BellaPacifica

Bay Area Abstraction, 1946-1963A Symphony In Four Parts

Elmer Bischoff, Ernest Briggs, Joan Brown, Bruce Conner, Edward Corbett, Jay DeFeo, Richard Diebenkorn, Edward Dugmore, Sam Francis, Sonia Gechtoff, Wally Hedrick, Hans Hofmann Jess, James Kelly, Frank Lobdell, Deborah Remington, Jon Schueler, Hassel Smith, Peter Voulkos

David Nolan Gallery527 West 29thNew York, NY 10001Jan 11 − Feb 05davidnolangallery.com212 925 6190

Nyehaus358 West 20thNew York, NY 10011Jan 20 − Mar 05nyehaus.com212 366 4493

Franklin Parrasch Gallery20 West 57thNew York, NY 10019Jan 20 − Mar 05franklinparrasch.com212 246 5360

Leslie Feely Fine Art33 East 68thNew York, NY 10065Jan 20 − Mar 05lesliefeely.com212 988 0040

Nyehaus is pleased to present Bella Pacifica: Bay Area Abstraction, 1946-1963: A Symphony In Four Parts that will take place from January 11th to March 5th, 2011 at David Nolan Gal-lery, Nyehaus, Franklin Parrasch Gal-lery and Leslie Feely Fine Art.

Characterized by tonal, harmonic, and rhythmic instability, the 6 Gallery exemplifies the ‘50s at its most rest-less, carefree and experimental. The work shown at the gallery within its short life span (1954 to 1957) ranges from expressionism, to surrealism, il-lusionism, collage, assemblage and abstraction; pure and impure. A DADA attitude of Hilarity and Disdain had replaced the grave sense of mission that characterized the period from 1945 to the early 1950s. It can be said that out of all these artists’ profes-sors and mentors, Hassel Smith had the most influence over this group, as they were outgoing, gregarious and playful, with strong ties to jazz and a new poetry that was like jazz.

In the late ‘50s, both the San Fran-cisco and Los Angeles scenes related to New York but on different channels. There were two different ways of con-structing a conversation of difference, in which New York stood in for all of Metropolitan culture and each of the Alternative Scenes (Los Angeles, San Francisco) presented itself as the Real America.

In San Francisco, the Alternative Scene resulted in collective projects such as galleries, publications, jazz bands and film-screening societies. Founded in 1952, the City Lights proj-ect became the center for the literary movement, and was to poetry what the 6 Gallery (and King Ubu before it) was to art.

The factual history of the 6 Gallery has taken the form of memoires and oral histories (the latter archived by the Smithsonian Institution). The gallery was an informal co-op with six mem-bers and no records were ever kept. Its members and other participants

became famous later as poets and painters, successes and failures, and they dragged it into history with them.The 6 Gallery co-op was located at 3119 Fillmore Street, in a disused garage space that had previously housed King Ubu Gallery. The original 6 (members) were Jack Spicer, Wally Hedrick, Deborah Remington, Hay-ward King, John Allen Ryan and David Simpson. Its mission—clear but never explicit—was to show both teachers’ and students’ work alike.

The 6 fostered a spirit of coexistence not only between faculty and students, but between different art movements, disciplines and ideals. The community they helped to create was itself the masterpiece. These artists and poets, who came from such varied back-grounds, lived their lives as adventur-ers, without compromise, with mutual encouragement and participation.

They were: Robert Duncan, active in Bay Area poetry since the late 1940s (and, unusual among San Francisco artists, a native) had been involved with Jess (Collins) since 1951, and with the gallery space (King Ubu) they founded together with Harry Jacobus, since 1952. Jess Collins - a nuclear chemist who worked on the Manhat-tan project during WWII—went on to study art CSFA (California School of Fine Arts). A foreboding sense of doom was the catalyst. He remade the existing world, and rearranged it to be richer, stranger. Wally Hedrick, a Korean War veteran whose work was sarcastic and mystical. He had been in San Francisco before the war and had met Clyfford Still and returned in the ‘50s with a group of friends from Pasadena, which included Deborah Remington. He married Jay DeFeo – by then back from Florence—in 1952. The final member of the original six was the poet Jack Spicer, who took over the lease from Duncan and Jess.

The other artists in this exhibit have equally important roles in the history of the San Francisco avant-garde: Sonia Gechtoff (the first woman to

have a solo show at Ferus Gallery in L.A.), Hassel Smith and Bruce Con-ner. The mentors were Jack Spicer (then teaching in the English depart-ment at CSFA), Hassel Smith, Elmer Bischoff, Richard Diebenkorn and Kenneth Rexroth. CSFA was the fo-cal institution of the moment, but oth-ers, including Black Mountain College (through the influence of Robert Dun-can) and the Ferus Gallery of Ed Kien-holz and Walter Hopps were palpable influences.

A few feet from the gallery, at 2322 Fillmore Street, “The Ghost House” was their place of residence. There lived the following eccentric constel-lation of energetic youths: Jay DeFeo, Wally Hedrick, Bruce Conner, Joan Brown, Craig Kauffman, Sonia Gech-toff, Jess, Robert Duncan, Philip La-mantia, Michael McClure and James Kelly, to name a few.

The Beat movement – as the avant-garde of this period would later be called and to which these artists be-longed—took hold of the Bay Area youth culture during the Cold War and can be book-ended by the Korean War and Martin Luther King’s speech “I Have a Dream”, followed by the stu-dent rebellions at Berkeley in 1963. It was a movement against “the gray, chill silence, the intellectual void, the spiritual drabness” and the oppres-siveness of the times, McCarthyism a palpable force against dissent.

Given the times, artists realized that before they made art, they had to cre-ate a culture in which to make art. “Whatever lives needs a habitat, a proper culture of warmth and mois-ture to grow...” as Gary Snyder put it.

But I have nothingShall have nothingbut thisImmediate, inescapableand invaluableNo one can afford THISBeing made here and now—Philip Whalen

From the beginning, the 6 wanted po-etry, TO SEE poetry on the walls along the works of art. They wanted to hear it, and they arranged for Michael Mc-Clure to organize a poetry reading. Lacking time, McClure delegated to a young New Yorker he had just met, Al-len Ginsberg, the task of herding a few poets together.

On the night of Friday, October 7th, 1955, the following happened: Rexroth was the Master of Ceremonies, Philip Lamantia read prose poems by his late friend John Hofmann and Mike Mc-Clure read “Point Lobos: Animism”, and “The Death of 100 Whales”. Gary Snyder read “A Berry Feast”, Philip Whalen read ”Plus ça Change”.

And then Allen Ginsberg read HOWL, in its totality for the first time, which was, of course, all anybody remem-bered afterwards. Something…but nobody remembers what. Jack Ker-ouac (who memorialized the event in his novel The Dharma Bums), Law-rence Ferlinghetti and Jack Spicer were present, as was an astonished audience of 150. Everyone present (except for a reporter for The Chron-icle, who informed middlebrow San Franciscans that, as ever, their City was the home of assorted nutty art frauds from elsewhere) understood they had been present at one of those moments when everything changes.

By the 1970s, the memory of the early years of CSFA as an important part of the country’s history was mostly forgotten. Bruce Conner was still around, but the scene had scattered, the poets split for the East Bay or far-ther east. While one could still visit the Beatnik shrines of North Beach, the Beat scene had disappeared into academe, both its own academic ver-sion (The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, e.g.) and within regular curriculums.

First Movement: The 6 Gallery or An Array of Influences, Heard Softly

In the San Francisco Bay Area, Ab-straction found a unique vocabulary. The mid-century avant-garde was composed of a cadre of extraordinarily gifted and energetic artists, each with a distinct personal vision. The Pacific, unlike The Atlantic, is not an ocean BE-TWEEN continents or worlds, old and new. It is, itself, the center and end of the world. Robinson Jeffers, who spent the better part of his life staring at it, called the Pacific the Eye of the Planet. It’s the void the moon rose from, to which it calls, still.

While they were the inheritors of an Abstraction that came to them as a tradition and a vocabulary of con-straint, West Coast painters who were young at mid-century were committed to a modernism that broke rules and moved relentlessly forward. In time, the rules, the nostalgia and the region-alism all came back, but before the wave breaks, it’s all glory.

West coast artists also looked to Zen, to Jazz, and to the sheer overwhelm-ing space and distance of a West that was not yet reduced by highways and jets. Theirs was a Modernism that consumes and abandons its own his-tory; that fights the past and wins. Battlefields come in all shapes and sizes, from the beaches of Normandy to the weave of cotton tacked to a studio wall.

Bay Area Abstraction (also known as “Ecole du Pacifique”, “Hybrid Abstrac-tion,” “free-form” or “first sensation”) flourished under the auspices of Doug-las McAgy at the California School of Fine Arts who lead CSFA’s sweeping change in educational philosophy. Most of the artists in this exhibition either studied or taught there in the years from 1945 to 1952.

It is interesting to point out that CSFA’s entire history could be written as a re-flection of American military history. The period after WWII was a great so-cial mixer. The waves of GI Bill students created an influx that allowed creative writing and art programs to thrive; ar-

tistic communities to be formed; and prepared the rising audience for the avant-garde.

When resigning in 1950, McAgy cites as his main reason the fact that a pal-pable change was occurring, particu-larly the loss of a more mature student body. He was referring to the student body he encountered when he started his tenure as director: artists enrolled under the G.I. Bill, such as Jon Schuel-er, Hassel Smith, Elmer Bischoff, Rich-ard Diebenkorn, and Frank Lobdell.

It can be said that as a school, CSFA repudiated geometry, the easel, the frame, the constraint of a border. In one of America’s most beautiful cities, these painters rejected architecture, interior and urban space. The space in which they imagined their work was exterior, natural and vast. Elemental, organic allusions to space as well as specters of the figure remain.

The methods they individually em-ployed–Gestural (Bischoff, Brown); free looping calligraphic lines (Hassel Smith), large canvasses of Color field (Clyfford Still, Jon Schueler, Edward Dugmore), pointilistic (Ernest Briggs and James Kelly), metaphysical (Frank Lobdell and Edward Corbett)—were influenced mainly by landscape; and, in some cases, memories. In the case of Gestural Painting, the influences were the strident sounds of Dixie and Jazz. “...In painting then we were talk-ing about creation, about free creation, about starting from scratch, breaking with the past, destroying the past, de-stroying the demand of the past, of Eu-rope, of the formal scheme of things, of the convention of painting, and now Abend wanted to do the same thing with music...” (From: The Sound of Sleat: A Painter’s Life by Jon Schueler, Picador USA, 1999, pages 223-225) Schueler’s recollections evoke a change in Jazz as complete as the change in painting that took place in the 1940’s. Bebop, the music of Char-lie Parker, had been kept prisoner in New York by a recording strike for the

balance of the war years, and arrived in the rest of the country in 1945 and af-ter, as something full-grown and radi-cally new. Bebop required much more intense, continuous engagement, but at the same time wasn’t social in the same way Jazz had been—it wasn’t dance music any more. This was the same transition painting was making from WPA populism to the highly en-gaged, but apparently obscure work of the action painters. Contrary to the absolutist revolutionar-ies that influenced them (Clyfford Still, Ad Reinhardt and Rothko to name a few) this generation embraced interac-tion as a way of life. Teachers and stu-dents played in a band (CSFA’s “Studio 13” Jazz Band). Twelve of Still’s stu-dents (Jon Schueler amongst them) ran the MetArt gallery which operated for a year, opened with an Ernest Briggs show and closed with Clyfford Still. A group of professors—Richard Dieben-korn and Frank Lobdell amongst them, was known as the “Sausalito Six” and met at Lobdell’s studio. Classes—Has-sel Smith’s, Clay Spohn’s, Edward Corbett’s, David Park’s—were con-ducted as talks, energetic discussions, impromptu exercises.

The conflicts and splintering that fol-lowed this period of collective effort can once again be traced to he decline of a popular dance music soon to be replaced by rock and roll, and partly about individual versus social art: the end of WPA populism and the rise to market power of the personal gesture.

Was there, then, in fact, an Ecole du Pacifique? Part of our feeling as cura-tors is a gut reaction mingled with cu-riosity, a belief that there is more than we’ve been lead to believe. That be-yond canvases that explode with unre-solved problems and angst there is in fact a transcendental beauty, a Pacific Beauty, that has been long overlooked.

The last arrival to San Francisco in the fifties was Peter Voulkos. Having grown up in Bozeman, he studied ce-ramics there, at Montana State, and completed his MFA in Oakland. After a short stay teaching at Black Mountain, he moved to L.A. in 1954, where he be-comes one of the most revered teach-ers at the Otis College of Art and De-sign. He moved from there to Berkeley in 1957 and started the new ceramics department at Berkley. He stayed there through his retirement in 1985. In every teaching position he had, from the be-ginning, he was the first to teach in a new department, inventing what he did from the ground up. There was a substantial craft tradition in Ceramics, but Voulkos reinvented it as an art medium. He worked at a heroic scale, with a strength and en-durance that drew each piece, and the medium with it, out of what was understood as craft, and into its own artworld. They had all the freshness and weight of gestural abstraction when it was new. They were three-dimensional action painting, and just as much, were timeless.

This tendency to attack the craft traditions of a medium by pressing its limits of scale and weight is also characteristic of Joan Brown, whose first Bay Area paintings had active surfaces like those of Elmer Bischoff, built on simple, rather dark composi-tions. As the surface activity grew, the paintings grew larger and, fantasti-cally, thicker. They’re still aging and drying, now, half a century later; still changing; still new.

Both Voulko’s and Brown’s work can be said to contrast with Voulko’s own early paintings, more influenced by colour field and Clyfford Still, as is the latter work of Corbett, Dugmore and that of Jon Schueler during his San Francisco period.

Second & Third Movements: Ecole du Pacifique or A Feeling of Strength, In Reserve

Fourth Movement: Three Dimensional Abstraction or Tension Beneath Calm

David Nolan GalleryBruce ConnerJay DeFeoSonia GechtoffWally HedrickJess CollinsJames KellyDeborah RemingtonHassel Smith

Wally HedrickPhysical Experience #11963Oil on canvas39.5 x 97.5 in.

Sonia GechtoffThe Angel1953-55Oil on canvas72 x 67 in.

James KellyEmbarcadero II1956Oil on canvas32.5 x 25.5 in.

Jay DeFeoUntitled (Berkeley)1953Tempera and acrylic on ragboard22.125 x 28 in.

Deborah RemingtonUntitled1953Oil on canvas39 x 51 in.

Deborah RemingtonUntitled1953Oil on canvas39 x 51 in.

Hassel SmithThe Houston Scene1959Oil on canvas69 x 118 in.

JessEx. 1 - Laying a Standard: Translation #11954Oil on canvas30 x 24 in.

Bruce ConnerChou Rat1959Mixed media assemblage with metal, string nylon, paint and fabric, et al.18 x 6 x 6 in.

JessBlasted Beauty1954Collage30 x 24 in.

James KellyPlexus1955Lithograph39 x 27 in.

Deborah RemingtonOn the Scene1954Color lithograph14.75 x 21.25 in.

Deborah RemingtonFast Company1954Color lithograph21.25 x 14.75 in.

Deborah RemingtonFleur de Mal1959Ink on paper59 x 39.875 in.

Bruce ConnerShoes1960-1964Shoes, beads, fringe, snakeskin, fur, fabric, gold leaf, and paintShoe size 10.5 D

Jay DefeoUntitled (Florence)1952Tempera on paper21.625 x 24.125 in.

Sonia Gechtoff Large Drawing 1956-57 Pencil on paper 61 x 40 in

Hassel SmithUntitled1961Graphite on paper16.5 x 22 in.

Deborah RemingtonMarch1964Oil on canvas57.25 x 49.5 in.

Bruce ConnerYin Yang, April 29, 1962 Calle Napoles 77-4, Mexico City, Mexico1962Pencil on paper25 x 18.875 in.

Deborah RemingtonSoot Series 21963Soot on muslin18.5 x 13 in.

Deborah RemingtonSoot Series 11963Soot on muslin20.75 x 17 in.

Elmer BischoffErnest BriggsRichard DiebenkornEdward DugmoreSam FrancisDeborah RemingtonJon Schueler

Nyehaus

Ernest BriggsUntitledDec. 1952Oil on canvas92 x 68 in.

Ernest BriggsUntitledDec. 1958Oil on canvas94 x 69.5 in.

Sam FrancisUntitled (SF58-041)1958Watercolor on paper40 x 25.75 in.

Richard Diebenkorn Untitled circa 1951 Welded scrap iron 20.5 x 41 x 29 in.

JON SCHUELERToward Morning III1951Oil on canvas38 x 49 in.

Edward DugmoreUntitled1953Oil on canvas71.5 x 40.5 in.

Jon SchuelerTransition1955Oil on canvas54 x 60 in.

Hassel SmithUntitled1957Oil on canvas46 x 24 in.

Peter VoulkosTeapot1959Glazed ceramic12 x 13 x 10.5 in.

Elmer Bischoff Untitled 1948 Oil on canvas59.5 x 53 in.

Hassel SmithUntitledDecember 1953Oil on canvas69.5 x 62 in.

Frank LobdellFall1957Oil on canvas75 x 70 in.

Jon SchuelerAbstract, III1949Oil on paper18.75 x 23.75 in.

Jon SchuelerAbstract, IV1949Oil on paper23.75 x 18.75 in.

Jon SchuelerAbstract, V1949Oil on paper23.75 x 18.75

Elmer BischoffErnest BriggsEdward CorbettRichard DiebenkornFrank LobdellHassel Smith

Leslie Feely Fine Art

Elmer BischoffUntitled1950Oil on canvas66 x 56 in.

Ernest BriggsUntitled1951Oil on canvas71.5 x 70 in.

Frank Lobdell1 August 19481948Oil on canvas35.5 x 27.5 in.

Edward DugmoreOsgood Place1956Oil on canvas66.25 x 58 in.

Richard DiebenkornSausalito 1949Oil on canvas45.125 x 33.375 in.

Richard Diebenkorn Untitled 1949 Oil on canvas 47.75 x 32.75 in.

Hassel SmithUntitled1958Oil on canvas72 x 52 in.

Edward Corbett#97circa 1963Oil on canvas26 x 22 in.

Elmer BischoffUntitled (Feb’ 52)1952Oil on canvas66 x 62 in.

Joan BrownEdward DugmoreSam FrancisHans HofmannPeter Voulkos

Franklin Parrasch Gallery

Hans Hofmann Fragrance 1962 Oil on canvas 48 x 36 in.

Joan BrownAI Jolson’s Mammy #21960Enamel on canvas69 x 69 in.

Peter VoulkosUntitled Stack1971Ceramic, cobalt, and clear glazes42 x 12 diam in.

Peter VoulkosStack1979Glazed Ceramic46 x 15 in.

Peter VoulkosHans Brinker1958Ceramic36.5 x 35 x 14 in.

Edward DugmoreUntitled1966Oil on canvas12 x 16 in.

Sam Francis White Line (no.5) 1959 Gouache on paper 26.5 by 40 in

Edward DugmoreUntitled #0041963Oil on paper mounted on board10.75 x 13.5 in.

Hans HofmannUntitled1946Ink and gouache on paper18 x 24 in.

Peter VoulkosUntitled Painting1961Vinyl paint, lacquer and sand on canvas48 x 51 in.

Curators: Jacqueline Miró & Tim NyeEditor: Jacqueline MiróSpecial Thanks to Tim PorgesDesign: Kyle LaMar

Nyehaus358 W 20th St, #2New York, NY, 10011

P: 212 366 4493 | F: 212 366 4498www.nyehaus.com

BellaPacifica