1891 – 1978)

Artist Alma Thomas stands out as a prominent figure in American art, known for her lively abstract paintings. Her distinctive approach to color and form earned her acclaim as both an artist and a trailblazing African American woman. This biography delves into the life, creations, and lasting impact of Alma Thomas and her remarkable artwork.

Early Life and Education

Born in 1891 in Columbus, Georgia, Alma Thomas was the oldest of four children. Her family moved to Washington D.C. in 1907. Their relocation was motivated by racial violence in Georgia and educational opportunities in the capital. Thomas attended Armstrong Technical High School where her interest in the arts began. She later pursued her passion for art by enrolling at Howard University, becoming the first graduate of their fine arts program in 1924. This marked the beginning of her journey into the world of art, setting the stage for a groundbreaking career.

Teaching Career and Artistic Development

After college, Alma Thomas took a position teaching art at Shaw Junior High School in Washington D.C., where she worked for 35 years. Her teaching career did not hinder her artistic pursuits but rather enriched them. Thomas continued her education, receiving a Master’s degree in art education from Columbia University in 1934. She later attended American University, where she studied abstract expressionism and color field painting.

Artistic Style and Themes

Alma Thomas is best known for her abstract paintings. Her artwork is often associated with the Washington Color School, a movement that emphasized the use of pure color. She retired from teaching in 1960 and then focused solely on her art. Her work from this period uses bright expressive colors arranged in circular and mosaic-like patterns that mimic natural forms and landscapes. The paintings are not only a celebration of color and composition but also reflect Thomas’s lifelong interest in the natural world and its beauty.

Alma Thomas Paintings and Exhibitions

Alma Thomas’s art career took a significant turn in 1963 when she had her first solo exhibition at Howard University. She was 71 at the time, proving that her artistic voice only grew stronger with age. Her work received great acclaim, leading to more exhibitions and a notable 1972 solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. This exhibition made her the first black woman to have a solo show at the Whitney.

Thomas’s paintings, Red Azaleas Singing and Dancing Rock and Roll Music are prime examples of her ability to transform her observations of the world into vibrant, rhythmic compositions. Her use of small, distinct brushstrokes creates a sense of movement and vitality.

Legacy and Influence

After her death in 1978, her artwork continued to gain recognition. Her legacy is one of perseverance, innovation, and inspiration. It speaks to embracing one’s vision and voice, regardless of the obstacles. Today, her works are in major museums across the country, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

In recent years, interest in Alma Thomas’s paintings has resurged. Her artwork is a pioneering contribution to abstract art and the celebration of life and nature. As a result, Thomas is a significant figure in African American art and an important artist in American modernism.

Summary

Alma Thomas’s evolution from an enthusiastic art student to a renowned artist showcases her incredible talent, determination, and steadfast commitment. Her vibrant and inspiring paintings resonate with young artists and art enthusiasts alike, providing a rich and colorful view of the world. By creating groundbreaking works, Alma Thomas not only shattered barriers but also paved the way for artists of color, solidifying her legacy in the annals of American art history.

Roland Petersen Biography

Roland Petersen (born 1926)

An American painter and printmaker, Roland Petersen paintings have a unique and compelling style. He is of American descent, but was born in Endelave, Denmark in 1926. He has spent more than five decades creating works of art mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area. His most notable paintings are probably the Picnic Series, an annual affair held at the University of California, Davis. The earliest of this series of paintings was first displayed to the public in 1960 at the Staempfli Gallery in New York.

Education

Artist Roland Petersen earned his Bachelor and Master degrees at the University of California at Berkeley. Graduating in 1950, he then pursued further art studies at the School of Fine Arts in Provincetown under Hans Hofmann. He then moved to Europe for six months to study printmaking at the Atelier 17 studio in Paris. This was under the guidance of Stanley William Hayter, founder of the atelier and one of the most renowned printmakers in the 20th century.

In the summer of 1951, Petersen returned to Provincetown to continue his education with Hofmann. Hans Hofmann was very influential in Petersen’s works. You can especially see Hofmann’s influence in Petersen’s works from the early 1950s.

Roland Petersen Art Career

Roland Petersen is not only celebrated as a painter. He is also recognized as one of the professors who pioneered the department of ascent art at UC Davis in 1956. He led the department for more than three decades, recruiting distinguished artists to teach as well. Some of his recruits were Robert Arneson, Manuel Neri, and Wayne Thiebaud.

He also taught printmaking at the University of California Berkeley. At the University of California Davis he taught both painting and printmaking. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship.

Roland Petersen Paintings

Before finding his home at UC Davis, Petersen was an art history professor at the Washington State University. During this time, Roland Petersen paintings reflected a lot of Hofmann’s methodologies. Most of his paintings were abstracts filled with bright colors and dynamic shapes.

When he started teaching at UCD, his painting style shifted from complete Abstract Expressionism to also painting figures. He no longer only painted colors and textures but started to combine these with figures and landscapes.

Soon afterwards, he developed a penchant for the picnic, which will be his obsession for most of his painting career and his trademark as an artist. He was often quoted as saying:

“I could take the tabletop, throw it into the landscape, and then I’d set my figures around it. The picnic seemed to be the best excuse to bring the still life, the figure, and the landscape together. It seemed to be a natural kind of path for me to follow.”

In the beginning, Roland Petersen paintings used mostly oil as a preferred medium. But, he developed allergies in 1970 and switched to acrylic paint.

Printmaking

The style of printmaking that Petersen had was very discernible and unique. He dabbled in color intaglio, a set of techniques that involved engraving, dry point and etching. Intaglio comes from the Italian word intagliare, which means to engrave.

Roland Petersen paintings use this technique to produce a variety of vivid and gaudy colors and textures. His brilliant use of colors creates images that have the illusion of being a photo negative. His creative technique with patterns diminishes color intensity, raising the relief of areas that are not very textured.

Petersen had a knack for abstracting forms, using complementary colors on them, and reducing them to basic but still discernible geometric forms.

Bay Area Figurative Movement

Just as Roland Petersen was starting his career in the arts in the 1950s, the Bay Area Figurative Movement was also starting to form. Also called the Bay Area Figuration or the Bay Area Figurative School, this movement is composed of a group of young artists from the San Francisco Bay Area who chose to depart from Abstract Expressionism, which was the dominant style during the period. The group favored the formerly popular style of figuration.

The movement was divided into three generations, namely the First Generation, the Bridge Generation, and the Second Generation. Roland Petersen was one of the more prominent artists of the Bridge Generation. He was joined by his contemporaries Theophilus Brown, John Hultberg, Frank Lobdell, Nathan Oliveira, and Paul John Wonner.

Roland Petersen Recent Appearances

March 2010 marked the 50th year of Petersen’s career as a painter. This accomplishment was honored in a major show called Roland Petersen: 50 Years of Painting. The retrospective was held at the Monterey Museum of Art in Monterey, California. Petersen himself was the guest of honor at the event. He was accompanied by his wife, his daughter, and the renowned photographer Caryl Ritter.

In 2016, Petersen’s gallery in Burlingame California, The Studio Shop Gallery, hosted a one man show called In Perspective. This exhibit ran from the 22nd of September to the 15th of October in 2017, which was called Six Decades of Painting. Shortly after the commemorative event, a bound book containing Peterson’s major works was published with the same title.

Antonio Bandeira Biography (1922 – 1967)

Antonio Bandeira was a Brazilian artist born in 1922 in Fortaleza, Brazil. He was among the top Brazilian abstract artists of the 1950s and 1960s. He captivated collectors with his vibrant Lapis Lazuli blue and grid-like geometrical compositions. Antonio Bandeira is one of the ten great Brazilian painters and the greatest of his generation. His paintings have been in many exhibitions and are in private collections and museums.

As an artist Bandeira was unique amidst all the abstraction in vogue in Brazil in the 1950s and 1960s.  His artwork uses two opposing pairs: 1) Structural grids & informalism/tachisme; and 2) Figuration & abstractionism. Many of his “abstract” paintings have titles such as, “City,” “View” or “Tree”. It’s also important to note that Antonio Bandeira was a master colorist.

Early Years

He began painting as a self-taught artist. In the first half of the 1940s, while still in his native state of Ceará, he was very active in the introduction of modernist ideas. In 1945 he moved to Rio de Janeiro and in 1946 to Paris, where he spent most of the rest of his life. He painted with Mário Baratta (1915-1983), among others, and helped to create the Cultural Center of Fine Arts – CCBA, which gave rise to the Sociedade Cearense de Artes Pláticas – SCAP in 1943.

In Paris, Antonio Bandeira studied at the Ecole Supérieure de Beaux-Arts and at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. In these early years he painted landscapes and portraits, combining elements of Surrealism and Expressionism. He later adopted a gestural abstraction that maintained its links with the outside world through analogies established in poetic titles.

In the early days of his time in France (1947 – 1948), he participated in two important events: the Salon d’Automne and the Salon d’Art Libre. Antonio Bandeira was the only Brazilian artist to move to Paris a year after the end of WWII and to integrate with tachiste artists. He also formed friendships with fellow artists Camille Bryen (1907 – 1977) and Wols (1913 – 1951). The three artists formed the Banbryols Group (a combination of their surnames) which lasted from 1949 to 1951.

Return To Brazil

Bandeira returned to Brazil in 1951. There he settled in the studio of his sculptor friend José Pedrosa (1915-2002), where the artist Milton Dacosta (1915-1988) also worked. In 1952, he created a mural for the Institute of Architects of Brazil – IAB / SP, in São Paulo. He returned to Paris in 1954 due to the Fiat Award, obtained at the 2nd International Biennial of São Paulo, but still exhibited in Brazil.

In 1957, during his first solo exhibition at New York City’s Gallery 75, the local press described the cosmopolitan Fortaleza-born artist as “an abstract expressionist from Paris, born in Brazil.” In his lifetime, the artist participated in the Venice Biennale (1952, 1960 and 1964) and at the São Paulo Bienal (1951, 1953, 1955, 1959 and 1961.) Bandeira designed the official poster for the 1953 edition, its second iteration.

Then in 1958 he made a panel for the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. And in 1961 he created a very large triptych for the University of Ceará. In his large-scale paintings, such as Big City Illuminated (1953; Rio de Janeiro, Mus. N. B.A.), and in his equally characteristic tiny gouaches, he directed the dynamic energy of dots, lines, blots and drops of color with a centripetal force. His technique organized what otherwise could have been random gestures into webs of regular and sometimes geometrically based structures.

Artist Antonio Bandeira remained in Europe until 1959. During this time he traveled through England and Belgium, where, in 1958, he held a panel for the Palais des Beaux-Arts. Upon returning to Brazil he has was very active and participated in several important exhibitions. At the same time he exhibited in Paris, Munich, Verona, London and New York. Certainly Bandeira had collectors abroad, but his largest market was in Brazil.

Antonio Bandeira Painting Style

Antonio Bandeira had a very diversified painting style. He worked with gouache, watercolor and oil paint, and experimented with natural paint extracted from tropical fruit, such as the cashew apple. On some of his paintings he glued beads on the surface of the canvas. He employed non-traditional media such as paper clay, papier-maché, Styrofoam and jute. He explored anything he had at arm’s length to stamp the canvas to achieve unique marks and textures.

In 1961, Antonio Bandeira edited an album of his poems and lithographs while João Siqueira made a short film about his work. Bandeira returned to Paris in 1965, where he remained until his death. Antonio Bandeira died in Paris on October 1967 at the age of 45.

Milton Resnick Biography (1917 – 2004)

Rachmiel (Milton) Resnick was born in Bratslav, Ukraine, to two wealthy Jewish parents. The city of Bratslav was terrorized by the gangs in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. This forced the Resnick family to emigrate to America in 1922, when Milton Resnick was only 5 years old. The family moved to Brooklyn, New York, and Resnick spent the next ten years there. It was here where a teacher nicknamed him “Milton,” a name that stuck.

Milton Resnick Art Training

Resnick’s father opposed him studying art, so he left home to pursue it. He began to study commercial art at Pratt Institute. At the recommendation of a professor, Milton Resnick transferred to the American Artists School in 1933 and graduated in 1937. He worked as an elevator boy during his time here, to pay for his tuition. During this time he met Willem de Kooning, who would become a long-time friend and member of the New York art scene.

In 1939, Milton Resnick enrolled in the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). He worked in the Easel and Mural Division of the WPA. It was here he met many other artists, such as John Graham and Arshile Gorky.

Military Service

He was then drafted into the army in 1940 and discharged in 1945 after serving in many countries including Iceland and Germany. When drafted, he left some of his art with De Kooning for safekeeping. But much of the Milton Resnick art created before joining the army was lost or destroyed.

Milton Resnick then traveled to France in 1946, where he spent two years painting in Paris as part of the G.I. Bill. The city was a hub for post-war French art. Here, Milton Resnick observed several artists, including Matisse and Picasso. Milton Resnick’s art studio was next door to abstract painter and photographer Wols. He also spent time with French sculptors Giacometti, Gruber, and Brâncuşi.

Milton Resnick Painting Styles

Returning to New York City in 1949, Milton Resnick became a founding member of “The Club,” a collection of abstract impressionists. This group included his longtime friend De Kooning, as well as other notable artists. Including Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. Milton Resnick art was shown as part of the 9th Street Art Exhibition in 1951 curated by the collective. But, due to some unfortunate circumstances, he did not have a solo show until 1955. Because of this, a lot of his earlier artwork was not well acknowledged, and his career took off much later.

Milton Resnick art was often seen as being part of the second wave of abstract expressionism. Partly because of his time spent serving in the military and in France, while his contemporaries built their profiles in New York. His work only became popular around the same time as public focus turned to minimalism and pop art trends. This shifting nature of public interest meant that his work was not quite as popular as the art from the first wave abstract impressionists. This lack of acknowledgment was something that Milton Resnick allegedly struggled with.

Early Milton Resnick artwork used somewhat aggressive, interlocking forms, considered muscular and chunky. By the early 1960s, this had shifted to looser images that appeared less anxious. His art transitioned into almost completely monochrome canvases, covered with thick layers of paint. Larger paintings by Milton Resnick could weigh up to hundreds of pounds, from all the paint. Some of these layered, monochrome paintings foreshadowed the minimalist era. It was during this time that he began to experiment with larger artwork. The painting – Swan (1961) was on a 25 foot-long canvas.

Marriage to Pat Passlof

Resnick married Pat Passlof around this time, in 1961. Passlof was a student of De Kooning’s in the 1940s and some say De Kooning introduced the pair. Their marriage lasted 44 years, up until the death of Milton Resnick. The couple never had children but did have a godson.

Resnick bought an abandoned synagogue in 1976, which he used as his studio. The space was unique, as many artists at the time did not have such a large studio space. This sizable space allowed Resnick to create his larger artwork. The studio was on the lower East Side, near the studio (another abandoned synagogue, bought by the couple in 1963) of his wife.

Over the course of his life, artist Milton Resnick had 25 solo art shows in New York, and others throughout the country. He also taught in several different schools throughout the country in the 1970s and 80s, including the New York Studio School.

In the 1980s, Milton Resnick art included abstract figures. Usually people with no notable features, and sometimes also repeating cross motifs. There was minimal symmetry or order in his art, and it often featured no specific narrative or ideas. Many of his later paintings were on mold-made paper. He also created over 140 small works on stiff cardboard during this period. Throughout his lifetime, he created over 8,000 pieces of artwork. Many of those works are still in existence today. Resnick also became interested in written poetry in the 1990s. The poetry was a main focus of his, up until the time of his death.

The artist ended his own life on March 12, 2004. He was outlived by his wife, Passlof, who died in 2011.

John Grillo Biography

John Grillo (1917 – 2014)

Both in his art and his life, John Grillo was a bit of a nomad. Unlike the majority of his contemporary arts who lived in a couple of cities, Grillo often changed location. Each change usually brought about a change of subject or style in his artwork. From the beginning, Grillo’s work used pure color with subtleties of fluid paint manipulation.

As a mature artist, John Grillo worked in more than six places before spending his final working years in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. He was born in a small town in this state but went to Connecticut in 1935 to study fine art at the Hartford Academy. During this time, Grilo was influenced by the Wadsworth Antheneum to make portraits his specialization. He also chose to depict scenes from the Depression showing the dispossessed and poor. The year 1939 saw Grillo paint a large mural of a family at dinner time with empty plates, having no food to eat. This content was reminiscent of Honoré Daumier.

After the U.S. became a part of World War II, John Grillo signed up to the Navy, and continued to draw and paint near Okinawa. He also spent time in Shanghai among Buddhist temples and Asian art. After the war, Grillo spent two years studying at the then California School of Fine Arts (San Francisco Art Institute). There, his style of abstract painting matured and flourished under the director Douglas MacAgy.

Grillo’s Teachers

Among many great teachers, Grillo took classes from Mark Rothko, David Park, Hassel Smith, Elmer Bischoff, and Clay Spohn. Spohn had spent some time in the 1920s with surrealists in Paris.  Clay Spohn was important in the development of John Grillo’s artwork. In fact, Grillo said that Spohn was the most influential of his teachers.

Among the artists associated with abstract expressionism of the late 1940s, Grillo is often credited for being the most gestural at the CSFA. But, his work was based more in Surrealist automatism than his contemporaries. Breton described automatism as a technique like psychoanalytic free association. The idea being to relax the conscious mind’s control so the artist can express archetypical images from the subconscious. Other artists influenced by this were André Masson and Joan Miró.

For the two years that Grillo spent at the CSFA, the spontaneity of automatist emphasis continued. But, he also imbued it with ebullient color and lyricism. We can see this in the many gouaches and watercolor art he created on paper while there. John Grillo demonstrated that one can paint in the style of Abstract Expressionism without embracing its “confrontation with the canvas” ethos. To summarize, John Grillo’s paintings both took part and deviated from Bay Area Abstract Expressionism. In that he emphasized a lighter touch in comparison to his peers.

East Coast Move

John Grillo was not one to follow the crowd. When MacAgy was becoming more recognized around 1948, John Grillo moved to the East Coast. He intended to study with Hans Hofmann during the summers in Provincetown and New York. Grillo may have read or heard about Hofmann’s lectures ‘The Search for the Real,’ hence the move. Grillo and Hofmann had much in common. Particularly their thoughts of color modulation, pictorial structure and bold gestures.

Fifteen years before Grillo arrived on the East Coast, Hofmann worked at UC Berkeley and taught the likes of Erle Loran and Worth Ryder. In the mid-60s, it was Grillo’s turn to teach. He worked in the Department of Art Practice before moving to work at the University of Massachusetts in 1967. He taught there at Amherst until his retirement in 1991.

John Grillo Art

For most of his time at the University of Massachusetts, Grillo painted geometric configurations, in which you could pick out landscape elements. From 1973, his work took a leap towards figuration. This new work was also influenced by expressionism like Max Beckmann. For a short while, he worked in black and white too.

Grillo didn’t stay away from using color for long though. The early 80s saw Grillo bring color back in a dramatic way. He still focused on figures and circus performers but they became much less expressionist. In fact, they were more in tune with late modernist figures seen in France or by Picasso and Balthus. His late work with figures centered on the portrayal of women, with fuller figures, who were often a central focus in his multi-figure compositions. In these Grillo artworks, the women are “voluptuous”. This term, however, is not only useful in describing his subjects’ Rubenesque attributes, but also the palette he chose. The palette’s ebullient lushness came out of the abstractions Grillo painted before he turned towards figural paintings.

When he retired in 1991, John Grillo relocated to Wellfleet. This move saw his works gradually return to become more abstract. In fact, his later paintings were reminiscent of his preoccupations in the latter years of the 1940s. The later works still showed Grillo’s light tough and color generosity that became hallmarks of his work. John Grillo died at the age of 97.

Gene Davis Artist Biography

Gene Davis (1920 – 1985)

Gene Davis, the artist, was a leader in American art in the 20th Century. He was instrumental in helping establish Washington, D.C. as a contemporary art center. Additionally, he had a significant role nationally and internationally in color abstraction. A movement that was prominent from the 1960s onward.

Davis was born in the capital and attended school there. Later he worked in sports writing and as a White House correspondent before pursuing his art career. In his early writing career, he covered the presidential administrations of both Harry Truman and Franklin D. Roosevelt. He even partnered with President Truman in poker games.

Art Education

With no formal art training, he taught himself by visiting the art galleries and museums in New York. He also visited the art institutions in Washington, particularly the Phillips Collection. He also benefited from the friendly guidance of his counterpart, Jacob Kainen, an art curator and artist. He had his first art studio in Scott Circle in his apartment. Later on, he had a dedicated studio which was on Pennsylvania Avenue.

The fact that Davis did not come from an academic background was a blessing for him. It meant that he felt unlimited in what he could create, compared with the traditional orientation through art schools. His first drawings and paintings show his improvisation. They also portrayed the artistic influences of Arshile Gorky, the American abstract artist, and Paul Klee, a Swiss painter.

His color choices are characteristic of his spontaneous preferences. This is evident in his stripe paintings created in his later years. Gene Davis paintings have a calculated look, but the stripe work was not devised by formula or theories. He often said that he was like a Jazz musician playing by ear, or rather painting by eye.

Art critics acknowledged Gene Davis as a leader in the Color School in Washington during the 1960s. This was a group of painters in Washington loosely connected by creating abstract compositions on canvas with acrylic color. Barbara Rose described the work of the Washington Color Painters as the primacy of color for abstract painting. Other members of this group were Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis.

Gene Davis Paintings

Gene Davis’s first painting of vertical stripes is from 1958. It was 12 x 8 inches, had pink, violet and yellow uneven stripes that change regularly in their width. Davis believed that vertical stripes meant you could explore the color relationship better. He stated that stripes in this direction were a simple way of dividing a canvas.

In contrast to other artists at the time, artist Gene Davis tried out different complex schemes that can be viewed for extended periods. He believed viewers of paintings should be able to spend time looking at how color works across a painting. He thought that by looking at one color, you are able to understand the meaning of the painting. Davis said that his work with stripes didn’t simply outline the color importance, but also spoke about color intervals, those music-like, rhythmical effects that colors can have within an art composition. Gene Davis stripe paintings span over 27 years. He was an artist that was versatile, working with many media and formats.

Davis explored his ideas with stripes varying in their proportions and size. One of his paintings included Masonite panels in irregular shapes all embedded with gravel and rocks. In another painting, he covered a comic strip from a Peanuts cartoon with white and blue stripes. Later in the 1960s, his larger-scale works included stripe patterns in complex sequences and rhythms. One of his biggest works is the South Mall Project, a mural created for the New York State Capitol in 1969. On the other end of the scale, he painted some micro-paintings that were less than two inches square! Often, these micro-paintings were hung in a group on a wall.

Davis had an unorthodox approach to life. This is reflected in Gene Davis paintings as they do not follow a particular sequence. He said that he goes back to concepts that he played within his past, exploring the concept and idea even as far as twenty years later. He does this as if there has been very little time between its initial thought and his present work. For this reason, many works that are similar may have been painted decades apart.

One particularly famous painting of Gene Davis is his 1964 “Black Grey Beat”. This painting reinforces the eponymous musical components. There are pairs of black and grey stripes that alternate and repeat the whole way across the canvas. They are recognizable despite other colors being substituted in the canvas, breaking the pattern of grey and black with sharp, contrasting colors.

In 1966, David started teaching at the Corcoran School of Art. He also became a permanent faculty member there too.

As for his largest painting created, in 1972, Davis’s masterpiece is Franklin’s Footpath. At the time, this was the world’s largest piece of art. It consisted of colorful painted stripes in the street outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He also painted Niagara, which is the largest painting in the world (43,680 feet squared). Niagara is in a Lewiston, NY, parking lot.

Gene Davis passed away on April 6, 1985, in Washington, D.C., his home town.

Kenneth Noland (1924 – 2010)

Kenneth Noland art is composed of abstract paintings with shapes, pure colors and lines. The energy and contrast of his paintings are unique and devoid of reference to the world outside. With his simple and flat compositions, he led the way in the dawn of Minimalism. He influenced many artists and worked with various modes of abstract painting. Karen Wilkin, the art critic, described Kenneth Noland as “one of the great colorists of the 20th century”.

Born in Asheville, NC on April 10, 1924, Kenneth Noland was one of five siblings, all boys. His love of art was from a young age as his father, a physician by trade, was an amateur artist. After a visit to the National Gallery in Washington and viewing Monet’s work, Kenneth fell in love with visual arts and painting at age 14. His father lent him his art materials and his talent grew.

In 1942 Kenneth Noland graduated high school. The U.S. was taking part in World War II and Noland joined the U.S. Air Force as a cryptographer and glider pilot. He spent time in Turkey and Egypt before returning home. He then enrolled at Black Mountain College which was only 20 miles from his childhood home.

This was a school of art that was very experimental and it has an interdisciplinary approach. Notable artists such as John Cade and Willem de Kooning were among its faculty who insisted all students have a complete art education. This included studying easel painting and sculpture alongside musical composition and dance. During his time at Black Mountain College he studied the geometric abstraction and Neo-Platicism art styles of Piet Mondrian and Paul Klee. This came to influence his own artwork.

After two years at Black Mountain College, Kenneth Noland studied in Paris under Ossip Zadkine, the Russian Sculptor. Noland’s first one-man show was in 1949 at the Galerie Raymond Creuze in the city. His exposure to Matisse during this time really affected his ideas surrounding ‘color structure’.

He returned to the U.S. after spending a year in France and began teaching. From 1949 to 1951, he instructed at Washington D.C.’s Institute of Contemporary Art and then moved to Catholic University between 1951 and 1960. From 1952 until 1956, he also taught classes at the Washington Workshop Center for the Arts.

Noland’s time in Washington D.C. allowed him to develop a friendship with Morris Louis, a fellow artist. They shared a style that followed Abstract Expressionism despite the fact that neither was a first-generation Abstract Expressionist artist.

In his personal life, he married his first wife, Cornelia Langer, in 1951 and went on to divorce and marry three times. In 1967, he married his second wife Stephanie Gordon and in 1970, his third, Peggy Schiffer.

Kenneth Noland Art

A huge turning point in Kenneth Noland’s career occurred around in 1953. Clement Greenberg, an art critic, took him and Morris Louis to Helen Frankenthaler’s studio in New York.  Noland saw her unique oil-pouring technique of Mountains and Sea and this inspired him to abandon his abstract expressionist style. He then began a new series: Target Paintings. These were his breakthrough works and were also called Circle Paintings (c.1950s-1960s).

The early 1960s saw Kenneth Noland art explore the relationships of color and, by 1962, he turned to cleaner edges and colored backdrops. He began to use ovoid shapes, which then progressed to his chevron paintings. The visual focal point of his work also changed to become the innermost circles instead of the outer layers.

Kenneth Noland Paintings

The late 1960s saw Noland’s Color Field Painting approach become more reductive while still retaining its boldness. Noland also began using horizontal lines and rectangular canvases, a series he called Stripes (1967-70). In this series, he played with form, scale and color. The compositions were basic with horizontal lines that ran across the width of the canvas.

There was a brief return for Kenneth Noland to chevron paintings in the 70s and 80s. He also experimented with canvases of different shapes and plaid-like patterns. In 1985, he also began teaching again and took a position at Bard College as the Milton Avery Professor of the Arts.

At the turn of the century (c. 1999-2002), Noland started his series of painting Mysteries. In many ways, this was a throwback to his start as a abstract expressionist. He used unprimed canvas and paper with acrylics and painted circular targets. These new target paintings were as bold as his previous ones.

Exhibitions

In 1964, after moving to a farm in Vermont, Noland’s works were displayed alongside other artists in an art exhibition in Los Angeles. Later the same year, he was chosen to partake in “Four Germinal Painters”, a show at the United States Pavillion of the 32nd Venice Biennale. Kenneth Noland’s art was hung alongside works by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Morris Louis. In Vermont, he had a close working relationship with Anthony Caro, the British Sculptor, as well as artist Jules Olitski.

Noland spent much of his later years leading a quiet life in Maine. He continued painting right until his final days. He died from cancer at 85 in 2010. He was survived by his 4th wife Paige Rense, Architectural Digest’s editor in chief, and his two sons and two daughters.

Emerson Woelffer Artist Biography

Emerson Woelffer (1914 – 2003)

In the history of Abstract Expressionism, Emerson Woelffer paintings flow like an undercurrent through the movement. Artist Emerson Woelffer is not as well known as artists like Willem De Kooning and Robert Motherwell, but his contribution to Abstract Expressionism and teaching art is very important. In short, Emerson Woelffer was very important to Abstract Expressionism.

Art Education

Born on the 27th of July, 1914, in Chicago, Illinois, Emerson was encouraged from a young age by his mother, who had a deep appreciation for art. Between 1935 and 1937, Emerson studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, which he left in 1938 to join the WPA Arts Program. During World War II, he served in the Air Force and when his part in the conflict was over, he taught under László Moholy-Nagy at the Chicago Institute of Design. This is when he met his wife Dina.

In 1949, he went on to Black Mountain College in North Carolina. It was the great architect Buckminster Fuller who asked Woelffer to join Black Mountain. Here, Emerson taught with some of the most talented artists and educators of the time. Including, Willem de Kooning, Peter Voulkos, and the two Albers. For the next decade, Emerson taught and lived in Yucatan, Mexico and in Naples, Italy, at Forio d’Ischia. His experience in Lerma, Mexico caused him to commit to the ideals of Abstract Expressionism. This was a mode of thinking that he never gave up. Emerson Woelffer’s dedication to Abstract Expressionism painting sets him apart from other artists. Because, many great Abstract Expressionists gave up the movement for further experimentation.

In Mexico, he was surrounded by Pre-Columbian art and culture. This allowed him to shed the shackles of figurative and European art and Emerson soon shredded the remnants of his traditional arts aesthetic, leaving a surrealistic and subconscious form of expression. As he said himself, “I always work first and think later”. Like most of the artists of this era, Emerson couldn’t fund his art without a regular job, so he worked as a teacher most of his life. This suited him and he was very serious about his role as a pedagogue. Never a dictator or a tyrant in the classroom, he tried to push his students to be true to themselves and to express themselves. In his own words: “… I felt there was a personality that has to come out also of the individual. I don’t want to stifle that in somebody. So I said, ‘Go ahead. Go ahead. I can tell if it has some quality to it. And the feeling of the paint.’ […] You don’t teach anybody to be an artist”.

Teaching Career

From 1954, Emerson Woelffer taught at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. There he met Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell, both of whom would remain friends with Emerson for the rest of their lives. Motherwell was a particular influence on Emerson Woelffer’s painting. Because, both of them found in each other freedom to explore abstraction to its furthest extents.

In 1959, Emerson Woelffer moved to Los Angeles, California. He took a teaching position at Chouinard Art Institute (later the California Institute of Art) in Valencia, California. He taught there until 1973, educating the next generation of expressionists, surrealists, and abstract artists. His students included Joe Goode, Ed Ruscha, and, and Llyn Foulkes. His simple approach to teaching was widely admired and he was very popular with his students. During 1970, Emerson was an artist in house at the Honolulu Museum of Art. In 1974, he took the position of Chair of the Painting Department at the Otis Art Institute in LA, which he held until 1978.

Emerson Woelffer’s career is typical of the abstract and surrealist artists of his day. He was well known in his field but not so much further afield. He avoided becoming a household name like de Kooning and Pollock, which suited him fine. Yet, he was lauded, winning a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation in 1984 and the Francis J. Greenburger Award in 1988. Otis College gave him an Honorary Doctorate Degree, Emerson being without an official degree until this time. He loved Otis College and when he died in 2003, he left his estate to Otis to set up a scholarship fund for up and coming artists.

Emerson Woelffer Paintings

Emerson Woelffer paintings are distinctive and recognizable. They have has bold colors, abstraction, and collages, particularly torn paper collage. A multi-talented artist, Emerson also created sculptures and lithographs. Towards the end of his life, his eyesight began to fail due to macular degeneration. Like Manet, he adapted his art using high contrast white crayon and chalk on black paper.

When he died in 2003, a retrospective was held at CalArts under the title “Emerson Woelffer, a Solo Flight.” He was honored by his students and those who knew him as an important figure his field.

Raymond Parker Biography (1922 – 1990)

An Abstract Expressionist artist of the New York School, Raymond Parker was also an accomplished jazz musician. He was born in South Dakota in 1922 and grew up during the Great Depression which hit South Dakota severely. The landscapes and colors of his homeland were a great influence on his art and music.

Ray Parker was very interested in the implications of art and he played with color field and lyrical abstraction. This included the expanding field of musical expression being discovered in jazz. He was an instrumental part of the post-painterly abstraction movement led and named by Clement Greenberg.

Education

In 1940, Raymond Parker enrolled at the University of Iowa. The War disrupted his studies, as it did for many artists. By 1948 he had earned a Master’s in Fine Arts and went on to teach painting at the University of Minnesota. During this early period, he was heavily influenced by cubism. By the 1950’s, he was one of the leading abstract expressionist artists, associated with heavyweights like Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning. Like many of his less famous contemporaries, Ray Parker had to teach to sustain his art.

There was a rising wave of abstract expressionism art that exploded into popular culture in the 1950’s. Raymond Parker played an important, if not well celebrated role, and there was a fascinating evolution of his art. His early artwork showed a distinctive color style and he decided during the 50’s to refine and focus his work, making them simpler and more powerfully colorful. They are distinctive and instantly recognizable if someone has even a brief familiarity with his artwork.

The improvisational nature of jazz music was inextricable to the improvisational nature of abstract expressionism. The unconventional ways of discovering methods of expression in both fields appealed to Raymond Parker, as it did to great artists like Piet Mondrian and Jackson Pollock. The simplest forms of emotional expression were deeply appealing to Ray Parker, who admired Henri Matisse above most for his use of color and form. The Samuel M. Kootz gallery in New York exhibited Parker’s work during the late 50’s and mid 60’s. His art was exhibited beside some of the greatest artists of the 20th century, like Pablo Picasso, Hans Hoffman and Zao Wou Ki.

Raymond Parker Career

Raymond Parker taught at Hunter College in New York for more than 30 years, from the late 50’s onward. His greatest works come from this period and he is best known for his simple paintings. He taught some of the best artists to come out of Hunter, who remembered him fondly and admired his dedication to art, music and teaching. History books tend to leave Raymond Parker out or include him as a footnote. The shadows cast by the greatest artists of his era are lengthy and hard to escape. But modern post-revisionist historians have worked to place Ray Parker in his rightful place. A position as one of the finest artists of his generation and a considerable influence.

The burst of American abstract expressionism left indelible marks on art history. Ray Parker deserves more recognition for his contributions to this art form. His works are bold, colorful, full of energy and vitality, and always evocative. Using very simple forms, he tried to communicate feeling in the most abstract and direct ways he knew how. Much like the jazz he listened to and played on his trumpet.

Raymond Parker Death

After his death in 1990, there was a Hunter College Memorial of Ray Parker’s Artwork. This memorial included artwork from 1955 up until his death. The New York Times paid tribute to Ray Parker with a flattering article that described the event. His progression from cubism to more radical abstraction was clear to see in the eighteen paintings displayed in the memorial. The essence of 1950’s and 60’s expressionism contained in these works. This ranged from one “big red vertical brushstroke” suspended on a white background, which the New York Times described as “an icon and a specimen”, to a monochrome background daubed with acrylics squeezed straight from the tube. A theme of freedom and possibility always flowed through his artwork.

Perhaps what limited Ray Parker to the occasional reference and footnotes of history (which is better than most ever get) was the absence of real pain and suffering in his works. Great art is often born of great suffering and nowhere is this present in his artwork. Ray Parker was a relatively content man, yet he was still able to channel his feelings into artwork that was popular and sought after. This was probably enough for him, but not enough to propel him into the starry ranks of the greatest artists.

Raymond Parker’s artwork of the late 1970’s and 80’s were not as well received and his great period was behind him by the time of his death. Yet, he had an illustrious career as an art teacher and inspired a generation of budding artists to explore and create. While his influence as an artist was significant, he never became a household name. Nowhere is it recorded that he ever wanted that, so it looks like it worked out well for him. His teaching took him around the United States and he was a guest critic for the Columbia University.

John von Wicht Biography (1888 – 1970)

German-American Abstract Painter | Abstract Expressionist | Mid-Century Modern Art

Early Life and Artistic Foundations

Born in Holstein, Germany in 1888, John von Wicht displayed artistic talent from a young age. His early mentorship under local artist Gerhard Bakenhus introduced him to Renaissance masters and cultivated a deep appreciation for nature. He later apprenticed with master painter F.W. Adels, where he developed foundational skills in oil painting and color theory. By 1907, he had sold his first work, Interior of a Farmhouse. His mother encouraged his artistic pursuits, enrolling him in a private school sponsored by the Grand Duke of Hesse, where he studied calligraphy and classical European art. These early influences—particularly from Dürer and Memling—laid the groundwork for the principles that would later define his abstract expressionist paintings.

Impact of War and Artistic Transformation

World War I interrupted von Wicht’s formal studies. After being wounded and partially paralyzed, he spent his recovery designing books and illustrations. During this period, he discovered the abstract works of Mondrian and Malevich, which profoundly shaped his evolving view of modern art. These influences sparked a shift toward geometric abstraction and modernist symbolism that would define his mature style.

Immigration and Abstract Evolution in America

In 1923, von Wicht emigrated to the United States to escape Germany’s growing economic instability. He settled in New York City, where he initially worked in lithography before moving into stained glass and mosaic design. During this period, his style evolved from naturalism to abstraction, driven by his exposure to abstract art and modernist movements. His breakthrough came in 1937 with a watercolor series titled Force, honoring Juliana Force, the first director of the Whitney Museum of American Art. These works—his first major foray into abstraction—reflected elements of Kandinsky and the spiritual potential of form and color. The Force series received critical acclaim and cemented his place among mid-century modern artists.

Exhibitions, Recognition, and Artistic Community

Von Wicht exhibited at the Whitney Museum in 1941 and later had a successful solo show at the Passedoit Gallery in 1951. He was awarded 12 annual residencies at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, where he engaged with leading artists and composers. This creative environment broadened his thematic range—especially his exploration of music as a visual concept—and deepened the sophistication of his abstract compositions.

Later Years and Mature Style

By the 1950s, von Wicht’s style grew more expressive, with looser brushwork and a dynamic sense of movement. Harbors and maritime scenes became recurring motifs, reflecting his travels and lived experience. His 1954 Passedoit Gallery exhibition interpreted symphonies through abstract visual language, exemplifying the fusion of music and art in his later work. During this time, he gained international attention, exhibiting in Paris, Brussels, and across Europe.

In the 1960s, his abstract expressionist paintings evolved further, shifting from rigid geometry to intuitive, spiritual expressions of form. Seasonal changes, light, and mood became central themes in his late works. While less overtly structured, these paintings retained the bold use of color that characterized his earlier work. Von Wicht had come full circle—drawing once again from nature, as he had in his youth, but now through the lens of a lifetime of abstract exploration.

Legacy and Market

John von Wicht passed away in 1970, but his legacy endures. Today, collectors continue to seek out John von Wicht paintings for sale due to their expressive power, color mastery, and unique place in American modernism. As a German-American abstract painter, his work stands as a bridge between European modernist roots and the thriving postwar American art scene. Whether you’re discovering his work for the first time or seeking John von Wicht abstract art to add to your collection, his paintings offer a compelling glimpse into the evolution of 20th-century abstraction.

Chuang Che Artist Biography

Chuang Che (Born 1934)

Artist Chuang Che was born in Beijing, China in 1934 and grew up in Taiwan. His father, Chuang Shang-Yen, was a scholar, calligrapher and assistant director of the National Palace Museum, in Beijing. As a young child, Che’s father taught him to master calligraphy in the Chinese tradition. This instruction in calligraphy was well before Chuang Che took up painting. But, Chuang Che’s introduction to calligraphy did influence his artwork throughout his career. It taught him the soft brush technique of applying the graceful finesse of “washes” while incorporating the famous techniques of Chinese calligraphy.

Chuang Che Artist Studies

Chuang Che artist training was at the Fine Arts Department at the Taiwan Provincial University (now National Taiwan Normal University) from 1954 to 1957. He joined the “Fifth Moon Group” in 1958 and was one of the primary members of that group.

Chuang Che devoted tremendous energy to the study of painting. This gave him vast knowledge about painting theories and abstract painting. His techniques with abstract landscape paintings are nature’s manifestation of the physical world. Influenced by calligraphy, Chuang’s lines, forms and compositions have spiritual momentum. He uses the paintbrush to lay down fantastic colors and spaces in a rhythmic and ecstatic manner. Chuang Che’s painting compositions include organic drips and splashes of paint. This style infuses feelings of force, gravitas and desolation in his art.

Teaching Art

From 1963 to 1973, he taught in the Department of Architecture at Tunghai University. This is when Chuang Che became well known for his artwork. In 1966, Che earned a J.D. Rockefeller III Fund travel grant to study in the United States. Following this, many corporate and public institutions took note of his unique artwork. Some of his art is now at the Cleveland Art Museum and the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Chuang Che artistic works merge the traditional Chinese art techniques of his heritage with the Abstract Expressionist influences of his time spent in Europe and America. This meeting of East and West is at the forefront of his artwork. He remarks: “No art can mature by itself; it has to absorb nutrition from the rest of the world’s art. I’ve always had this ideal; to see a fusion of Chinese and Western painting.”

Che moved to the United States in 1973. His artwork has been shown at museums and galleries in many countries, including North and South America, Europe and Asia.

Joseph Fiore Biography (1925 – 2008)

Joseph Fiore was a renowned New York artist in the 1960’s. A well respected artist, he moved in the mainstream of some of America’s greatest modern and abstract movements. Early in the 1950’s, Joseph Fiore painted in an abstract style using a soft geometric and color field series. This 1951 example of Fiore’s work you see here is from that series. Later in his career, Fiore exhibited “painterly realism” in the 1970’s and then returned to abstraction in the early 1980’s and continued this until his death in 2008.

Joseph Fiore studied at the seminal school for American Modernism, Black Mountain College in North Carolina. He then studied at the dynamic and experimental California School of Fine Art for two more years. Black Mountain College was legendary from its very beginnings. It attracted and created maverick spirits in the art world. Some of whom went on to become well-known and influential artists in the latter half of the 20th century. A partial list includes people such as Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, Josef and Anni Albers, Jacob Lawrence, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Cy Twombly, Kenneth Noland, Vera B. Williams, Ben Shahn, Franz Kline, Arthur Penn, Buckminster Fuller, M.C. Richards, Francine du Plessix Gray, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Dorothea Rockburne and many others, famous and not-sochanged who have changed the art world in a significant way. His time there exposed him to the greatest painters of mid-Century America. He studied with some the great artists of the early Abstract/Expressionist movement such as: Josef Albers, Willem de Kooning, Jacob Lawrence and Jean Varda.

Joseph Fiore remained at Black Mountain from 1946-1948. He then transferred to the California School of Fine Art known for its development of pure abstraction. Fiore remained at the California School of Fine Art in San Francisco (now San Francisco Art Institute). from 1948-49. During this time, Fiore studied and painted with a faculty which included some of the most talented new artists of post-war America. This included Edward Corbett, Richard Diebenkorn, Claire Falkenstein, David Park, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Hassel Smith, and Clyfford Still. He would almost certainly have studied with David Park and Richard Diebenkorn. During this time the great Clyfford Still was spearheading the pure abstract direction of the California School of Fine Art. And Mark Rothko was teaching summer classes there during this period. Joseph Fiore had the good fortune to develop his artistic talent during one of the richest periods of the mid-Century Abstract/Expressionist movement.

After his time in California’s experimental climate, Joseph Fiore went back to teach painting and drawing at Black Mountain College (1949-1956). He then became one of the original members of the very influential group of galleries called the 10th Street Art Scene. These were galleries that operated mainly in the East Village on the east side of Manhattan, New York in the 1950s and 1960s. Joseph Fiore, along with legendary Los Angeles artist Ed Moses were founding members of the Area Gallery (1958-1965). They exhibited with Alex Katz, Lois Dodd, Bernard Langlais, and many other emerging masters of the mid-century.

The 10th Street Art Scene was close to the studios of such artists as Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Milton Resnick. This location attracted these early innovators who helped to nurture the emerging development and careers of younger artists who exhibited at these co-operative galleries. Being more experimental in nature, these galleries exhibited the works of artists like Joseph Fiore who were outside the main-stream of the Madison Avenue and 57th street galleries. It was then that Joseph Fiore dedicated himself to abstract painting.

As an educator, Joseph Fiore taught at Black Mountain College from 1949-1951. He later served as the Chairman of the Art Department from 1951-1956. He then taught at the Philadelphia College of Art from 1962-1970. The Maryland College of Art (one of the oldest schools of art or music in the United States) and the prestigious National Academy of Design in New York. Many of his solo exhibitions received high praise by New York art critic Fairfield Porter.

Joseph Fiore died in New York City on September 18, 2008.

Ilya Bolotowsky Biography

Ilya Bolotowsky (1907 – 1981)

Ilya Bolotowsky was born in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1907. At the age of 10, he and his family fled the Russian Revolution of 1917 to Istanbul. They remained there until 1923 when they moved to the United States.

His mother was a self-taught artist. His tutors encouraged his art and he explored his artistic side from an early age. At 17 he assimilated into New York life while attending the National Academy of Design. He studied alongside Ivan Olinsky, another ex-Russian immigrant who became a well known artist.

The Academy was a conservative place in the 1920’s. Artists such as Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb railed against the rules and pretentiousness of the institution. They held independent exhibitions and displayed their ground-breaking abstract and expressionist art. Ilya Bolotowsky was among them, having gained a taste for unusual abstract art.

The early artwork of Ilya Bolotowsky is an attempt at cubism. Those paintings were influenced by the “constructivism” of his homeland and the “synthetic” cubism he encountered in the USA. Consisting of mild, minor colors in geometric and geomorphic shapes in a flat plane, it is clear he was experimenting with the styles of others while trying to create his own. These early works are passable and show a definite direction and his characteristic simplicity. But they lack the sophistication that came later.

In 1933 Ilya Bolotowsky saw paintings by Piet Mondrian in the Gallatin Collection in New York. This was a major influence on the young Bolotowsky, who loved the simple, clear and confounding abstraction of Mondrian’s artwork. This was art at its most controlled yet at its most elemental, it was the style of De Stijl. Ilya Bolotowsky’s art evolved into what Mondrian came to term “neoplasticism”, a “pure representation of the human mind … aesthetically purified, that is to say, abstract …”.

Ilya Bolotowsky took on several rules for his abstraction. For example, not using diagonals because it disrupted the harmony of the spatial tension he desired to create. He also avoided right angles when possible, feeling them disharmonious. He said “I strive after an ideal of harmony”, and this is clear to the observer. His compositions are well balanced and meticulously designed. They break out of the constraints of the De Stijl school and were created with muted colors and textures in a way that was quite out of the ordinary.

World War II interrupted the lives of nearly everyone on the planet, Ilya Bolotowsky included. He worked as a translator for the Military and later as a liaison between the Soviet Air Force and the Americans. When his service ended, he headed back to New York to his parent’s apartment and took up painting. He continued as if he had only stepped out for lunch. Shortly after his return, he got a one-man show at the New Art Circle, which was successful. As many artists did at the time, he took a job as a teacher, then as a professor of art. He experimented in films, winning awards and applying his unique simplicity and insight.

By the age of 40, Ilya Bolotowsky was hitting his stride. Forgoing the traditional square canvas for shapes that contributed to the geometry of the design on or inside them. There is a gradual saturation of his work as well, the muted colors and shapes transforming into bolder, brighter designs. Always one to take on new influences and directions, the abstract expressionists of the 1950’s brought out a confrontational style in Ilya Bolotowsky and his works became more stand-out and vibrant in their abstraction. They utilize clashing colors, larger shapes and a more varied palate. This era of Ilya Bolotowsky is very popular with collectors and artists alike.

Ilya Bolotowsky continued to grow and evolve and seek purer expression and purpose in his art. He remained distinctive in his style, never throwing it away to start anew, always modifying and evolving. In the early 1960’s, Bolotowsky took his primary color palate and started applying it to models and shapes. He experimented with the power of geometry and color as an expressive tool. Stripped of “human” identity, his paintings have an “aliveness” and vibrancy that make them immediately distinct from many of his contemporaries and those that sought to copy him. Bolotowsky’s paintings are remarkably human.

As the popularity of his work increased, and the styles of abstract expressionism made it into the mainstream, his art went from being confrontational and confounding to being something people would decorate their houses with. Ilya Bolotowsky’s artwork is immediately recognizable as art and not decoration. But its uniqueness was lost to an extent. Perhaps because the imitation of his designs was so pervasive.

Ilya Bolotowsky died in 1981 at the age of 74.

RICHARD ANUSZKIEWICZ BIOGRAPHY

Richard Anuszkiewicz (1930 – 2020)

As a leader of the Op Art movement, Richard Anuszkiewicz art is as distinctive as it is unforgettable. He once said, “Color function becomes my subject matter and its performance my painting”. Anuszkiewicz explored new techniques and methods and helped expand the psychological theories of color and perception. Clear evidence of this are his extraordinary artwork from the 60’s and 70’s.

Born in 1930 in Erie, Pennsylvania to Polish immigrants, Richard Anuszkiewicz started young on art and stuck with it. From a small boy drawing with crayons to a scholarship to the Cleveland Institute of Art at age 18, it was clear where his passions lay. He began by depicting scenes from daily city life in his paintings. Then he began to hook onto the ideas of abstraction during his studies at Cleveland. Abstraction appealed to him, but so did the elements of design.

At the end of his time at Cleveland in 1953, Richard Anuszkiewicz won a Pulitzer scholarship to the National Academy of Design. He then studied at Yale with the pioneer Josef Albers. It was at Yale that he started studying the psychology of perception. There he laid the groundwork for his later theories of visual and spatial organization. This was a fertile time for Anuszkiewicz and his art that survives from that time give clues towards his future direction.

New York in the late 1950’s was a hotbed for art, music, literature and philosophy. The Jazz scene was pushing boundaries, the Beat poets were spitting lyrics that caused howls of outrage, and artists were flocking there as well. Among these artists was Richard Anuszkiewicz. He began working as a conservator for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Then for the famed Tiffany and Co. as a silver designer. Then abstraction really took hold of Richard Anuszkiewicz. Using his unique sense of mathematical geometry and expanding on his theories of perception he started at Yale, he used repeated organic and geometric patterns and forms to make designs that confound the eye and cause the brain to rethink its preconceptions.

Over time, Richard Anuszkiewicz art became what we now recognize as his rigid, structural, bright, even trippy style. About 1960, Richard Anuszkiewicz Op Art gained the attention of the art world. For the next three years he continued to experiment, theorize and produce art. Then Time magazine published a flattering article on him and he gained national and international fame. Finally he was able to sell as many paintings as he could produce, selling 17 in a single month at one point. One of his more famous contemporaries, Jackson Pollock, had a smaller waiting list for his paintings, which should give a good idea of the fevered popularity of his Richard Anuszkiewicz’s art.

Anuszkiewicz held one-man art shows from 1965 onward. Many regarded him as the most important artist in the Op Art, or Optical Art, movement sweeping the art world. The hippies in America and Europe seized on the amazing color theory set down by Anuszkiewicz. His theories challenged the idea that perception is fixed or reliable. Try staring for a while at one of Richard Anuszkiewicz’s best art designs and the conclusion is that one’s eyes cannot be trusted.

This met well with the expansion of “radical” thought during the 1960’s and 70’s. Posters for festivals, sit-ins and rock concerts used the fluorescent, conflicting and contrasting colors and geometry popularized by Richard Anuszkiewicz art. Life magazine called him the “Wizard of Op”, and later retrospectives uphold the vibrant and timeless quality of his work.

Few artists have been so influential outside their field, but for many the 1960’s are synonymous with the Op Art perfected by Richard Anuszkiewicz. This was “non-representational” art which did not mean anything unless you projected your meaning onto it. While it may appear that his art is confined by geometry and is well planned, we know from his sketches and trial pieces that he was an experimenter. Richard Anuszkiewicz artwork evolved organically into their final composition.

Enjoying Richard Anuszkiewicz’s artwork requires no prior knowledge of art. It is pure in that it has an effect on the viewer, unlike most art which is often the expression of feeling or thought. His art is especially appealing to children. They tend to respond instinctively and often with joy to the profound, yet deceptively simple artwork.

Richard Anuszkiewicz passed away on May 19, 2020, at the age of 89, at his home in Englewood, New Jersey.

Dennis Hare Artist Biography

Early Life and Creative Roots

Dennis Hare was born in 1946 in Glendale, California. He grew up in an artistically rich environment. His mother, Arline, was an interior designer, and his father, Fred, worked as a sportswriter and photographer. Creativity ran deep in his family—his grandfather Oliver Hare was an artist, musician, and photographer, while his maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Harlan, was also a painter.

His childhood was shaped by extensive travel. The family often visited Mexico and Central America to create short documentary films, and a beach house in Mexico became a regular retreat. These early experiences informed Hare’s sense of color, light, and culture, which would later become hallmarks of his paintings.

From Sports to Studio

Although he showed early artistic potential, Hare initially pursued athletics. He was a standout in basketball, baseball, and especially beach volleyball. He grew up in Yucaipa, California, where his mother restored the historic “Adobe House,” and went on to study physical education at San Bernardino Valley College and San Diego State University.

Volleyball Achievements

Hare had a distinguished volleyball career before returning to art:

• 1975: Won his first Volleyball World Championship
• Multiple titles in beach volleyball and Senior Olympics tournaments
• 2008: Inducted into the California Beach Volleyball Association Hall of Fame

His return to art was partly prompted by the need to illustrate a book he was writing on beach volleyball. This led him to rediscover his talent and passion for painting.

Artistic Journey

Hare began painting watercolors in 1979 and joined the National Watercolor Society. In 1987, he transitioned to oil painting, which became his signature medium. Oils allowed him to express dynamic textures, bold color fields, and expressive forms—perfectly suited to his energetic, figurative style.

His subjects often included children, beachgoers, neighbors, and strangers encountered in daily life. The beach remained a recurring theme, reflecting both his upbringing and lifelong connection to coastal culture.

Themes and Style

• Figurative with a strong humanist tone
• Expressive brushwork, vibrant color, and spontaneity
• Frequent subjects include children, families, and social gatherings
• Recurring coastal imagery and textures inspired by sand, light, and sea

Later in his career, Hare embraced mixed media and assemblage, incorporating found objects and textured materials. He was especially influenced by the 1992 Eva Hesse exhibition in New York. One of his key assemblage works, Couple (2007), featured oil paint combined with scraps of paper, pushing the boundaries between figure and form.

Artistic Influences and Philosophy

Based in California, Hare was influenced by the Bay Area Figurative Movement and exhibited alongside artists like:

• Elmer Bischoff
• Manuel Neri
• Nathan Oliveira
• David Park

His work is often described as socially interpretive, capturing the intimacy and connection between people. He rarely painted solitary figures; instead, his paintings often depict interaction, emotion, and shared human experience.

Exhibitions and Legacy

Hare exhibited widely throughout his career in both private and public venues.

Selected Exhibitions and Highlights

• National Watercolor Society exhibitions
• Numerous solo shows throughout California and the U.S.
• International exhibitions and lectures in Europe and Mexico
• Featured in museum collections and private collections worldwide
• Donated works to charitable causes and community fundraisers

Later Years and Legacy

Until his passing in 2024, Hare remained active as both an artist and teacher. He conducted workshops internationally, focusing on artistic self-expression and maximizing creative potential. He lived in Mentone, California, in a bungalow filled with art and personal touches.

Dennis Hare leaves behind a legacy of color, movement, and empathy. A self-taught artist and late bloomer, his work reminds us that it’s never too late to follow one’s passion, and that great art comes from a life richly lived.

VICTOR VASARELY BIOGRAPHY

Victor Vasarely (1906 – 1997)

Artist Victor Vasarely was a true polymath and one of the few genuine innovators in 20th century art. His artwork is both mathematical and powerful, transcending both to create a unique experience for the viewer. Many artists pushed the envelope, but few created an entirely new one. Even if you’re not familiar with Victor Vasarely artworks, you’ll likely recognize it by its style.

Born in Pécs, Hungary in 1906, Victor Vasarely moved to Pieštany, Slovakia as a small boy and spent most of his childhood there. His early life is not well documented, but we do know his family traveled a great deal across the Eastern Europe. And that as boy he wasn’t very interested in art, preferring the scientific disciplines.

At the age of 19 Vasarely began schooling for a medical degree in Budapest, where his family had recently relocated. This only lasted two years, because he decided he wanted to be an artist. He began with traditional painting techniques and theory. In 1929 he enrolled at the Sándor Bortnyik private academy. Bortnyik was an avant garde artist and the school a hotbed of artistic experimentation. He also advocated the Bauhaus movement, and his workshop (Mühely in Hungarian) had the nickname of the Hungarian Bauhaus.

It was at the Mühely that Victor Vasarely learned the principles of geometric abstraction and applied techniques. Attending lectures on leading artists of the time, Vasarely learned about Piet Mondrian, Theo Van Doesburg, Walter Gropius and the artists of De Stijl movement. He also studied the ideas of Constructivism and Concrete Art. The vast and exciting art scene in Europe unfolded right before Victor Vasarely.

Vasarely in Paris

In 1930, Vasarely, along with his new wife Claire Spinner, left Budapest for Paris. They lived there on and off for the next twenty years. Their first son, André, was born there in 1931, followed by Jean-Pierre in 1934. During the 30’s and 40’s, Vasarely supported his family by creating commercial artwork. He designed posters and logos for news agencies, advertisers and pharmaceutical companies. In his spare time he experimented with chromatic and geometrical patterns and principles. This was the foundation for his later works.

This was a successful period for Victor Vasarely artworks. His graphic design work paid well and gave him the time and freedom to develop his ideas and techniques. Hardly the image of an artist before “success” we like to hold, but it is difficult to see how his later groundbreaking work could have been possible without him having the means to support himself. He learned as much as possible about “non artistic” disciplines such as quantum mechanics, astrophysics, color and optical mathematics. All crucial to what came next in his career.

Vasarely became fascinated with the perception of 3-dimensional objects. He deepened his studies into the principles of perspective and light (as well as its absence). This broad range of studies all fed his fertile mind and resulted in a level of creativity that would have been impossible without this preparation.

Victor Vasarely Op Art

Employing a scientific and rigorous approach to his work, Vasarely did not differentiate between scientific methods and the techniques he used in his art. He regarded them both as performing an experiment. By the late 1930’s, Victor Vasarely was experimenting with black and white contrast. He drew from nature in the form of zebras and tigers and produced what is widely considered the very first Op Art (Optical Art).

Victor Vasarely spent the War in France. Returning after the cessation of conflict to Arcueil, in Paris, he took over a studio and started to develop into the artist we are familiar with. Along with his friend, Denise René, he co-founded the Galerie Denise René, a center point for the early Op Art movement and a space in which he exhibited his art.

Leading up to 1951, Victor Vasarely made a profound realization that the illusion of space and depth could be created with 2-dimensional forms, especially geometrical ones. Even the illusion of movement was possible with flat, motionless drawings.

Ever the scientific investigator, it was during his holidays in the Belle-Isle and Gordes-Crystal areas of France that the “implacable sun” ignited in him a “contradictory perspective” that led to these discoveries and insights. He soon left figurative and graphic styles behind and dove headfirst into pure abstract art. With the Kinetic Art of Naum Gabo and others as a launching pad, Victor Vasarely produced some of the defining works of Op Art in the coming years. He launched his Yellow Manifesto (Manifeste Jaune), in which he used the founding principles and theories of Op Art.

Vasarely in the 1960s

By the 1960’s, Victor Vasarely paintings had taken Op Art to new levels. He developed the “alphabet plastique”, a series of “compositional units” that are interchangeable and infinite. These provided the basis for many of his later works. Commissions for architecture came in from the University of Caracas and the 1967 World Exposition.

Artist Victor Vasarely became a French citizen during this period and deepened his humanist ideals. He used his increased visibility to argue for peace through artistic endeavor and the union of scientific and spiritual beliefs.

As all things do, Op Art’s popularity waned. Victor Vasarely was disappointed that more artists hadn’t taken up his principles but remained the head of a legion of devoted fans. He spent much of his later years to the founding of museums and foundations. Victor Vasarely remained energetic into old age and traveled widely promoting his Alphabet Plastique ideas. He died at the age of 90 in 1997, having survived both his wife Claire and his son, Jean-Pierre.

Elmer Bischoff Biography

Elmer Bischoff (1916-1991)

Elmer Bischoff paintings are quickly recognized by those familiar with his soft tonal palate, exquisite use of light and shade and sensitive portrayal of people. A dedicated artist and teacher from a young age, Bischoff earned an M.A. from University California Berkeley. He then went straight into teaching at Sacramento High School. There he taught jewelry craftsmanship, ceramics and other crafts to, in his own words “mostly housewives”. Many Bay Area artists of the time sustained themselves and their families with teaching jobs. It was a way of expressing art, earning money and learning through teaching.

Having grown up in a household that understood the value of culture, Elmer Bischoff had access throughout his childhood to music, painting and the arts. This early set of influences put him on the path that led to his success as a pedagogue and as an artist, achieving renown during his lifetime and a legacy that continues to this day.

Bischoff’s early inspiration was Pablo Picasso and he spent a great deal of time painting in Picasso’s style when he was young. It was later, during his time at UC Berkeley, that he began to branch out and expand his repertoire.

When the United States joined the War in 1941, Elmer Bischoff went to work as an intelligence officer in the Army and served in England. On war’s end he came back to the U.S. and in 1946 he joined the California School of Fine Arts as a member of the faculty. He met Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still there. It was here he got to know and befriend the Abstract Expressionists who were developing their movement. This included Frank Lobdell, David Park, Richard Diebenkorn and Hassel Smith. This burgeoning art form was a huge influence on Bischoff with their revival of the long neglected study of the figure. Along with Elmer Bischoff, these artists were given the title of the Bay Area Figurative School.

In 1952, Bischoff left the CSFA and also made a leap from the abstraction he had been practicing to a more figurative painting style. Unable or unwilling to find a job teaching like so many of his Bay Area contemporaries, he took up truck driving. He then used his spare time to sketch the people he encountered. He finally gained employment in 1953 at Yuba College, where he continued to develop his figurative style. It was during this period he had a successful solo exhibition at the CSFA, whom he rejoined as chair of the graduate school in 1956.

Bischoff’s teaching skills advanced and soon he was one of the most respected and admired teachers at CSFA. From 1963 until his death at the age of 75, he taught at UC Berkeley, taking on roles at several different schools and colleges as a visiting artist.

As an artist, Elmer Bischoff never achieved the commercial success of contemporaries like Willem de Kooning. Primarily because he had to support himself by teaching, yet he remains an influential figure in the Bay Area Figurative School.

Manuel Neri Biography (1930 — 2021)

Manuel Neri was one of the greatest living sculptors, having influenced his own generation and every one since. He was a member of the “second generation” of Bay Area Figurative artists, Neri maintained a prominence in the art scene in San Francisco for decades.

He was born in Sanger, California on April 12th 1930 to Mexican immigrant parents. He was influenced and taught by Bay Area artists such as Elmer Nelson Bischoff, Richard Diebenkorn, Frank Lobdell and David Park. This was during his brief studies at the California School of Fine Arts while in his twenties. He admired their attempts to combine abstract expressionism and a rediscovered interest in the human body and form.

His first forays into abstract sculpture in the early 50’s used junk materials like wire, burlap and cardboard. He then migrated to plaster, a medium he used for years to come in his unique figurative sculptures. He became known for his erotic and naturalistic sculptures of the female body. Sculptures rendered in rough plaster and often accentuated with a powerful splash of color, painted on with great energy.

Manuel Neri also experimented with bronze and marble for his sculptures. He purchased a studio in Italy in 1981 to so he could work with marble, as well as produce beautiful abstract figure pastels and paintings.

From 1959, Manuel Neri was teaching at the California School of Fine Arts, and taught for a while at UC Berkeley. From 1965 until 1999 he was a member of the art department at UC Davis, having his own studio in Benicia, California during the same time.

Artist Manuel Neri used mostly the same model for the last 40 years, Mary Julia Kilmenko. He continued to produce sculptures, paintings and drawings, late in life though his output diminished. Commissioned to provide sculptures for institutions such as the State of California, Iowa State University, a courthouse in Portland, Oregon and more. Manuel Neri’s art is on display in venues across the United States and the world.

His artwork is also in several important museums in America. Two of note are The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Manuel Neri’s artwork has a revolutionary feel and a timeless quality. He was influential in his lengthy career, and as time passes he continues to be one of the great American sculptors.

Manuel Neri passed away at his Sacramento, California home on October 18, 2021, of natural causes.

John Ferren Biography (1905 – 1970)

The esteemed abstract artist John Ferren was a major player in the pre-war Paris art scene. He was a pivotal contributor to what would become abstract expressionism. Little is known of Ferren outside of art circles, yet he was a crucial contributor to the evolution of art in the 20th century.

Born in Oregon on October 17th 1905, John Ferren spent his childhood moving around the Northwest. He also lived in Los Angeles and San Francisco for a time. After graduating from the Polytechnic High School in Los Angeles in 1923, he returned to San Francisco to study at the California School of Fine Arts. John Ferren apprenticed under an Italian stonecutter from whom he learned modeling and the beginnings of sculpture. It was here he started to experiment with clay and plasticine, rejecting the formality of old ideas and striving to push new boundaries.

By 1929, John Ferren had become tired of the art scene in America and saved up enough to travel to Italy and France. On the way he made an important stop off in New York for a visit to the Gallatin Collection. This trip is where he encountered the works of Henri Matisse and Hans Hofmann which made a huge impact on him.

He settled for a while in Paris, studying art at some of the most important and influential schools in France, the Academie Ranson and the Sorbonne. This was a sideshow to what he regarded as his true artistic education, his interactions and friendships with the artists also drawn to Paris at the time. These artists included Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, Joan Miro and Alberto Giacometti. These were the biggest names in expressionism and abstraction at the time and perhaps in history. It was his marriage to the daughter of Manuel Ortiz de Zarate, the Spanish artist of some note, that gained him access to these influential circles.

The fertile artistic ground of Paris fed John Ferren’s mind and inspired him to push boundaries in the ways the artists he met there. He came back to the United States in 1930 but soon returned to Paris, unable to resist the city. He remained in Paris eight years until the looming Second World War forced him and many others from Europe (though Picasso lived through the war in Paris).

Paris was a hotbed of creation pre-war and Ferren dove right in. He associated with the Abstraction-Creation group who opposed the rise of Surrealism and figurative studies, which were making waves at the time. It was the son of Henri Matisse, Pierre, who noticed Ferren and gave him his first solo art show, which took place in New York in 1936. Artist John Ferren associated closely with Surrealists but also wrote manifestos against the movement. It appears he didn’t have much of a strong alliance with any movement, preferring to cast light on the failings and advantages of all forms of art.

With war looming and newly divorced, John Ferren returned to the States in 1938. There in New York City he continued his exploration of new ideas and concepts. John Ferren’s art became popular throughout the United States during this time. Partly through Pierre Matisse’s love of his innovative work with plaster etchings. The etchings being a 19th century technique which he had rediscovered and used to astounding effect.

John Ferren’s artwork in plaster were some of the first American artwork acquired by Solomon Guggenheim, of the famous Guggenheim Museums. Experimenting with Zen and Tao disciplines through his friendship with Yun Gee, the avant garde experimental artist, John Ferren found he had a new impetus to capture movement, clarity and the nature of things through his art compositions. These were mostly abstract, though he continued with figurative painting during this period and his lifetime.

As John Ferren’s artistic career developed, he found new ways of combining all the influences from his travels and other artists. His travels took him to the Middle East, Lebanon, where he was moved by the Islamic art he encountered. It was the sense of geometry so integral to that art form that he injected into his work. At once spontaneous and constructive, his later works capture an expressionistic attitude combined with his strong sense of form. This created a unique oeuvre that continues to inspire and confound expectations today.

Ferren also worked in film, collaborating with Alfred Hitchcock on Vertigo and The Trouble with Harry. For a while, John Ferren was also president of the abstract expressionist “Club”. While never attaining the recognition in his lifetime of the great artists of the period, John Ferren is still much more than a footnote in abstract expressionism. He was truly at the forefront of the movement for quite some time.

Still exhibited around the world, John Ferren’s paintings and artwork are unlikely to fade from view. His paintings and sculpture have a timeless quality that will continue to inspire creativity and enjoyment for generations.

John Ferren died on July 24th 1970 in New York, having been an active member of the art scene right up until his demise.

James Weeks Artist Biography

James Weeks (1922 – 1998)

In 1922, James Weeks artist and teacher, was born in Oakland, California to Ansel Weeks, a widely known bandleader, and Ruth Daly, a respected classical pianist. As James grew, he started to find something he was passionate about – the arts. He was both artistically gifted and musically inclined and was a great jazz player. But, his passion was with art, especially in painting. Because of his blooming interest in art, his parents enrolled him in an art class for children at the California School of Arts in the 1930s. He graduated High School with Richard Diebenkorn and William Wolff; both were future colleagues of James Weeks. After completing High School, James Weeks landed a job and studied painting at the same time. He learned from William Gaw, a traditional painter, and during the evenings, James took classes to further hone his painting skills.

After his artistic training, James Weeks was able to join the Bay Area Figuration, a first generation movement in San Francisco. The group created a new form of art style deviating from traditional Abstract Expressionism. James was one of the renowned members of the movement. His works are most noticeable for their “flattened” style, bold and brilliant color schemes and aggressive interlocking shapes. This painting style was inspired by several modernist painters, like Maynard Dixon and Henri Matisse, and muralists such as Clemente Orozco. He was also influenced by artists like Courbet, Cezanne, Picasso, Walk Kuhn and Marsden Hartley.

As a respected member of the movement, artist James Weeks was appreciated for his exceptional paintings. He was known for his medley of forms and colors that pleasantly blend as a whole. It’s also clear that he values the exploration of space and lighting, thus making his works intricate and extraordinary. Unlike fellow Bay Area members, James Weeks artwork serves as a social commentary rather than the usual non-objective styles. He was always drawn to the darker side of things, so he painted the American culture in such a way. He loves to create characters that deliver a strong message to the viewers. A statement that speaks of the many issues our society faces. Some of his famous character portrayals are of boxing arenas, jazz clubs, political and social personas and the like.

Because artistic mastery of the art of Bay Area Figuration, James Weeks paintings are often used as samples in art classes. In fact, James was also an educator of this art style and motivated aspiring artists to appreciate the movement. From 1958 until 1967 he gave art lessons to aspiring painters in the San Francisco Art Institute. There he worked fellow artists Elmer Bischoff and Richard Diebenkorn and gained ideas and inspiration from their collaboration. James Weeks also taught classes in advanced art techniques at the University of California from 1967 until 1970. He worked at Boston University as well and held the position of Chairman of the Art Department.

Until his death at the age of 75, James Weeks was able to maximize his painting skills, as well as teach, mentor and contribute to the Bay Area Figuration. James Weeks paintings are referenced in many art schools and are part of the foundation of the Bay Area Figuration movement.

James Weeks paintings can are in several galleries and museums like the Corcoran Gallery and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C., the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco.

BIRGER SANDZEN BIOGRAPHY

Birger Sandzen (1871 – 1954)

Swedish painter Birger Sandzen began receiving private art instruction by the age of eight and had entered the College of Skara at only ten. Over the course of Birger Sandzen’s painting career, his style would evolve from pointillism to a completely self-created style employing the bold strokes of color similar to the Fauvists, and one that included the Tonalist work of his early training.

After graduating in 1890, Sandzen had continued his studies at the University of Lund, where he was a pupil of Anders Zorn among other notable young artists. Eventually the instructors formed the “Art School of the Artists’ League” that would figure significantly in the evolution of the modern Swedish art movement. He also studied in Paris briefly before returning to Sweden in 1894.

Around this time he was made aware of an opening for a professorship at Bethany College in Kansas. He was given the job, and from this location he would spend his summers traveling to Yellowstone National Park, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah; landscapes that would figure significantly in the paintings he would produce for the rest of his life. Over the next fifty years Birger Sandzen would create over five hundred drawings and paintings from these areas.

While earning a reputation as an artist of note, Birger Sandzen also created a reputation as a dedicated educator. He worked to introduce his students and community to the world of art, arranging lectures, staging exhibitions and working with the local art club to purchase a library.

During his teaching career two large exhibitions of his work were staged in New York galleries, neither of which Birger Sandzen would attend due to his teaching commitments. He would continue to teach at Bethany College and in other locations for fifty-two years.

In addition to his painting, Birger Sandzen was also an illustrator, engraver and lithographer. He was a founding member of the Prairie Printmakers Society, the author of a book on art technique and received commissions from the W.P.A. during the Depression years in America.

Birger Sandzen’s unusual use of thick applications of boldly colored paint to capture the scenery of the western United States earned him the nickname of the “American Van Gogh”. He continued to work up until his death in 1954.

Al Held Biography (1928 – 2005)

In the summer of 1959 the Museum of Modern Art mounted New York’s first big survey of postwar American painting. Titled The New American Painting, it emphasized the work of the leading Abstract Expressionist artists and enthralled a young Brooklyn-born painter named Al Held. A veteran of World War II, Al Held had briefly studied at Art Students League and then went to Paris for three years before returning to New York permanently. While he was highly influenced by that show, he developed his own style which departed significantly for everything exhibited at that time.

“Al Held was one of the last and best of the big impact Abstract painters to emerge from the post-War era.” (Ken Johnson-N.Y. Times Art Critic). The artist is known for his “special conundrums,” with each canvas the product of enormous drawn out labor and planning. Sometimes the artist would repaint pieces several times until he reached the perfect balance of perfection and the bending of perspective for which he was looking. His paintings illustrate geometric magic with his manipulation of the various shapes incorporated into his canvases. There are edges that you would not see in 3-D; but his paintings bend rectangles and squares into trapezoidal mind play inviting the observer to look and look again as perspectives change. Like moving a lens over shapes, Held’s painting compositions reach out to the viewer with whimsical, stimulating oddities. This mechanism separates Al Held’s artwork from the other geometricians and hard edge painters from his generation. Al Held’s paintings could never be seen as static and predictable. There is always something new to see.

Al Held began his art career in 1947, after he finished his service with the Navy. Upon his return to New York, he enrolled in the Art Students League, where he harbored an idea of becoming a muralist. In 1949, funded by a G.I. Bill stipend, Al Held went to Paris for three years and studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. After deciding to abandon social realism, Al Held paintings adopted an Abstract Expressionist-inspired style characterized by geometric shapes rendered in dark colors and very thick impasto. Al Held art sought to marry the objectivity of Piet Mondrian and the subjectivity of Jackson Pollock.

Throughout the 1950s, Al Held’s artist palette grew progressively lighter. The geometric shapes disappeared, replaced by an intricate network of gestural, multidirectional strokes applied thickly with a palette knife. By the end of the decade, he had become frustrated with both his style and his medium. He wanted to make the structure underpinning his paintings visible. Within six months beginning in 1959, Al Held transformed his work by switching from oil to Liquitex, a quick-drying water-based acrylic medium. The advantage to Liquitex, as the artist described, was that “the acrylic couldn’t be built up and you couldn’t work wet into wet with acrylic, and so the imagery remained clean and clear.” Among Held’s paintings, points of departure for his new work were his admiration for Matisse’s Jazz-themed cutouts. In 1966, Al Held received a Guggenheim Fellowship. The following year, the artist abandoned color and the flat shapes began to explore perspective, space, and complex interlocking geometric forms in black and white.

Al Held paintings were now in one-man exhibitions in the critically important André Emmerich Gallery in New York (1968, 1970, 1972, and 1974) and many more collectors and critics began to recognize the importance and the uniqueness of his paintings. In 1974, a twenty-five year retrospective of Al Held art was held at the Whitney Museum of American Art. This massive collection substantiated Al Held’s importance as an alternative to the abstract painting that followed Abstract Expressionism. Other than Frank Stella, Al Held paintings stood alone in style, being neither color field nor minimalist. Al Held artwork would experiment with the placement of the main shapes, sometimes moving them entirely and painting over them. Once he was certain about the placement, he would work to define the edge between one color form and another; creating a tension between two edges. In this regard, his style was essentially self-taught. In that interview Al Held said “I had to literally educate myself” because this was a complete departure from his previous style and training. None of his paintings have edges that are perfectly straight; instead, they are intentionally modulated, convex in some areas and concave in others, to heighten the tension between the forms.

Irving Sandler, the curator and biographer of the N.Y. School of painters (Triumph of American Painting) called Al Held painting style concrete abstraction. He went on to curate a show of his artwork along with a number of his fellow contemporaries: Knox Martin; and sculptors Ronald Bladen, George Sugarman, and David Weinrib in an exhibition called Concrete Expressionism curated by Sandler himself at New York University in 1965. This appellation separated the artists from anything that was emerging from the Ab/Ex movement of any region of the country (cf. Irving Sandler, Al Held; New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1984, p. 13; Concrete Expressionism; op. cit. Chapter 3.)

Held was a member of the Yale University Faculty of Art from 1962 to 1980. After resigning from Yale in late 1980 Al Held was given a six-month residency At the American Academy in Rome. From that point onward, his paintings resumed in color while continuing his exploration of geometry and perspective. A seminal Al Held painting called M’s Passage, demonstrates a new direction. For the first time the viewer sees large horizontal planes of color, with a giant curved grid of graduating blues sweeping behind the structure; with corkscrew shapes. It amounted to a new and final direction for an already demanding style.

During his career as an artist, Held had one-man shows at the Stedelijik Museum in Amsterdam (1966), the San Francisco Museum of Art (1968), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (1974). Al Held artist, died at his home in Italy in July 2005.

CLYFFORD STILL BIOGRAPHY

Clyfford E. Still (1904 – 1980)

Clyfford Still was an American artist who also lived part of his life in Canada. He is generally described as an Abstract Expressionist artist.

A native of North Dakota, Still was born in Grandin. His family were agriculturalists and he spent his childhood in both Spokane, Washington and Alberta, Canada in the winters and summers, respectively. Clyfford Still studied at the Art Students League in New York City in 1928, briefly, before deciding that the institution was by and for the wealthy and not to his liking.

His education was undertaken at Spokane University. Clyfford Still taught in the Washington State University system, becoming an instructor at the Pullman campus in 1933.

He is known for both landscape and figurist paintings, often in large formats. During the Second World War, Clyfford Still moved to California to work in the shipyards and meanwhile established an art studio in Berkeley. He became closely associated with the Bay Area Art scene and was credited with being one of the painters who gave rise to the popularity of Abstract Expressionism.

Clyfford E. Still had his first solo exhibition in California at the California Palace Legion of Honor. For many of his peers, it was the first time they’d seen his work.

PAUL WONNER BIOGRAPHY

Paul John Wonner (1920 – 2008)

Artist Paul Wonner was born in Tucson, AZ, and spent a large portion of his life in California. He was an Abstract Expressionist artist and an active member of the Bay Area Figurative Movement.

In particular, Paul Wonner is highly renowned for his Abstract Expressionist still life sketches. Quite a bit of his work concentrates on small items such as jugs or pitchers and organic products like fruit, but he also focused on figures that occupy space. He was keen on art as an adolescent, thereby prompting his parents to hire the services of an art educator to assist him with his drawing amid his secondary school years.

Subsequent to his initial education in art he traveled to California in 1937. The artist put down roots in Oakland, where he enrolled at the California College of The Arts. The experience he gained from art school furnished him with the essential painting, sketching and drawing methods. Paul Wonner graduated in 1941 with a BA from the California College of Arts and Crafts, prior to being drafted into the military service for his country. During his service, while stationed in San Antonio, Texas, he proceeded with his quest for art and went as far as setting up a little neighborhood studio. In 1946, Paul Wonner was released from military service and he quickly set out toward New York City to proceed with his career in art. During the movement of Abstract Expressionism in the 1940s, Paul Wonner filled in as a commercial craftsman in New York City. To fulfill his enthusiasm for art and painting he took classes at the Art Students League and attended symposiums at Robert Motherwell’s studio. There he acquainted with various other art professionals, essayists and critics. Paul Wonner resumed his studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was affected by the elements of Cubism. Paul Wonner earned his BA in 1952, MA in 1953 and an MLS in the year 1955. He filled in as a library administrator at UC Davis in the 1950s, and gave lectures at the Otis Art Institute and UC Santa Barbara in the 1960s.

In 1957, Paul John Wonner affiliated with a gathering of eleven different art specialists for an exhibition known as Contemporary Bay Area Figurative Painting, at the Oakland Museum of California. With backing from other Bay Area Figurative artists, which included Richard Diebenkorn (American, 1922–1993), David Park (American, 1911–1960) and his long-lasting associate Theophilus Brown (American, 1919–2012) whom he had met in 1952 while schooling for his Masters degree, Paul Wonner drew on motivation from Baroque-style Dutch still life arts and Cubist painting styles. Brimming with colors, and with his paintings frequently portrayed as dreamlike, Paul Wonner’s art was inclined to be more expressionistic in his early years as an artist, and improved toward a hyper-realist style as the years went on. In 1956, he began painting a progression of dreamlike male bathers and young men with bouquets. Acknowledged particularly for his exceptional mature style of still life painting, Paul Wonner painting and art are showcased in public collections all over the United States. For example, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Soloman R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Numerous private collectors are looking for art by Paul Wonner for sale in art exhibitions and galleries all over California, and the United States at large.

In 1968, Paul Wonner took up a lecturing job at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and went ahead to tutor in different areas in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. In 1976, Paul Wonner put down roots in San Francisco, where he kept on working as an Abstract Realist artist, creating his still life paintings. Later in his career, Paul Wonner went back to painting human figures in enigmatically figurative scenes and settings.

On Wednesday, April 23, 2008 on the eve of his 88th birthday in San Francisco, Paul Wonner passed on from natural causes.

Paul Wonner is highly renowned for his still-life depictions done in a unique expressionist style and for all the acknowledgment accorded to him for his artistic accomplishments. He was well liked and had a charming persona.

Alberto Giacometti Biography (1901 – 1966)

Artist Alberto Giacometti was born in Switzerland. He was the oldest of four children and the son of a Post-Impressionist painter. When he was about ten, he started drawing with pencil and pastel and many of those drawings exist today. The young Alberto Giacometti then started to try different things with oils and still-life paintings and regularly used his family members as models.

He was enrolled in an Evangelical School in the town of Schiers in 1915. There Giacometti continued his artwork in a small private studio and he later took art classes in Geneva at the École des Arts Industriels. He was taught painting, drawing and sculpture under the Pointillist artist David Estoppey and the sculptor Maurice Sarkissoff. In 1920, he went to Italy with his father and was very interested in the works of the old masters. Before long he moved to Paris, was drawn to Cubism and enrolled in several art classes. By the 1930s, Alberto Giacometti was part of the Surrealist art movement and he got to be near artists like Joan Miró, André Masson, Man Ray and Max Ernst.

Alberto Giacometti and his sibling Diego fled Paris in June 1940, barely missing the attacking German army. Giacometti stayed in France, became friends with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir whos friendship would impact his figurative work. In 1946, Giacometti was able to return to Paris and his previous significant other, Annette Arm, went along with him, and the two were married in 1949. As Alberto Giacometti’s style kept on maturing, his bronze figures became larger and larger. His Woman of Venice II (1956) was almost four feet tall, and his Tall Woman II (1960) was nearly nine feet tall.

Alberto Giacometti was globally renowned by the 1960s, but unfortunately his health was not good. He was tormented by heart and circulatory issues but yet he pressed on with producing his artwork. On the night of January 11, 1966, the artist passed way from complications of pericarditis.

Robert Bechtle Biography (1932 – 2020)

Robert Bechtle, also known as Robert Alan Bechtle, was an American artist closely associated with the Bay Area art scene. Born in San Francisco, Bechtle became recognized for his highly detailed paintings of everyday American life, particularly scenes from the Bay Area and suburban California. His unique approach combined photography and painting, creating a distinctive style that explored perception, memory, and the visual character of ordinary environments.

Bechtle began his artistic career with a strong interest in Abstract Expressionism before gradually incorporating photography as a foundation for his paintings. His work is often described as “painting from photographs,” using photographic references to create meticulously rendered scenes that capture the atmosphere and subtle details of contemporary life.

As an important figure within the Bay Area art community, Bechtle’s development within the Bay Area Figurative School positioned him alongside other pioneering artists, including Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, Nathan Oliveira, Roland Petersen, and Paul Wonner. Together, these artists helped define the movement’s distinctive emphasis on figuration, direct observation, and a renewed interest in representational painting.

The influence of Pop Art is also evident throughout Bechtle’s work, particularly in his elegant yet understated portrayals of suburban landscapes, automobiles, and everyday scenes. By transforming familiar and seemingly ordinary subjects into carefully composed works of art, Bechtle explored the relationship between contemporary culture and traditional artistic craftsmanship. His approach reflected a connection to earlier artistic traditions, including the Dutch masters who elevated scenes of daily life through exceptional technical skill and visual storytelling.

Bechtle studied at the California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts) in Oakland before earning his degree from the University of California, Berkeley. Over the course of his career, he became one of the most respected contemporary painters associated with the Bay Area, and his work is held in major museum collections and admired by collectors worldwide.

Robert Bechtle passed away on September 24, 2020, leaving behind a significant legacy as a leading figure in American representational painting and the Bay Area art movement.

JOHN McCRACKEN BIOGRAPHY

John Harvey McCracken (1934 – 2011)

John McCracken artist, sculptor and painter was known for his ability to create compelling work out of what he terms basic forms. John Harvey McCracken is associated with the contemporary art scene in California, Santa Fe, New Mexico and with innovating the American art scene at large.

His most famous works are created out of dark, lacquered shapes polished to a high shine. They constitute basic geometric forms, of which color is considered by the artist to be the vital component of their construction. This innovative use of color as an aspect of form is widely considered to be John McCracken’s principal innovation and the defining element of his work.

John Harvey McCracken attended the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland and has taught throughout the country at colleges in the University of California System was well as at The University of Nevada, Hunter College, New York and the School of Visual Arts in New York.

His art is a part of the permanent collections in a great many noteworthy museums, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which currently holds two of his pieces.

John McCracken lived and worked in Santa Fe, NM and New York. After being ill for almost a year, he passed away in Manhattan at the age of 76.

Robert Arneson Biography (1930 – 1992)

Robert Carston Arneson (1930–1992) was an influential American sculptor, ceramic artist, and educator who helped redefine ceramics as a respected medium for contemporary fine art. Best known as a pioneering figure in California’s Funk Art movement, Arneson challenged traditional expectations of ceramic art by creating imaginative sculptures that combined technical mastery with humor, satire, and deeply personal expression. His innovative approach transformed the perception of ceramics from a functional craft into an important form of contemporary sculpture.

Working during one of the most creative periods in Northern California art, Arneson emerged alongside artists who helped establish the San Francisco Bay Area as a major center for postwar American art. While his work was distinct from the Bay Area Figurative Movement led by artists such as Richard Diebenkorn, both movements contributed to the region’s growing national and international reputation for artistic innovation.

Today, Robert Arneson’s sculptures are represented in the collections of major museums throughout the United States and continue to be sought after by collectors of postwar American art. His lasting influence as both an artist and educator has secured his place among the most important American ceramic sculptors of the twentieth century.

Early Life and Education

Robert Arneson was born on September 4, 1930, in Benicia, California, a small waterfront community in the San Francisco Bay Area. He demonstrated artistic talent from an early age and pursued formal training in California, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree from the California College of Arts and Crafts before completing a Master of Fine Arts degree at Mills College in 1958.

During his studies, Arneson developed a growing interest in ceramics at a time when the medium was still largely associated with functional pottery. Rather than viewing clay as simply a material for utilitarian objects, he recognized its potential as a vehicle for creative expression, experimentation, and contemporary sculpture.

Artistic Style and Significance

Robert Arneson is widely recognized as one of the pioneers of the California Funk Art movement, an influential group of Northern California artists who emerged during the 1960s. Rejecting the formality of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, Funk artists embraced humor, irreverence, and unconventional subject matter while often drawing inspiration from everyday life and popular culture.

Although California Funk Art differed stylistically from the Bay Area Figurative Movement associated with Richard Diebenkorn, both movements reflected the creative energy that defined Northern California’s postwar art scene. Together, they helped establish the region as one of America’s most important centers for contemporary art.

Arneson played a pivotal role in elevating ceramic sculpture within the contemporary art world. His works frequently challenged artistic conventions through exaggerated forms, playful satire, and witty social commentary. While many of his sculptures reflected his distinctive sense of humor, they also demonstrated exceptional craftsmanship and a deep understanding of form.

Among his most celebrated works are his self-portraits, which explored identity, perception, and the role of the artist. Working in ceramics as well as mixed media incorporating mirrors, photography, and drawing, Arneson repeatedly used his own likeness as a subject, creating works that ranged from humorous and self-deprecating to deeply introspective.

Career, Teaching, and Legacy

In 1962, Robert Arneson became head of the ceramics program at the University of California, Davis, where he helped establish one of the nation’s most respected university ceramics departments. Promoted to full professor in 1973, Arneson influenced generations of artists while helping elevate ceramic sculpture within the broader contemporary art world.

UC Davis became an important center for artistic innovation during Arneson’s tenure, attracting talented faculty and students across multiple disciplines. Among his colleagues was sculptor Manuel Neri, another leading figure in Northern California’s postwar art scene. Together with artists working throughout the Bay Area, they helped shape one of the most influential artistic communities in the United States.

Although Arneson is often remembered for his wit and irreverent artistic voice, his later work reflected a more contemplative perspective. After being diagnosed with liver cancer during the 1980s, he produced a number of deeply personal sculptures exploring themes of illness, mortality, vulnerability, and the human condition. These emotionally powerful works are widely regarded as among the finest of his career.

Robert Arneson passed away on November 2, 1992, at his home in Benicia, California, at the age of 62. His work continues to be exhibited internationally, and his influence remains evident in contemporary ceramic sculpture and postwar American art.

Why Collectors Seek Robert Arneson’s Work Today

Collectors continue to value Robert Arneson’s work for its originality, historical significance, and lasting influence on contemporary American art. As one of the leading figures of California Funk Art, he helped establish ceramic sculpture as an important medium for fine art while creating works celebrated for their humor, technical sophistication, and psychological depth.

Museum-quality sculptures, important self-portraits, and works with strong provenance or exhibition history remain particularly desirable in today’s secondary art market. Collectors also recognize Arneson’s lasting influence as an educator and his role in shaping Northern California’s vibrant artistic community alongside contemporaries such as Richard Diebenkorn and Manuel Neri.

Because market values can vary significantly based on subject matter, scale, condition, provenance, rarity, and the period in which a work was created, obtaining a professional evaluation is an important first step before selling a Robert Arneson sculpture.

Selling Your Robert Arneson Artwork

If you own a Robert Arneson sculpture or ceramic artwork and are considering selling, Modern Art Dealers provides confidential evaluations for private collectors, estates, and individuals throughout the United States.

Our specialists evaluate each artwork based on factors including authenticity, condition, provenance, rarity, and current collector demand. Depending on the artwork and your objectives, we may be able to make a direct purchase offer or recommend a private consignment strategy designed to maximize your return.

To learn more about the current market for Robert Arneson’s work, submit photographs of your artwork for a confidential, no-obligation evaluation by our art specialists.

RICHARD DIEBENKORN BIOGRAPHY

Richard Clifford Diebenkorn (1922 – 1993)

Childhood
Richard Clifford Diebenkorn, Jr. (1922-1993) was born to Mr. and Mrs. Richard Diebenkorn in April, 1922 in Portland, Oregon. At the age of two, his dad was in supply sales for a hotel, and migrated the family to San Francisco. Richard Diebenkorn was enrolled at Lowell High School from 1937 to 1940. In spite of the fact that his parents were not especially receptive of his enthusiasm for the arts, Diebenkorn had support from his grandma, an artist, and civil rights legal counselor, encouraged his visual creative ability by giving him illustrated books, taking him to visit neighborhood art galleries, and creating in him a love for European heraldic symbolism.

Diebenkorn frustrated his dad by deciding to study craftsmanship and art history instead of the more down to earth quest for medicine or law at Stanford University, where he started his undergrad studies in 1940. There he studied art history and studio art, tutored by Daniel Mendelowitz and Victor Arnautoff. The former strengthened his enthusiasm for such American artists as Charles Sheeler, Arthur Dove and, most especially, Edward Hopper. Daniel Mendelowitz, one of his art history educators and guides, acquainted the yearning painter with the work of pioneers whose works would become developmental to the advancement of Richard Diebenkorn paintings. Mendelowitz likewise took him on a trip to see the home of Sarah Stein, sister-in-law of Gertrude Stein, where he viewed works by Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse – cutting edge artists who additionally roused the creative advancement of Richard Diebenkorn’s art.

Early Training
Richard Diebenkorn got married to a fellow student at Stanford, Phyllis Gilman in June 1943. She bore him two kids, Gretchen and Christopher. He enlisted shortly after in the U.S. Marine Corps where he served two years from 1943 until 1945. During his station at the base in Quantico, Virginia, Richard Diebenkorn took the chance to explore the East Coast’s most revered modern day art collection, such as The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art and The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. All this time he tried different things with dynamic watercolor and in addition making the representational artwork that would persist when he was stationed in Hawaii, and these make up his “wartime” paintings.

Upon returning to San Francisco in 1946, Richard Diebenkorn exploited the G.I. Bill by registering at the California School of Fine Arts. The next year, 1946, he became one of the school’s faculty members when he got the Albert Bender Grant-in-Aid which afforded him the ability use a winter painting in the lively artistic surroundings of Woodstock, New York. It was here where genuine abstract painters (among them the painter Melville Price and the sculptor Raoul Hague) were discovering their exploratory ways.

Then in New York City, Richard Diebenkorn met Bradley Walker Tomlin and William Baziotes. Diebenkorn’s generally little canvases of this period mirror these sources, a large portion of who were incredibly affected by Picasso. His fellow instructors were Hassel Smith, Elmer Bischoff, Clyfford Still, Edward Corbett and David Park. In 1948, his initial sole exposition was done at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, a spectacular qualification for so young a painter. He was honored with his Bachelor of Arts degree from Stanford in 1949. It was during this 1947 to late 1949 period that his foremost “phase”— the Sausalito Period—came to fruition.

Mature Era
Richard Diebenkorn’s first comprehensive contact with the work of Henri Matisse was during the late spring of 1952, when he saw the art show arranged by Alfred Barr for the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in its location at the Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles.

Continually searching for a change of landscape, in 1950, he relocated his family to Albuquerque to seek his Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of New Mexico. The acquaintances he made while traveling, educating, and learning at these distinctive universities had a tremendous effect on the youthful painter, who took an interest in an incredible trade of thoughts. During this time, when he was flying at low elevation in a plane between Albuquerque and California, he found himself able to see the countryside from above. This occurrence had a noteworthy effect on the design of a large number of his pieces, both in New Mexico and California.

The “Albuquerque Phase” symbolizes the first mature declaration of Diebenkorn’s particular, and intense, presence on the American modern artwork platform and was likewise where his Abstract Expressionist phase really started. This Abstract Expressionist phase kept going for approximately five years, through his relocation to Urbana, Illinois, (where he had agreed to a faculty post at the University of Illinois) and back again to California. Richard Diebenkorn then resided in Berkeley between 1955 and 1966 (his “Berkeley Period”). From the fall of 1964 to the spring of 1965, Richard Diebenkorn voyaged all over Europe; specifically, he was conceded a cultural visa to visit imperative historical centers in the Soviet Union and visit their property of Matisse’s artistic creations.

Later Years
In the mid year of 1953, Richard Diebenkorn went to New York, where, among numerous artists, he met Franz Kline for the first time. In the fall of 1953, Diebenkorn got an Abraham Rosenberg Traveling Fellowship for cutting edge art studies, affording him the opportunity to work in his studio full-time. With other artists Elmer Bischoff, David Park and eventually Frank Lobdell, he consistently took a shot at figure drawing from models; one of his biggest assortments of work contains thoroughly exploratory figure drawings.

In March, 1956, he had the first of nine presentations at the Poindexter Gallery in New York; these were noted by the East Coast art foundation and promoted his national notoriety. By 1965 he started the late figurative works, described by generally level, planar zones of shading, geometric arrangements, and periodically smaller ranges of embellishing figuration. In 1966, he saw the Matisse review at the University of California, Los Angeles Art Gallery as well as a View of Notre Dame and Open Window, Collioure.

In 1967, Richard Diebenkorn and his wife relocated to Santa Monica, where he became an arts professor at UCLA, where he taught until he resigned in 1973. Amid the late 1960s and mid 1970s – alongside the companions he had made at different tutoring positions, counting David Park – Richard Diebenkorn became a focal member of the Bay Area Figurative Movement, which shunned Abstract Expressionism for figural representation. Evidently, the free will of composition and gesture in his Abstract Expressionist period was at last not to his taste.

In the long run, Diebenkorn came to strike a harmony between the utilization of figural and abstract components in his artwork. His Ocean Park series (1967-1988), for instance, comprising of 140 canvases made within a span of 21 years, skyrocketed the matured artist into national limelight. In 1980 and 1981, he briefly altered his course, creating a somewhat unusual group of art on paper referred as the “Clubs and Spades” drawings. All these pictures have ended up becoming probably some of his most exceptionally prized works.

In 1988, Richard Diebenkorn and his wife relocated to Healdsburg, California, close to the Russian River. There he chipped away at some small scale, yet stunning, drawings and sketches until he fell sick in 1992. In one of his last print series, completed in 1990, he embodied disparity on the theme of a coat on a hanger. The late drawings, intended to show an extravagant edition book of poems by W.B. Yeats distributed by San Francisco’s Arion Press, represent some sort of farewell signal.

Death
The couple were eventually compelled to move into their Berkeley apartment to be closer to medical treatment. Richard Diebenkorn passed on at the age of 71 on March 30, 1993, owing to complications from emphysema.

Although Richard Diebenkorn did not achieve the level of distinction of the Abstract Expressionists of the New York School, significant art shows in 1976 and 1997 helped springboard his notoriety to that of a noteworthy postwar American artist. His work is still examined and copied by art students till date. The columnist John Elderfield said, he is respected “for the diligence and durability of his accomplishment… he revives your faith in painting.”

DAN CHRISTENSEN BIOGRAPHY

Dan Christensen (1942 – 2007)

Art critic Clement Greenberg described Dan Christensen’s art as Color Field or Post-Painterly Abstraction. One of the leading American abstract artists, Christensen’s art was expressed through the use of both line and color. But apart from being abstract, his art and paintings offer a wide variety of styles, including modernism.

Inspired by the artwork of Jackson Pollock at an early age, Dan spent 40 years painting. And not only painting, but exploring everything connected to the art of painting. As a result, his art and paintings were original, joyful and surprising. He was innovative at the time when painting was dead. He was also a dedicated artist and his work meant a lot to him. Christensen the artist, came up with the term “the harmonious turbulence of the universe”. This turbulence came from his exploratory approach to creating artwork.

Education

He was born in Cozad, Nebraska, in 1942 and graduated from high school in North Platte. The artist later attended Chadron State College in the late 1950s, where his artistic talent was first recognized by his professors. He transferred to the Kansas City Art Institute, where he graduated as class valedictorian in 1964.

In 1964, he moved to New York, where he worked at various jobs. As a bartender, carpenter and many other things, while starting his career as an artist. It happened then and there that his art was influenced by the city and the art world of New York.

In 1967, Dan Christensen art made the move from figuration to abstract painting. He started producing paintings with a spray gun, giving them the definition of abstract and original. He drew loops, lines and colorful stacks on his paintings. This made his art quite noticeable and got him his first artwork exhibition at the Andre Emmerich Gallery.

Two years later, in 1969, Dan Christensen art took a new course. He started creating geometric “plaid” paintings, and had a first one-person show at the same Andre Emmerich Gallery, along with the prominent Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski and Helen Frankenthaler. One of Dan Christensen most famous paintings, Lisa’s Red is from this period. This painting was included in an exhibition of his work from 1966 to 2006. The exhibition was held at Sheldon Museum and was titled Dan Christensen: Forty Years of Painting.

Dan Christensen Art Career

In the 1970s and 80s, he was exploring new techniques. At that time, Dan Christensen was already an acclaimed artist in New York. But as Jacobshagen said, outside New York, probably nobody knew him. Keith Jacobshagen, a Lincoln painter, had a good feeling about Dan Christensen’s artistic talent from the very first beginning of his career as an artist. He was at the Kansas City Art Institute with Christensen in the early 1960s and said – “He had a real nice sense of skill and of touch. He was painting figuratively at that time. It wasn’t until Dan Christensen moved to New York and was influenced by the city and the New York art world that he started painting abstraction.”

Along with Jacobshagen, Kennedy, the curator of Sheldon Museum of Art supported Dan Christensen’s art. The curator described him as an innovative and dedicated artist. Both of them consider that only Dan Christensen managed to gain a national reputation at the time. But before them, there was an architect, Philip Jonson, who supported his art from his early steps. He bought some of Christensen’s art and even gave one painting to the Museum of Modern Art.

Dan Christensen’s Legacy

Fifty years later, in the 2000s, Dan Christensen is the most noted Nebraska native artist of his era. Artist Dan Christensen’s unique approach to line and shape was even researched at the Butler Institute of American Art, Ohio. His paintings are now collectible and held by both art collectors and museums. It can now be difficult to find Dan Christensen art for sale. Kennedy, the curator of the Sheldon Museum of Art, claims that Dan Christensen should have been recognized much earlier.

Artist Dan Christensen spent his whole life creating art. From the 1970s to the very end of his life he was exploring new art and painting techniques.

He spent the end of his life in East Hampton. He died in 2007, but his art is now more alive than ever.

MICHAEL GOLDBERG BIOGRAPHY

Michael Goldberg (1924 – 2007)

This work titled, Big Mathilda, is part of the “Red Paintings” (1962-1963) that Michael Goldberg created as a tribute to Mark Rothko (whose studio he occupied; once Rothko died). Knoedler had a show of these works and then had a retrospective in July, 2010.

Notes from the 2010 show:
Artists’ studios are repositories of physical and psychic energy that often is transferred from one tenant to the next. In 1962, when the Abstract Expressionist painter Michael Goldberg (1924-2008) moved into Mark Rothko’s old studio at 222 Bowery, he found the floor spattered with red paint from a series Rothko had made for the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building. He set out to make his own series of big, near-monochromatic red paintings, moving away from his earlier de Kooning-influenced work.

Seen at Knoedler, with the Broadway play “Red,” about the Seagram murals, fresh in mind, Mr. Goldberg’s paintings look much earthier and grittier than Rothko’s. The reds are dark, the color of brick or clotted blood, and cut through with irregular stripes of black, white, tan and green. The paint is thick and opaque, and sometimes looks as though it dried on the brush midstroke.

Mr. Goldberg’s process, immortalized in Frank O’Hara’s poetry, was also very different from Rothko’s. Although these paintings look somber at first, you can see traces of the jazz-influenced, improvisational brushwork that inspired O’Hara — even in the marks made with a spatula.

“Mr. Goldberg, it turns out, got more from Franz Kline and Barnett Newman than Rothko. Still, his red paintings show that artists casting about for inspiration can sometimes find it right on the studio floor.” Karen Rosenberg

JAMES BROWN BIOGRAPHY

James Brown (1951 – 2020)

James Brown artist and painter was active in Paris and Oaxaca (Mexico). He was most understood in the 1980s for his harsh painterly semi-allegorical works of art, bearing affinities to Jean-Michel Basquiat and East Village painting of the time, yet with impacts from primitive craftsmanship and established Western innovation.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, California, artist James Brown received a BFA from Immaculate Heart College, Hollywood. He then invested years in Paris, and went to the Ecole Superieure des Beaux Arts, Paris, France. He defied the established preparing there, which he considered unimportant, yet stayed as he needed to stay in Paris. Voyages through Europe seeing renaissance and particularly medieval painting of Italy impacted his work. Amid the 1980s, James Brown art blended the pioneer convention of painterly application and adherence to the photo surface with clear impacts from tribal workmanship.

In the mid 1980s artist James Brown started displaying paintings and artwork in New York, and in this decade his work turned into a hit in the exhibitions and workmanship press, offering a look to the Bad Painting and youthful neo-expressionism of the East Village painters of the time. On the twelfth of September 1987 he wedded Alexandra Condon, who was concentrating on Art History at NYU at the time. At the time, they had know one another for more than ten years.

In spite of some time on the East and West shore of New York, artist James Brown kept living in Paris. With the East’s blurring Village workmanship scene he had progressively appeared in European exhibitions, where his work was presently found in the setting of a post-war European innovation in the custom of Jean Dubuffet. James Brown and Alexandra had their first offspring, Degenhart Maria Gray Brown, on the 24th of September 1989 in New York. In 1991 their second child, Cosmas And Damian Maria Todosantos Brown, was conceived on the sixth of June in Paris. On the sixteenth of April 1993, their third little girl was born, Dagmar Maria Jane Brown, in New York.

In 1995, artist James Brown moved out to the valley of Oaxaca (Mexico) with his family, where they lived in a Hacienda for a long time. Amid this time James Brown art was continually displayed in Europe, the United States and in Mexico. Artist James Brown and his wife worked together with different specialists, making carpets in a town in the mountains of Oaxaca. The floor coverings were made in the conventional Mexican style, weaved by hand on extensive wooden casings. James Brown and Alexandra then chose to begin making books with craftsmen, so they began Cape Diem Press. Like the carpets, these books are imprinted in Oaxaca utilizing antiquated and customary systems. The books are imprinted in constrained versions, and Carpe Diem Press keeps on teaming up with specialists. In 2004 James Brown moved his family to the city of Mérida, in the Yucatán. From that point forward artist James Brown has been investing much energy in Europe, displaying his work in France, Germany, Italy and Holland. He has been working generally in Paris.

James Brown has tackled a few styles throughout the years, he does however keep up a hand-made look consolidating worries of the innovator convention with themes and otherworldly hobbies from tribal workmanship. A lot of James Brown art contains portrayals or indications of unmistakable confronts or questions. All the more, he has recently accomplished more artwork in a conceptual mode. Then again, the line in the middle of representation and reflection is regularly a troublesome one in his work. For example, his later Firmament Series – Abstract Canvas that can likewise be perused as alluding to heavenly bodies or stars, or gatherings of rocks.

Other than paintings, James Brown has additionally delivered figures and arrangement of prints at different times in his career. In the 1990s he began to intensely use collage. Drawing and other one of a kind works on paper have been vital to the advancement of James Brown art.

James Brown and his wife, Alexandra, died in an automobile accident in Mexico.

Artist Exhibitions:

• 1983 Tony Shafrazi, “Champions,” New York
• 1983 Nature Morte, New York
• 1985 Bruno Bischofberger, Zurich, Switzerland
• 1986 Leo Castelli, New York, New York
• 1995 Leo Castelli, February, New York
• 2001 Pace Prints, February, Catalogue raisonne graphic work. New York
• 2005 Ex-Escuela Quintana Roo, “James Brown 10 acos en Oaxaca,” Mérida, Mexico. (This exhibition traveled internationally)
• 2007 Galerie Karsten, Greve Paris (Showing his abstract “Firmament Series”)
• 2014 Livingstone Gallery, The Hague (NL)

Joan Mitchell Biography (1925 – 1992)

Artist Joan Mitchell was an Abstract Expressionist painter. From an affluent family, Joan Mitchell was born and raised in Chicago. Her father was a physician and her mother a poet and both parents are known to have supported her artistic talents. She attended a private high school and the teachers there also supported her aptitude with art. She attended the Chicago Art Institute and earned her degree in art in 1947 and a Master of Fine Arts in 1950.

Joan Mitchell’s artistic style was influenced by the cubist painters and also the work of the French modernist artist Paul Cezanne. She also spent some time in France and it was there that her artistic style turned toward Abstract Expressionism. Mitchell later returned to New York and lived in Greenwich Village and she would socialize with the the New York Abstract Expressionist artists. Joan Mitchell had her first solo art exhibition in 1952 and her work was well received. Toward the end of the 1950s, general interest was waning in Abstract Expressionism due to the gaining popularity of Minimalism and Pop Art.

In the mid 1950s, the artist began spending time in both New York and Paris. Ultimately she made the decision to live full time in Vétheuil, France in 1968. There the colors in her paintings began to be influenced by the natural light she experienced in the countryside – Pinks, oranges and golds. She was not a prolific artist and on average only produced about twenty or so paintings per year. She was her own critic and would throw away the artwork that she felt was not up to par.

Joan Mitchell was also very supportive and generous of young artists. Some of these aspiring artists are know to have stayed with her Vétheuil. Some for just a night or two and others for extended periods of time. Correspondence indicates that their experience with her had significant impact upon their lives.

Abstract Expressionist artist Joan Mitchell died of lung cancer in 1992 at the age of 66.

FRANK STELLA (1936 – 2024)

The Architectural Mindset Behind an Abstract Visionary

Frank Stella’s journey from Massachusetts to modern art pioneer reveals an often overlooked truth: his work represents a fundamental reconsideration of how art occupies physical space. Born May 12, 1936 to an Italian-American physician father and artistically-trained mother, Stella developed not just as a painter but as a spatial thinker who would eventually bridge the worlds of abstract art and architectural theory.

Beyond Minimalism: Stella’s Unique Relationship with Surface

While many categorize early Stella within Minimalism, this classification misses his unique innovation. At Princeton, where most art students were exploring expressionist techniques, Stella developed what colleagues later termed his “systematic curiosity” – methodically testing how paint interacts with various surfaces and viewing angles.

“Most artists were adding emotion to canvas. I became interested in how canvas itself could generate form,” Stella remarked in a rarely-cited 1982 interview with Architecture Digest.

The Black Paintings: Deconstructing Rather Than Simplifying

The groundbreaking Black Paintings (1958-60) that launched Stella’s career at age 23 are frequently misinterpreted as reductive. Our analysis suggests these works instead operated as dissections of the painting process itself with each pinstripe revealing the fundamental tension between surface and illusion that would become his career-long exploration.

The Transformation Point: Material Becomes Medium

The critical shift in Stella’s work occurred not with the well-documented Polish Village series, but slightly earlier. Our examination of his transitional works between 1968-1970 reveals his growing frustration with canvas limitations. Unlike contemporaries who moved to sculpture, Stella uniquely:

• Maintained painting’s traditional wall orientation while rejecting its flatness
• Embraced industrial materials while preserving hand-crafted elements
• Developed what we term “structural color theory” – where hue serves a constructive rather than decorative function

The Polish Village Series: Cultural Archaeology Through Construction

While other analyses focus on the Holocaust connections in Stella’s Polish Village series, our perspective centers on how these works represent Stella’s investigation of architectural memory. Each piece functions as both homage and reinvention – not preserving lost synagogues but reimagining their structural principles for contemporary art.

Stella’s Ongoing Influence on Digital Design

Stella’s experimentation with three-dimensionality has proven remarkably prescient in today’s digital design landscape. Contemporary designers of virtual environments frequently reference his later works as foundational studies in how abstract forms create navigable space – a connection rarely explored in traditional Stella scholarship.

Experience Stella’s Revolutionary Vision

Stella’s works reside in premier institutions worldwide, including the Whitney Museum, National Gallery, and San Francisco MoMA. Yet experiencing these pieces through mere reproduction misses their essential spatial quality. We recommend viewing his large-scale installations at the Menil Collection (Houston) or Toledo Museum of Art, where the full impact of his artistic innovation becomes tangible.

Frank Stella continued to challenge conventional categorizations at age 89, remarking at that time: “I’m still not interested in making pictures. I’m interested in making objects that happen to hang on walls.” Frank Stella passed away May 4, 2024.

Frank Stella Art in Public Collections (partial list):

• Menil Collection; Houston, TX
• Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Washington, D.C.
• San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
• National Gallery of Art; Washington, D.C.
• Toledo Museum of Art
• Whitney Museum of American Art; New York

Biography

SAM FRANCIS (1923 – 1994)

In the summer of 1923, one of the twentieth century’s most profound Abstract Expressionists artists, Sam Lewis Francis, was born in San Mateo, California. He enrolled in the University Of California at Berkeley in 1941. There he studied psychology and a pre-medical course before dropping out to join the United States Army Air Corps. This is where he was to develop his artistic genius through a twist of medical fate. A spinal injury prompted him to take up painting and the rest they say is history. Today, artist Sam Francis is one of America’s most renowned Abstract Expressionist artists.

Artistic Influences and Style

Francis was influenced by artists Clyfford Styll and Mark Rothko. During his lifetime he created thousands of paintings, artwork on paper, prints and monotypes. These various mediums of Sam Francis artwork have been showcased in major museum collections and institutions around the world. His art was highly influenced by New York abstract expressionism, color field painting, Chinese and Japanese art (where he visited in 1957), French impressionism and Bay Area roots.

Unique Artistic Contributions

He applied a robust style of atmospheric color to his paintings of the 1950s that make his works unique from the normal harsh, anxiety-ridden canvases of the first generation Abstract expressionists. Sam Francis art is not only revered for its historical relevance to aesthetic vision but also for his in-depth mind and soul he puts into his artwork. This is why he is regarded as a contemporary renaissance man.

Through the transformative phase of his career, Sam Francis familiarized himself with the study of Monet’s Water Lilies and was greatly influenced by his close relationship with the Matisse family and artists Al Held, Joan Mitchell, and Jean-Paul Riopelle. After earning an art degree at Cal Berkeley in 1950, artist Sam Francis would go on to be named “the hottest American painter in Paris these days” by Time Magazine. Sam Francis’ interest in creative arts was expansive and he was able to delve into technology, psychology, science, medicine, and he also became an advocate for environmental protection.

Personal Life and Marriages

Sam Francis married his first wife, Vera Miller, in 1947 while he was recovering from the spinal cord injury he sustained while in the army. However the marriage didn’t last long and he also didn’t have much luck with other women as he ultimately married 4 other woman. His fifth was the English painter Margaret Smith who gave him a son named, Augustus. He also had another son, Shingo from his ex wife Mako Kawase.

Artist Sam Francis had an adventurous spirit and this led him to travel the world extensively to study. He also maintained art studios in different parts of the world in places like Berlin, Paris, Tokyo, Mexico City, New York and Northern and Southern California. His travels gave him a different perspective on art and painting styles techniques and cultural influences. This helped to shape the growth of his own dialogue and painting style. Sam Francis possessed a lyrical and gestural hand, enabling him to capture and record the brilliance, energy and intensity of color at different moments of time and periods of his life. Sam Francis paintings embody his love of literature, music and science, while reflecting his deep range of emotions and personal turmoil.

Techniques and Innovations

His art is shaped by many visual indicators reminiscent of the “action painting” or art informal schools of Abstract Expressionism. The thing that stood Sam Francis out as a unique painter was his technique of tachisme. This technique of heavy blotches of free-flowing oil paints were allowed to drip down and create an accidental design. In the Sam Francis artwork “In Blue Balls VII”, which was part of the 1964 Post-Painterly Abstraction exhibit, Francis used far less paint than he was accustomed to. The finished product showcases razor thin lines of blue paint that cascade down from the more noticeable blotches applied throughout the canvas.

Later Years and Continued Creativity

In 1962, the artist settled in Santa Monica, California. He worked there extensively for the next thirty years with the medium of printmaking as well as oil painting. He was one of the first artists to try “empty-center” paintings. These paintings had pigment stains on the periphery and much open space where other normal canvases were filled with paint. But in the year 1970, the viewer will find that his art abandoned the “empty-center” method.

In his later years, Sam Francis invested heavily in research to find solutions to non-renewable energy sources and cures for AIDs. In all these aspects of life, the artist explored the nature of creativity, what drives it, the relevance of testing new ideas through experimentation as well as the roles of imagination, intuition and knowledge. The Sam Francis Foundation which was created in his honor is dedicated to expanding his sense of wonder, his desire to explore and his life force to be creative.

Death and Recognition

The artist had such a love for creating art that he would physically exhaust himself artistically even though he was incapacitated in his final years. While in poor health, and with a crippled right hand (he even painted with an IV in his arm for a few days) he still painted one hundred and fifty small pictures, working until he had no more energy and they had to put him back to bed.

Sam Francis passed away on November 4, 1995 at the age of seventy-one.

JACK TWORKOV BIOGRAPHY

Jack Tworkov (1900 – 1982)

Artist Jack Tworkov was born in Biala Podlaska, then the Russian Empire. He would become a founding member of the New York School and the Eight Street Club, and one of the most prominent and awarded American artists of the twentieth century. He was also one of the two founders of the Abstract Expressionist Style.

In 1913, when Jack Tworkov was just 13 years old, he moved to the United States with his mother and younger sister. He was a student of English language at Columbia University until 1923, when he graduated. At first, Tworkov wanted to become a writer, but after seeing paintings of the two great artists – Matisse and Cezanne for the first time, he realized he wanted to study art. That same year, Jack became a student of the National Academy of Design along with Ivan Olinsky, and spent his summer in Provincetown, Massachusetts. In 1924, the artist returned to Provincetown to continue his studies, this time with Ross Moffett. There he met Karl Knaths, another lover of the art of Cezanne. Karl Knaths showed him the work of Joan Miro, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. During the years 1925 and 1926 Jack Tworkov was a student of the Art Students League and then in 1928 he obtained his American citizenship and had his art exhibited with the New England Society of Contemporary Art and Provincetown Art Association.

In 1929, he was painting in Provincetown, and also exhibiting paintings in New York with Societe Anonyme. In 1933, he visited Europe for the first time since immigrating to the USA. Upon his return he was accepted as a participant in the Treasury Department’s Public Works of Art Project. During this time he married Rachel Wolodarsky, with whom he had two daughters. Jack Tworkov had his first one-man show at ACA Gallery, New York in 1940. During the 1940s he became friends with Willem de Kooning and the two artists would remain friends for many years. In 1944, he began working with automatic drawings in ink, which was very different from his academic training. During World War II, Jack Tworkov briefly left his profession as an artist and painter and worked as a draftsman. He then returned to creating art and experimenting with abstract painting. By 1947, Jack Tworkov had another one-man show in New York, this time at Charles Egan Gallery.

In the early 1950’s Jack Tworkov creates association with Willem de Kooning and the two artists share their ideas, experiences and an art studio. Ultimately the two form their own Abstract Expressionist Style with their gestural abstract paintings. Their combined studio existed until 1953. Jack Tworkov was also teaching at American University, Washington DC during this same period. In 1958, Jack Tworkov paintings were being exhibited in eight European cities and were included in ‘’The New American Painting’’ exhibits.

In 1962, Jack Tworkov paintings were being exhibited in Galerie de France, along with other famous artists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning. In 1963 Jack Tworkov won the Corcoran Gold Medal in Washington, DC. He was also elected chairman at the School of Art and Architecture at Yale University. While there he attracted many famous names to come teach art there – George Wardlaw, Al Held and others. Tworkov also taught many artists that would later become famous names – Chuck Close, Richard Serra and many others. In 1964, Jack Tworkov paintings were being exhibited retrospectively in 6 different major museums. By the end of the sixties, Jack Tworkov abandoned abstract gesture paintings, and started to include geometry in his paintings. In 1969, he became a professor of painting at the Yale University. He continued to teach at various universities later in his life, exhibiting his paintings at the same time both in the U.S. and in Europe.

His later paintings reflect his maturity as an artist and are well known for delicate brush strokes and strong lines. His paintings have been described as both tender and strong at the same time. Jack Tworkov received Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts Degrees three times during his lifetime. Then in 1974, he also received the Medal for Painting from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Jack Tworkov also received many other awards during the seventies.

Jack Tworkov was present in the world of art in various ways until the very end of his life. He died in September 1982 at his home in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Zao Wou-Ki Biography (1921-2013)

Early Life and Chinese Training

Zao Wou-Ki was born on February 13, 1921, in Beijing, China, into an artistic family. His father worked as a calligrapher, introducing young Zao to traditional Chinese artistic practices. The artist studied calligraphy in Dantu, connecting with his ancestral roots and developing skills that would later influence his distinctive painting style.

In 1935, Zao Wou-Ki enrolled at the School of Fine Arts in Hangzhou, where he studied painting for six years. He continued his education at the Hangzhou National Academy of Fine Arts, eventually becoming a teacher there. His first solo exhibition opened in 1942, featuring his works alongside those of his mentor Wu Dayu, marking the beginning of his professional artistic career.

Paris Period and Abstract Development

In 1948, Zao Wou-Ki moved to Paris with his first wife Lan-Ian, leaving their son with his parents in China to pursue their artistic ambitions. The couple settled in Montparnasse, where Zao became immersed in the vibrant Parisian art scene. His early exhibitions attracted admiration from renowned artists including Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso.

During this period, Zao Wou-Ki studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and lived on Rue du Moulin Vert, near Alberto Giacometti’s studio. He frequently gathered with other prominent artists at Galerie Nina Dausset, establishing crucial connections within the international art community.

American Influence and Style Evolution

Following his divorce in the mid-1950s, Zao Wou-Ki visited his brother in New Jersey, spending six weeks exploring the New York art scene. This American exposure influenced his experimentation with pop art techniques, resulting in several significant paintings. His largest pop art work, housed in the Detroit Institute of Arts, was a gift from his brother during this transformative period.

After traveling to Tokyo and Hong Kong, Zao met his second wife, actress Chan May-Kan, whom he later encouraged to pursue sculpture. By 1957, his painting style had evolved into pure abstraction, incorporating what he called a “cypher-like signature” that combined Chinese characters representing his first name with Western orthography for his surname—a visual representation of his dual cultural heritage.

Return to Chinese Traditions and Later Works

In 1972, Zao Wou-Ki returned to ink painting techniques learned in his youth, continuing this approach through the late 1970s. This period coincided with personal tragedy when his second wife, struggling with mental illness, committed suicide.

The early 1990s marked another stylistic shift, with Zao predominantly using black colors and saturated hues in his compositions. From 1993 to 2002, his paintings featured rich surfaces created through various mark-making techniques including spattering, pouring, and wiping. Despite these evolutionary changes, Chinese ink remained a constant element throughout all periods of his artistic development.

Recognition and Legacy

Zao Wou-Ki’s contributions to modern art earned him membership in the prestigious Académie des Beaux-Arts, part of the Académie Française reserved for architects and painters. His artistic legacy bridges Eastern and Western aesthetics, creating a unique visual language that influenced contemporary abstract painting.

The artist documented his life journey in an autobiography, detailing the emotional challenges of his transition from China to Paris and how these experiences shaped his artistic evolution. Zao Wou-Ki died April 9, 2013 at age 92 in Nyon, Switzerland, leaving behind a body of work that continues to command significant attention in the international art market.

NATHAN OLIVEIRA BIOGRAPHY

Nathan Oliveira (1928 – 2010)

Born Nathan Joseph Roderick, he would become well known as the artist Nathan Oliveira. He was born December 19, 1928 in Oakland, California. His father immigrated from Portugal with the last name Rodrigues, but later changed it to Roderick. About the artist’s last name of Oliveira, he took it from his mother’s second husband who was also a Portuguese immigrant.

In the late 1940s, San Francisco was a perfect place for poets, musicians and artists, so Nathan Oliveira moved there. He became a member of the Bay Area figurative school. This group consisted of artists such as Elmer Bichoff, David Park and Richard Diebenkorn. These artists had absorbed Abstract Expressionism, but landscape and figurative painting were the main points of their work. But, the style of Nathan Oliveira sculpture and paintings are difficult to categorize.

Nathan Oliveira Paintings

Nathan Oliveira paintings were abstract and painted with a brushy style. His painting and sculpture reflects influence of European artists such as Edvard Munch, Oskar Kokoschka, Francis Bacon and Alberto Giacometti.

Another influence was from Max Beckmann, the German painter. Nathan Oliveira studied with him and in a 1992 interview said: “There was a power that was emanating from his painting that was far more potent than what I was recognizing in most things I was seeing, and I wanted this”. “That made sense to me, that was the influence.”

Oliveira’s paintings are a bit different from his colleagues paintings of the figurative school. Although he used to work with vivid colors, he was a bit more committed to the darker side.

Nathan Oliveira used to take painting lessons from a marine artist. This later encouraged him to enroll in the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. In the summer of 1950, he studied at Mills College also in Oakland. He graduated in 1951, and received his master’s degree one year later. After serving in the Army, he resided in San Francisco. He lived at the Presidio and started showing his work. Nathan Oliveira paintings were shown in a solo exhibition in 1958, at the Alan Gallery in Manhattan. In 1959, the new curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, Peter Selz, included Nathan Oliveira paintings in the exhibition called New Figures of Man. This brought him a huge success in a short period of time. Nathan Oliveira paintings were described as spontaneous, just like he “was finding the figure in the process of painting it”, as Mr. Selz once wrote about him.

But this new fame and its demands were too overwhelming for the artist. He was constantly working on producing new paintings and sculptures. This led to his physical exhaustion. There was also the appearance of Pop Art, a new movement at the time which began replacing his art. In an interview from 1978, Nathan Oliveira said: “I reached a dry spell, lacking in imagination, and the incentive seemed to be gone“. It was about this time that he began concentrating on prints, drawings and watercolors.

In 1965, Nathan Oliveira became a permanent member of the art department at Stanford University. There he taught studio art for almost 30 years and created a printmaking program.

Although his paintings didn’t always portray the human figure, he always returned to figurative paintings and they were quite intense. In 1970, he produced a painting called Standing Figure and this painting represents that intensity. It has a pink female figure without a face, turned toward the viewer with a white death mask. Also fascinating are his paintings with dancers and runners, with red and dark orange backgrounds. These paintings belong to the last decade of Nathan Oliveira’s paintings.

In the 1990s, Nathan Oliveira created the Stelae series of paintings. These works have vertical forms resembling the menhirs of Stonehenge, the solemn majesty of Egyptian obelisks or Han dynasty tomb posts. But they also resemble the artist’s earlier paintings with the isolated figures.

Nathan Oliveira paintings later included a series of large-scale landscapes called The Windhover. Named after a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. The main figures on these landscapes are birds – red-tailed hawks and kestrels. These are birds the artist had the opportunity to observe very close to his painting studio.

In 2010, at the age of 81, artist Nathan Oliveira passed away in Palo Alto, CA.

GEORGE CHANN BIOGRAPHY

George Chann (Chinese/American, 1913-1995)

Artist George Chann (Chen Yinpi), was born in Zhongshan County, Guandong Province, China on Jan. 1, 1913. Chann and his father arrived in California as Chinese immigrants in 1922. George Chann lived in a missionary orphanage in Stockton, California and by the late 1920’s had moved to San Francisco. He lived in San Mateo from the early 1930’s. The most important decision of his life was to pursue an art career. Once decided, he moved to Los Angeles and began his studies at the Otis Art Institute (today the Los Angeles Art Institute) after having received a scholarship. He remained at the Otis Art Institute from 1934 to 1942.

During that time George exhibited his work in the California Art Club, 1941 (solo); The California Palace of the Legion of Honor, 1942, 1944 (solos); Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1942 (solo), 1943; De Young Museum, 1944 (solo); Foundation of Western Art (Los Angeles), 1945, the San Diego Fine Arts Gallery and numerous others.

The artist excelled in his talent while studying under the great Edouard Vysekal and Alexander Brook. George Chann’s early artwork had its roots in the post-Impressionist movement. He created his own stylized landscapes and paintings of social-realism. These included character studies of ethnic peoples (Chinese, Blacks, and Mexicans) he must have encountered in his travels and living in Los Angeles. George Chann’s artwork would depict a strong humanitarian message and a deep compassion that would carry him throughout his lifetime.

One of his most dramatic paintings depicts the Los Angeles riots that surrounded the Rodney King incident and resulting fires. To show the power of emotions, George Chann merged representative and abstract styles. This was to be Chann’s last artwork in 1995.

George Chann Reviews

A whole variety of art critics from major news outlets took notice of George Chann’s enormous talent. Rollin McKinney, the Art Director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), introduced George Chann’s artwork to many museums. This helped to open doors to some of his most notable shows. In fact, George Chann was the first Chinese artist to exhibit at the LACMA.

Alfred Frankenstein of the San Francisco Chronicle, critic Alexander Fried and Kay English, Art Directors of the San Francisco Examiner both wrote excellent reviews of George Chann artwork. These reviews came after attending Chann’s first show at the Palace of Legion of Honor (1942) and later shows in the San Francisco area (CPLH and De Young Museum both in 1944).

George Chann Exhibitions

George Chann art exhibitions in Los Angeles also garnered him many public admirers. Alma May Cook of the Los Angeles Herald Express followed his career and wrote several reviews about his talent. The great art critic, Arthur Miller of the Los Angeles Times, and later Howard Devere of the New York Times, both wrote one or more articles documenting Chann’s outstanding achievements. George Chann’s artwork appeared in national magazines like Art Digest Magazine, Art News, and Life Magazine. George Chann paintings were also represented in the Joan Ankrum Gallery and the Heritage Gallery (Los Angeles) from the 1960s through the 1980s. Because of the promotion of his work and the glowing reviews in the press, George Chann paintings began to sell to prominent collectors from Hollywood. This included the famous actor, Edward G. Robinson.

In 1947, George returned to China. He spent the next few years embracing his culture and incorporating his Asian culture into his artwork. While in Shanghai, he met his wife-to-be, Yvonne Chun. As the difficulties of the Communist takeover became more evident, the Chann’s left for Hong Kong in April 1949 where they married. Leaving behind their embattled home, the Chann’s returned to the United States. Their daughter, Janet, was born in San Francisco, CA in 1950.

George Chann Abstract Expressionism

After returning to the United States, George Chann realized that the Los Angeles art scene had changed. To reestablish himself in the art community he began exhibiting new works at the James Vigeveno Gallery. At this gallery, his artwork was very unique. The gallery exhibited American artists such as Grandma Moses and Paul Clemens, but focused upon European artists such as Van Gough, Renoir, Chagall and Rouault.

Comfortable with the abstract, George Chann began to integrate his Chinese heritage into the predominant artistic direction of the 1950’s, Abstract Expressionism. He took to this new style and began developing a combination of calligraphy and oils painted with precise individual strokes. Painting with one color and shape over another, George Chann often created collages of poetry painted on rice paper.

George Chann died in May, 1995 after enjoying a successful artistic career.

George Chann Retrospectives

Beginning in the year 2000, George Chann’s artwork and unique talent began a new trajectory. There was a major retrospective in Taipei, Taiwan. In 2005, another major retrospective of his abstract art was in Shanghai. In 2014, Christie’s Hong Kong initiated an effort to bring his genius to their Chinese collectors. This exhibit and sale was titled The Trajectory of George Chann. It shows his artistic development and his strong sales prices through the years.

CHU TEH-CHUN BIOGRAPHY

Chu Teh-Chun (Chinese/French, 1920-2014)

Chinese artist Chu Teh-Chun was born in China in 1920, in the province of Jiangsu. The province of his birth is an important fact, as this region is also known as water country and would later become an influence on his painting style. He was among a small group of Chinese artists who eventually moved to Paris, due to the political situation in their country. Teh-Chun is also known for incorporating Chinese traditional art to the art of the West. The majority of his paintings were produced in the West, France, to be more precise, but he is considered to have significantly contributed to the Chinese modern art movement. Chu Teh-Chun was trying to produce paintings which could be easily understood and loved by everyone, and he clearly accomplished this goal. But it wasn’t just the paintings he created. His artistic abilities were wide ranging – from creating large-scale paintings, graphics, diptychs and triptychs, to working with ceramics. His style was unique and he created marvelous artwork.

Chu Teh-Chun was born into a family of doctors. From the very beginning of his life, Chu Teh-Chun was familiar with Chinese art and calligraphy, as his father and grandfather were collectors of traditional Chinese paintings. His family supported his artistic side, so in 1945, at the age of 15, Chu Teh-Chun entered the National School of Fine Arts in Hangzhou. One of Teh-Chun’s professors was Lin Fengmian, the father of modern Chinese art. He was blending the Western and Eastern art, like Chu Teh-Chun’s paintings would later and this possibly influenced his decision to move to a mythical France and settle there.

The artist didn’t just learn techniques of traditional art in France; he became familiar with the work of the major impressionists artists as well, such as Renoir, Matisse, Picasso and Cezanne. Impressionism fascinated him and in it he discovered another technique. At this time he befriended two other Chinese artists – Wu Guanzhong and Zao Wou-Ki. These were important friendships for all three artists as they ultimately influenced each other’s artwork throughout their lives, and they were also lifelong friends.

In 1941, he graduated from school and started working there as an assistant professor. He was teaching architecture from 1944 until he transferred to Taipei in 1949. In 1948, Teh-Chun married Liu Han and had a daughter with her the following year. In 1951 he started working as a professor at the National Taiwan Normal University, where he fell in love with a student whom he later married. His social status was high at the time, but he was still dreaming about moving to Europe and leaving his profession. In 1953, he had his first one-man show.

In 1955, at the age of 35, Chu Teh-Chun moved to Europe with his new wife. The journey was long, and one of their stops was Egypt. He visited Cairo and discovered Pharaonic art – a first contact with western art. He arrived in Paris in 1955, and settled there. This is also when he was introduced to modern art. That same year, Chu Teh-Chun artist and painter visited the exhibition of the late Nicolas de Staël in the Denise-René gallery, and it was around this time that he abandoned figurative painting. He was moved by unrestrained brush strokes, and moved on to new abstract techniques color combinations. Chu Teh-Chun artist works started to display rich colors with light and dark contrasts. The artwork of Chu Teh-Chun also began to incorporate calligraphy in his abstract paintings, thereby connecting the art of the West with the art of the Far East.

Chu Teh-Chun’s new artwork became an immediate success. That same year, he entered and won the Silver Prize at the Paris Spring Salon for a portrait of his wife Tung Ching-Chao, which was later described as ‘’Mona Lisa of the East’’.

Ultimately, Chu Teh-Chun was to become an abstract artist, inspired by his life in Paris. He continued to produce paintings linked to China, but replaced the traditional urban views with lively colors and shapes. Chu Teh-Chun paintings present both real and the imaginary, based on his experience. His main sources of inspiration were nature and its landscapes, and climatic phenomena. It was during the next few years that the artwork of Chu Teh-Chun made a name for him as an artist.

In 1958, the first Chu Teh-Chun artist exhibition was held in Paris. The exhibition was a huge success, and he was offered a 6 year contract with the Legendre gallery. This allowed the artist to invest in his own workshop. While working in the gallery, he met some other Parisian artists, such as Kijno and Feraud and he became a part of Parisian artistic life.

Abstract art gave Chu Teh-Chun artistic freedom to express himself and communicate more easily and ultimately abstraction became a necessity for him. In 1964, Chu Teh-Chun artist works were exhibited at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. This exhibition gained him an international reputation. After that, Chu Teh-Chun paintings were exhibited in Jerusalem, Athens and at the Sao Paulo Biennale in 1969. In the 1970s he took up calligraphy again. This connected Teh-Chun to his Chinese roots and he practiced something he hadn’t done since he was young. He incorporated elements of calligraphy in his paintings and this would be one of Chu Teh-Chun’s most popular styles of painting.

In 1980, Chu Teh-Chun artist and painter became a French citizen. In 1983 he met his old teacher in Paris and renewed his friendship with Wu Guanzhong and the other Chinese artists in France. That same year, the department of Fine Arts of the University of Hong Kong invited Chu Teh-Chun to be on the final year examining board.

In 1987, The National Museum in Taipei made it possible for Chu Teh-Chun artist works to be exhibited, 32 years after his leaving. That was the first time Chu Teh-Chun had an exhibition showing all his artwork. In the 1990s, Chu Teh-Chun moved to the suburbs – to Vitry-sur-Seine in Val de Marne. There he created paintings in his big workshop and on large formats. Artist Chu Teh-Chun exhibited his diptychs and triptychs throughout Europe, the US and Far East. In 1997, Chu Teh-Chun was made a member of the Academie des Beaux-Arts.

In 2001, Chu Teh-Chun artist works became widely recognized. He became a Chevalier of the Order of Academic Palms and the President of France appointed him as a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. Chu Teh-Chun considered the painting The Aura of Revival to be his best work. In 2003, he donated the painting to the Shanghai Grand Theatre and the painting was temporarily displayed in the lobby. In 2006, Chu Teh-Chun was appointed as the Officer of the National Order of Merit. That same year, he received the European Gold Medal of Merit in Luxembourg. During that period, his artwork was described as the meeting between cultured Chinese tradition and contemporary French painting. In 2008, the artist began to include ceramics and during this period he produced a series of 56 vases. The name of the collection was “De Neige, d’or et d’azur”.

In 2009, Chu Teh-Chun had a stroke, which made it impossible for him to continue with his work although he would continue to live in Paris until his death.

In 2010, a retrospective exhibition of his work was held at the National Museum of China.

On March 26, 2014, not long after the death of his artist friends Wu Guanzhong, who died in 2010, and Zao Wou-ki, who died in 2013, the renowned artist, and the last of the ‘’Three Musketeers’’ Chu Teh-Chun artist dies at the age of 93. With him gone, the generation of Chinese painters who lived in Europe was gone. His death was labeled as the end of an era.

John Baldessari Biography (1931 – 2020)

A gifted artist and teacher, John Baldessari was born in 1931. He is most associated with the California art world and, particularly, with his long career in education.

Baldessari was a native of National City, California, near San Diego. His education includes a Bachelor’s in Painting from San Diego State University in 1953 and an MA from the same university in 1957. He studied for a time in Berkeley in 1953 and began his teaching career during his graduate studies.

His teaching resume spans nearly five decades, working at Southwestern College at Chula Vista throughout the 1960’s. Since 1970, John Baldessari has been teaching at the California Institute of Arts in Los Angeles.

John Baldessari art represents his multi-discipline approach. He uses various mediums such as photography, video and film, an interest which he began to develop in the 1960’s. He also worked in books, public works and billboards.

Baldessari was the recipient of the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award, the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative and his art has been featured in over 200 solo exhibitions and over 700 multi-artist exhibitions across the nation. He was the subject of a retrospective at the Tate Modern, London in 2009.

John Baldessari passed away at his home in Los Angeles on January 2, 2020, at the age of 88.