The way art in California developed from Gold Rush days to the present is a fascinating story. The early artists came from Europe and applied European styles to Western subjects. But they also established art schools here, and their students began to paint like Californians. For a long time, the state itself—it's scenery and typical activities—was the main subject of painting, but by the middle of the 20th century, artists were applying the California attitude to a wide range of subjects and ideas. The California attitude is experimental, inclusive, and exuberant, and that shows in the state's vibrant art trends.
The Crocker Museum of Art in Sacramento has a very large collection of works by California artists, representing all the major periods and most of the important artists in the state's history, especially for Northern California. Considered in order, the collection presents a survey of how art developed in this state.
Gold Rush Days
Charles Christian Nahl (1818-1878)
California's first significant artist was Charles Christian Nahl, a native of Germany, where he attended the art academy in his hometown. In 1846, when he was 28, he and fellow artist Frederick Wenderoth moved to Paris. There he continued his studies, and exhibited in the prestigious Paris Salon. In 1849, Nahl, with his family, and their friend, August Wenderoth, sailed for New York and settled in Brooklyn. Lured by the prospect of gold, the group left for California in 1851. After failing to strike it rich, Nahl returned to making art. He and Wenderoth established a studio in San Francisco in 1851, and became part of the core art community there. The Crocker has a dozen or more of his works; the Crocker family commissioned five major works in the 1860s and 1870s. The art museums in Oakland and San Francisco also have important examples of his work.
Nahl painted wall-filling canvases, usually with figures and an implied narrative. Some of them are very attractive, but sometimes his style is comically theatrical and obvious. It is worth noting that similarly over-the-top narrative paintings were popular in Germany and Russia in the 19th century.
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| Charles Christian Nahl, 1818-1878 The Love Chase, 1869 |
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| Charles Christian Nahl, 1818-1878 The Indian Camp, 1874 |
William Hahn (1829-1887)
Another German immigrant to become popular for California subjects was William Hahn. He was already a versatile and successful painter of the "Düsseldorf" style when he met California artist William Keith, who was visiting Germany with his wife. On the eve of the Franco-Prussian War, he accompanied the Keiths to the U.S. In 1872, the two artists set up a studio in San Francisco.
Hahn spent his first 6 months documenting this street scene, which made his career when it was purchased by Judge Edwin Crocker, who was building an art collection in Sacramento. Although it is a beautifully detailed document of the period, it is a large canvas and it is difficult to photograph because of the deep shadow around the cart being loaded on the left.
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| William Hahn, 1829-1887 Market Scene, Sansome Street, San Francisco, 1872 |
Thomas Hill (1829-1908)
Thomas Hill was born in England but he emigrated to the U.S. with his family at the age of 15, and received his art training at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He was loosely associated with the Hudson River School, though he was a generation younger. The Hudson River School of painting tended toward grand scale landscapes with exquisite lighting effects and spiritual overtones. It may be fairly said that Hill brought that style to the Yosemite Valley, his signature subject.
Hill had financial problems and ill health when he brought his large family to San Francisco in 1861 (Wikipedia cites the date as 1856, but other sites agree on 1861, when he was age 32, which is more consistent with his life story). He established himself as an artist but his career didn't really take off until he discovered the Yosemite Valley; sources disagree, but the Crocker Museum asserts that his first sketching trip to Yosemite was in 1865, in the company of photographer Carleton Watkins and another painter, Virgil Williams. In any case, he exhibited Sugar Loaf Peak, El Dorado County in San Francisco that same year, and it was the first major work that Edwin and Margaret Crocker purchased from a contemporary Californian artist.
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| Thomas Hill, 1829-1908 Sugar Loaf Peak, El Dorado County, 1865 |
Edwin Deakin (1838-1923)
Although he was largely self-taught, except for a stint of decorating furniture, Edwin Deakin had a magical way with an academic type of detailed realism. He occasionally strayed into sentimentality, but some of his paintings are irresistible.
At the time he emigrated to the U.S. in 1856, he was already a notable landscape artist in his native England, though he was only 18. His family settled in Chicago, where his father opened a hardware store and Deakin began work as a portrait and landscape painter. After the family business and most of his art were destroyed by the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, Deakin moved to San Francisco and opened a studio. He was an active part of the art community and his work soon became popular. He traveled extensively in the U.S. and Europe looking for romantic subjects. In 1890 he settled in Berkeley, building a home and studio there. Though he was highly successful, he is now considered a minor artist, known mainly for his many paintings of the California missions.
As a painter Deakin had an incredible range. Although the style is traditional, this floral still life is wonderfully vibrant.
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| Edwin Deakin, 1838-1923 Roses, 1912 |
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| Edwin Deakin, 1838-1923 Cattle Drive near the Mission, 1876 |
Many of Deakin's works illustrate works of literature, such as the scene below. You don't need to know the story to see a lonely old man taking solace in a venerable building.
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| Edwin Deakin, 1838-1923 She Will Come Tomorrow, 1888 |
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| Edwin Deakin, 1838-1923 Strawberry Creek, 1893 |
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| Edwin Deakin, 1838-1923 Palace of Fine Arts and the Lagoon, c. 1915 |
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| Colin Campbell Cooper, 1856-1937 Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco, 1916 |
Turn of the Century
California School of Design
In 1871, Charles Christian Nahl, Thomas Hill, and a couple dozen other artists formed the San Francisco Art Association for the purpose of promoting art and art education. That organization founded the California School of Design in 1873, making it the first significant art school in California. It welcomed both women and men as both students and faculty; out of sixty students in the first class of the School of Design, forty-six were women. Arthur Mathews was its director from 1890 to 1906.
The school has been through many transformations and several name changes. Many of the California artists at the Crocker received some training here, but their biographies may name various art schools that are later incarnations of the California School of Design.
Mark Hopkins Institute: In 1893 the Mark Hopkins mansion was donated to the school, and it became known as the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art, until it was burned down by the Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906.
San Francisco Institute of Art: A new building was erected on the same site, and the school was renamed San Francisco Institute of Art.
California School of Fine Arts: In 1916 the Institute was renamed the California School of Fine Arts. In 1926 it moved to its current location at 800 Chestnut Street.
San Francisco Art Institute: In 1961 the school was renamed the San Francisco Art Institute. It is considered one of the most prestigious colleges of art in the United States.
The first major artist to be born in San Francisco was Theodore Wores; his parents were immigrants from Hungary. When the California School of Design opened in 1874, Wores was one of its first students. After a year he moved to Munich, where he spent six years studying under Frank Duveneck, a successful American painter. Later he set up a studio near Chinatown in San Francisco and began specializing in genre scenes of the area. In the mid-1880s he spent 3 years in Japan, and his paintings of Japanese subjects were well-received. This example is from his second trip, in 1892.
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| Theodore Wores, 1859-1939 The Iris Flowers of Hori Kiri, Tokio, c. 1893 |
Arthur Mathews (1860-1945)
One of the earliest artist/educators in California was Arthur Mathews. He was born in Wisconsin, but his architect father moved the family to the East Bay when he was six. He studied painting at the California School of Design, but he augmented that with 4 years of study in Paris, at the Académie Julian. When Matthews returned in 1889, he began teaching at the California School of Design. He became its director the next year and continued until 1906. In 1894 he married one of his students, Lucia Kleinhaus. In the late 1890s they lived in Paris, enabling Lucia to study under American artist James McNeill Whistler.
When they returned to California, the pair developed a unified approach to painting, mural decorations, the graphic arts, and the design of frames, furniture and decorative objects. For more than two decades they were the most influential artists in Northern California. Arthur Mathews' students included Granville Redmond, Armin Hansen, and Maynard Dixon. Works by both Arthur and Lucia are shown by all the big California art museums, as well as major national museums.
Below is a 8-foot wide mural by Arthur Mathews that is hard to like and was even harder to photograph in the museum's dim lighting. The muted colors are a style called Tonalism, showing Whistler's influence; this style makes it difficult to distinguish the figures and determine their role in the story. The subject is Saint Francis, here dressed as a padre, gazing toward what would one day be the city of San Francisco; I take it that the white-robed female is a sort of Victory figure.
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| Arthur Mathews, 1860-1945 Vision of Saint Francis, 1911 |
One of Arthur Mathews students was Granville Redmond, who was born in Philadelphia, but raised in San Jose, California. Like many other students at the California School of Design, he went on to study at the Académie Julian in Paris. When he returned to California in 1898, he settled in Los Angeles. He is particularly known for fields of poppies.
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| Granville Redmond, 1871-1935 Patch of Poppies, 1912 |
M. Evelyn McCormick (1862-1948)
One of the earliest women artists to manifest the "free spirit" ethos of California was Evelyn McCormick, who made her name less gender-specific with the first initial M. She was born in the mining community of Placerville, but raised and educated in San Francisco. She attended the California School of Design in the late 1880s, and followed her lover, Guy Rose, to Paris in 1889. She and a handful of other women from California studied at the Academie Julian under some of the finest Salon painters of the day. McCormick was the first American woman to be admitted to the Salon's annual exhibition.
During one of their summer vacations, McCormick, Rose, and a few other artists drifted into the orbit of Impressionism, and lived in Giverny where they could study the work of Monet. Although McCormick was highly influenced by Monet, and she is generally called a California Impressionist, she was not part of the Impressionist in-group because she was the following generation, and because her style tends toward traditional, academic realism, with a sort of patina of Impressionist style.
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| M. Evelyn McCormick, 1862-1948 Cactus Garden, Del Monte, c. 1893 |
This painting is typical of her later output; the influence of Impressionism shows in the loosely dappled sky.
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| M. Evelyn McCormick, 1862-1948 Monterey Bay, c. 1907 |
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| M. Evelyn McCormick, 1869-1948 Carmel Valley Pumpkins, c. 1907 |
Guy Rose was born in San Gabriel California to a prominent family; his father was a California senator. He moved to San Francisco and trained at the California School of Design at the same time that Evelyn McCormick was there, though he was 5 years younger. Although he figures prominently in McCormick's bio, it is interesting to note that no mention of her is made in his. He also studied at Academie Julian and had his work accepted by the Paris Salon. After his return from Europe, he lived in New York City for several years, doing illustrations for various prominent publications. He married, and returned to Giverny, where the couple bought a cottage. Monet became his friend and mentor. The Roses returned to the US in 1912, first settling in Rhode Island, and moving to Pasadena a couple of years later, where he taught at an art school. In 1917 the Roses began to summer on the Monterey Peninsula, and he painted scenes typical of the area.
Monet's guidance is evident in Rose's work, and much of Rose's work has a European look, such as this portrait, which is very like that of the Impressionists of the previous generation.
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| Guy Rose, 1867-1925 Jade Beads, 1907-1912 |
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| Guy Rose, 1867-1925 Off Mission Point (Point Lobos), n.d. |
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| Guy Rose, 1867-1925 In the High Sierra, n.d. |
Grace Carpenter Hudson (1865-1937)
Another of the women students at the California School of Design to achieve moderate success was Grace Carpenter Hudson. She was raised near Ukiah, and spent most of her career there painting the Pomo Indians. She achieved a national reputation, and her small, modest paintings may be found in many California museums. In the example below, the woman is holding sticks for a gambling game called Kai-Dai.
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| Grace Carpenter Hudson, 1865-1937 Kai-Dai, 1913 |
Franz Bischoff (1864-1929)
One of the earliest successful artists in Southern California was Franz Bischoff, who immigrated from Austria in his teens. In Austria he was trained in ceramic decoration, and he gained success in decorating ceramics while he was living and working in Michigan.
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| Franz Bischoff, 1864-1929 Vases, 1900-1908 |
He settled in Los Angeles in 1906, when he was 42. He began to paint on canvas and to specialize in the California landscape.
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| Franz Bischoff, 1864-1929 The Arroyo Seco, Pasadena, c. 1918 |
Maurice Braun (1877-1941)
Another immigrant from Eastern Europe who ended up in Southern California was Maurice Braun. His family moved to New York City when he was age 4. He began his training at the National Academy of Design, and finished by visiting the museums in central Europe. He settled in San Diego in 1909. In 1912 he founded the San Diego Academy of Art and became its director.
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| Maurice Braun, 1877-1941 Foothills, 1934 |
I especially like this atmospheric night scene.
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| Maurice Braun, 1877-1941 Early Evening, California, c. 1920 |
Maynard Dixon (1875-1946)
Born in Fresno, Maynard Dixon was another artist who trained at the California School of Design under Arthur Mathews. Here's a switch: he is known for being married to Dorothea Lange, a nationally famous photographer. They married in 1921, when he was 46 and she was 26; they divorced in 1935. It is said that her influence prompted Dixon to produce paintings that were more spare, stylized, and defined.
He is especially known for bold, simple Western landscapes, frequently featuring horses.
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| Maynard Dixon, 1875-1946 Wild Horses of Nevada, 1927 |
Yet he could also deal with wetlands. In the painting below, the simplification of style flirts with total abstraction.
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| Maynard Dixon, 1875-1946 Glacial Meadow (Tuolumne Meadows), 1921 |
Helena Dunlap (1876-1955)
Helena Dunlap was born in my home town, Whittier, California. She studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. She traveled extensively and lived in Paris for many years. Returning to Los Angeles in 1911, when she was 35, Dunlap exhibited her paintings, earning awards throughout California. She died in Whittier, California, in 1955, where she kept a studio on her orange ranch.
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| Helena Dunlap, 1876-1955 Young Danish Girl with Flowers, c. 1917 |
Armin Hansen (1886-1957)
A San Franciso native, Armin Hansin studied art at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art, which was briefly the successor to the California School of Design. After 3 years, he went to Germany and studied in Stuttgart. He returned to San Francisco in 1912, but then moved to Monterey, where he became one of the region's premier painters. I especially like this foggy scene.
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| Armin Hansen, 1886-1957 Drifting Fog, late 1920s |
20th Century Modernism
Otis Oldfield (1880-1969)
One of the earliest modernists in California was Otis Oldfield, whose work has an incisive and rigorous edge entirely new to the placid and traditional art scene. He was born in Sacramento to a working class family; he had to earn his own way to art training. He started at a modest school in San Francisco, but he continued working, and within a few years he had saved enough to go to Paris, to study at the Académie Julian, the favorite of California artists at this time. He stayed in Paris from 1911 to 1924, eventually setting up his own studio. He returned to California in 1924, and settled in San Francisco. He became a well-known professor at the California School of Fine Arts, which had started as the California School of Design. In 1934 he was one of 26 artists selected by the federal government to paint murals in the newly erected Coit Tower. The subject of his fresco is Shipping Activities Inside the Golden Gate.
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| Otis Oldfield, 1890-1969 Self-Portrait—Shorn, 1929 |
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| Otis Oldfield, 1890-1969 White Dress, 1936 |
Helen Clark Oldfield (1902-1981)
Helen Clark Oldfield, wife of much-more-famous Otis Oldfield, was a talented artist, but her work is not shown much in museums. She was born in Santa Rosa, and attended the College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. After her marriage she practiced various crafts, painted, and taught art. Here's an example of her work.
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| Helen Clark Oldfield, 1902-1981 Green Pears, 1941 |
The first California artist to achieve international stature was Stanton Macdonald-Wright, one of America’s leading Modernist painters and an early pioneer of abstract art. Born in Virginia and raised in southern California, he settled in Paris in 1907, studying at the Sorbonne and exhibiting at the Salons. Together with fellow American expatriate Morgan Russell, he co-founded the avant-garde painting movement Synchromism, whose first exhibition was held in Munich in 1913. Synchromism combined color with Cubism, producing luminous and rhythmic compositions of swirling and serpentine forms infused with a rich chromatic palette. After a period in New York, Macdonald-Wright resettled in Santa Monica in 1919 and entered a period of teaching at the local universities. He also worked as the director of the WPA Art Project in Santa Monica for about ten years. In the mid-1950s he returned to nonobjective painting, producing some of his finest canvases.
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| Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890-1973) Subjective Time, 1958 |
Henry Sugimoto (1900-1990)
For most of his career, Henry Sugimoto lived in New York City. Born in Japan, he immigrated to Hanford, California when he was 19 following his parents. He got his art training at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland and the California School of Fine Arts. He then spent 4 years studying and painting in France. He returned to California in 1932, and married his long-time sweetheart in 1934.
In 1945, when he was 45 years, Sugimoto and his family were interned in a relocation camp in Arkansas. When released in 1945, Sugimoto and his family moved to New York City. His is not a big name, but this painting is charming, in a way that combines Japanese, Californian, and American influences.
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| Henry Sugimoto, 1900-1990 New York Wind Blow Everything, c. 1964 |
Charles Griffin Farr (1908-1997)
Charles Griffin Farr was a long-time resident of Potrero Hill in San Francisco. He was raised in Tennessee and studied art in New York. During World War II he served as an artist-correspondent. After the war, he studied on the GI Bill at the California School of Fine Arts, where he later taught. He referred to himself as the school's "token realist." He bequeathed many of his paintings to the University of California at Santa Cruz.
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| Charles Griffin Farr, 1908-1977 Still Life with Cabbage, 1939 |
The Post-War Art Scene
Elmer Bischoff (1916-1991)
The California School of Fine Arts was at the hub of avant-garde expressionism when Elmer Bischoff became an instructor there after World War II. His colleges included Mark Rothko, Clifford Still, and Ad Reinhardt. There he met Richard Diebenkorn and David Park, and with them developed a style that uses free brushwork and thickly painted surfaces of abstract expressionism to create works with recognizable imagery. This approach became known as Bay Area Figurative Art, when it received its first major show at the Oakland Museum of Art in 1957.
Bischoff grew up in Berkeley, and earned a Master of Arts at the University of California there. In the 1960s he became a professor at U. C. Berkeley, and taught there the rest of his career.
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| Elmer Bischoff, 1916-1991 Green Lampshade, 1969 |
Wayne Thiebaud (b. 1920)
Californian Wayne Thiebaud is one of the most important living American painters. The richness, variety, and sincerity of his work can hardly be over-praised. His work is prized by California museums, and I've been following his progress for decades. The Crocker's collection represents most of his phases. The artist is still active at 94; recently a reporter for The New Yorker said he "looked like a high-school athletic coach a week or two into retirement." That is great news.
Thiebaud had a basic California education, having studied at San Jose State University before transferring to the state college in Sacramento where he earned a master's degree. In 1960, he became a professor at the Davis branch of the University of California and remained there through the 1970s. He retired at age 70.
In the beginning of his career, the first subject that had impetus for him was cakes and pies and similar treats. This was a time when Pop art was rising up against abstract expressionism. In this painting he uses the juicy brushwork associated with expressionism to depict a Pop art subject. The painting is so rich and satisfying that you don't actually need to eat the food. The artist recently told a reporter for The New Yorker "there are still days that start with the thought: This morning, I’d like to paint a pie."
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| Wayne Thiebaud, b. 1920 Boston Cremes, 1962 |
In the 1960s he dwelt on nearly photo-realistic portraits with flat brushwork and fine edges.
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| Wayne Thiebaud, b. 1920 Betty Jean Thiebaud and Book, 1965-69 |
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| Wayne Thiebaud, b. 1920 Title unknown |
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| Wayne Thiebaud, b. 1920 River Intersection, 2010 |
Robert Colescott (1925-2009)
Oakland-born Robert Colescott is another of America's premier painters. Though his parents were trained musicians, his father supported the family by working as a railway porter. Thus, Colescott didn't have much formal training before he was drafted in 1942. After the war he earned a Master of Art degree at Berkeley; he also spent a year in Paris studying with Fernand Léger.
Colescott taught in Portland, and worked on projects in Cairo and Paris, before settling in California. He spent 15 years teaching at various California art schools, before becoming a professor at the University of Tucson. The San Jose Museum of Art organized the first major retrospective of his work.
Colescott is known for satirical paintings that convey his exuberant, comical, or critical reflections of being African American. His paintings are always enigmatic. The title of this painting proclaims that "Blondes have more Fun," as the saying goes, but the Black couples surrounding the blonde are going at it in ways that are supposed to be fun, and she's looking smug, just because she is blonde, or just because she is white.
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| Robert Colescott, 1925-2009 Blondes Have More Fun, 1990 |
Ralph Goings (b. 1928)
Like Thiebaud and Colescott, Ralph Goings came from a working-class California family. He studied at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland before earning an MFA from Sacramento State College. He presently lives in Santa Cruz, CA, and Charlottesville, New York.
Goings was a major player in the rise of the Photorealist movement, in which the artists uses photographs as the basis for their paintings. In the beginning, he projected the slide on the canvas and painted with a seamless surface that shows no trace of the human touch. The subjects are generally commonplace scenes and objects. This is a very early example.
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| Ralph Goings, b. 1928 Sacramento Airport, 1970 |
Robert Bechtle (b. 1932)
Robert Bechtle was studying at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland at the same time as Ralph Goings, and with him developed photorealism, a popular style in California that begins by tracing the artist's photo projected onto the canvas. He taught at San Francisco State University from 1969 until 1999 and now lives in San Francisco's Potrero Hill neighborhood.
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| Robert Bechtle, b. 1932 French Doors II, 1966 |
Joan Brown (1938-1990)
The first woman artist from California to have national fame was Joan Brown. She studied with Elmer Bischoff at the California School of Fine Arts, and is considered part of the second generation of the Bay Area Figurative movement.
However, instead of occupying herself with the landscapes and objects that characterized California art, Brown relentlessly painted her everyday life, family relationships, and dreams. Her pioneering use of domestic imagery, autobiographical narrative, patterning, color, and revealing emotional scenarios anticipates the preoccupations of women artists in the 1960s and 1970s.
The following work uses thick, expressionistic brushwork to depict herself when she was pregnant. Here she identifies with the goddess Flora, who epitomizes springtime and fecundity. Brown also introduced another element that was new to California art—references to masterpieces of European art, in this case a famous painting by Rembrandt.
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| Joan Brown, 1938-1990 Flora, 1961 |
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| Rembrandt van Rijn, 1606-69 Flora, 1634 Hermitage Museum; St. Petersburg, Russia Photo by Dan L. Smith |
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| Joan Brown, 1938-1990 Wolf in Studio, 1972 |
Like her own painting, Brown's biographers tend to focus on Brown's turbulent private life rather than her career. Born Joan Beatty, she came from a troubled family and was herself married 4 times. She taught at the California School of Fine Arts from 1961-68, and at UC Berkeley from 1974 until her death in 1990. She died while installing a sculpture in India, when the building collapsed on her and an assistant. She was 52 at the time of her death. Her work is featured prominently in Bay Area museums.
The Current Era: Late 20th-early 21st century
The artists currently living and working in California tend to prefer art with rich subjects and dramatic narratives. In addition to social commentary, there is often a surreal or magical element.
Stephen J. Kaltenbach (b. 1940)
Stephen Kaltenbach studied at the University of California at Davis, where he was mentored by Robert Arneson. In the 1960s he was at the center of New York's avant-garde, where he became known for conceptual work, such as bronze time capsules. In the 1970s he returned to California and focused on painting, but since the 1980s he has created sculpture and media installations. No mention of a teaching career is made in online biographies.
This tribute to his father was painted in a barn in California and required 7 years. It is very large and very moving.
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| Stephen J. Kaltenbach, b. 1940 Portrait of My Father, 1972-79 |
Guy Colwell (b. 1945)
Guy Colwell differs from this whole line of artists. Born in Oakland, he received only two years of training at the College of Arts and Crafts before starting work full-time, and after that he is basically self-taught. Instead of teaching, he supported himself as an underground cartoonist. In the 1970s, he worked for an underground paper. He has done several comic book series. He is famous for having spent a couple of years in prison for resisting the draft. He has focused on painting since the 1990's. He is married and currently lives in Oakland.
Colwell also brings a new subject to painting: social commentary. He considers himself a reporter and observer of the social scene, and in his youth he would attend peace marches and other demonstrations in order to bring authenticity to his work. In the painting below, the healthy people are on the left and the sick ones are on the right.
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| Guy Colwell, b. 1945 Epidemic, 2009 |
Hung Liu (b. 1948)
One of the most prominent Chinese painters in the United States is Hung Liu. She immigrated from China in 1984, to attend the University of California, San Diego, where she received her MFA. She moved to northern California to become a faculty member at Mills College in 1990, and still lives in the area. Her work is frequently exhibited in Bay area museums, but she is well-known nationally as well. Most of the work I've seen shows some scene of everyday life in old China, and the scenes are blurred, like her memories, by drips of paint and streaks of linseed oil.
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| Hung Liu, b. 1948 Shoemakers, 1999 |
Chester Arnold (b. 1952)
Chester Arnold was born in Santa Monica, California, but he was raised in post-war Germany and studied art there in his youth. He returned to California and earned an MFA from the San Francisco Institute of Art in 1988. No second career is mentioned in his biographies. Popular in Bay area museums, his work tends to be large-scaled, richly detailed, and wryly humorous. It frequently features accumulations of similar objects.
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| Chester Arnold, b. 1952 After the Fact, 2007 |
Sandow Birk (b. 1962)
Los Angeles-based painter Sandow Birk is a graduate of Otis Art Institute, now known at Otis College of Art and Design, in Los Angeles. Working on a large-scale, he does contemporary history paintings; his subjects are current events, but his compositions frequently refer to well-known masterpieces of historical painting. He has a very large body of work that treats a wide-variety of subjects, from California's prisons to Dante's Inferno. He has also developed some of his subjects into films.
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| Sandow Birk, b. 1962 Stonewall, 1863 |
Jamie Vasta (b. 1980)
Only 34 years old, as of 2014, Jamie Vasta is creating a stir in the Bay area art scene. Born in upstate New York, she got her BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Art Boston, but she earned her MFA from California College of the Arts in Oakland and has lived in Oakland since then. Her subject tends to be feminist but enigmatic narratives. What distinguishes her work—and it hardly shows up in photos—is the use of glitter and glue as her basic medium. It is amazing that she can achieve rich color, vibrant light, and detailed "brushwork" by spreading glitter on canvas. It makes her work literally dazzling.
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| Jamie Vasta, b. 1980 Voyeur, 2007 |
Sculpture in California
The Crocker has a cute collection of California sculpture, but it is limited.
Robert Arneson (1930-1992)
Nowadays we take non-functional clay art objects for granted because they are familiar, but when Robert Arneson started working with ceramics, they were associated strictly with bowls, vases, and other objects with ostensible functions, even though they might sit on a shelf as collector's items.
Born in Benicia, Arneson became an apt cartoonist in his teens. He studied art education at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, and earned an MFA from Mills College. He taught at a high school and a community college, and then went on the staff of the University of California at Davis in 1962. The founder of the art department there assembled a faculty that would come to be celebrated as one of the most prestigious in the nation. In addition to Arneson, there were Manuel Neri, Wayne Thiebaud and William T. Wiley, who all became internationally recognized. Arneson taught at Davis for 30 years, and his teaching and high-spirited persona inspired entire generations of young ceramists.
It was in the 1960s when Arneson and other young artists began to use everyday objects to create biting satire, a movement dubbed Funk Art. Arneson might be considered the father of the ceramic Funk movement. He fused offbeat humor and irreverence with Pop-inspired subject matter, and helped make irreverence and wit acceptable in art.
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| Robert Arneson, 1930-1992 Overcooked, 1973 |
Viola Frey (1933-2004)
Raised on a vineyard in Lodi, California, Viola Frey attended the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland at the same time as Robert Arneson, and was part of the Funk art movement in ceramics. After receiving her degree, she went to New York to study at an art center geared toward artists exploring ceramics as a fine art medium without the functional constraints of craft. She began teaching at the California College of Arts and Crafts (now the California College of the Arts) in 1965 and continued there her entire life. She became an internationally respected artist and leading figure in contemporary ceramics, despite working in a field often dominated by men.
Frey is known for her large, colorfully glazed clay sculptures of men and women, which expanded the traditional boundaries of ceramic sculpture. The example below is not typical, and it is too detailed to photograph well. It appears to be a portrait composed of symbolic objects; I can see an odd hat, a hand with a fan, a pipe, and a picture frame on top of a wooden stand, like a parody of a portrait bust. Bricolage (tinkering, in French) is the construction of a work from a bunch of stuff that happens to be available.
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| Viola Frey, 1933-2004 Bricolage Sculpture, 1981 |
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| Bricolage Sculpture, 1981 Detail |
Though the lives of women artists are typically fodder for reporters and biographers, Frey's personal life is generally ignored. I found a note that her life partner was Charles Fiske, who had been her teacher, and who placed her career before his own, but I can't find any confirmation of this..
Robert Hudson (b. 1938)
An archetypical Bay-Area artist, Robert Hudson has been a primary force in the West Coast Funk art assemblage movement. Born in Salt Lake City in 1938 and raised in Richland, Washington, Hudson moved to San Francisco in the late 1950s and trained at the San Francisco Art Institute, the current incarnation of the influential California School of Design.
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| Robert Hudson, b. 1938 Outrigger, 1983-84 |
Clayton Bailey (b. 1939)
Although he earned a master's degree in art and education from the University of Wisconsin—Madison, and spent 28 years teaching at California State University, Hayward (now known as California State University East Bay), Clayton Bailey affects the persona of an outsider artist, as if he were an inspired but untrained bumpkin making art spontaneously out of whatever comes to hand. He wears a long handle-bar mustache, waxed and curled, and in Port Costa he has a yard full of spaceships, and pots with faces, toilets with spouts and handles, and similar jokey junk like any nutter. And, in fact, his style is sometimes known at 'nut art,' but generally he is the logical conclusion of the California Funk art movement.
This figure is assembled from parts from a restaurant supply store, with other hardware.
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| Clayton Bailey, b. 1939 Buns Robot, 2003 |
Rik Ritchey (b. 1953)
Rik Ritchey is a Bay Area artist who is best known for his series of otherworldly scenes painted on polyurethane foam, but he has created sculpture in various media.
This glass piece is made of thin slices of glass buttressed with steel. Gold beads placed between glass slices create a line through the center of the sculpture.
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| Rik Ritchey, b. 1953 Mechanical Drawing: Heartbreak, 2011 |
Conclusion
This is not the complete story of art in California—far from it. Where are Nathan Oliveira, Richard Diebenkorn, and Ruth Asawa, just to name a few obvious omissions? Full disclosure: the Crocker collection is not totally comprehensive, and I don't photograph works of art that I don't like. But this overview is a good starting place, a good framework for understanding the flow of art history in our state. It's something to be proud of—another reason why California is the coolest state.
