Bella Pacifica

Bella Pacifica

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

David Nolan Gallery 527 West 29th New York, NY 10001 Jan 11 − Feb 05 davidnolangallery.com 212 925 6190

Nyehaus 358 West 20th New York, NY 10011 Jan 20 − Mar 05 nyehaus.com 212 366 4493

Franklin Parrasch Gallery 20 West 57th New York, NY 10019 Jan 20 − Mar 05 franklinparrasch.com 212 246 5360

Leslie Feely Fine Art 33 East 68th New York, NY 10065 Jan 20 − Mar 05 lesliefeely.com 212 988 0040

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

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

Nyehaus is pleased to present Bella Pacifica: Bay Area Abstraction, 19461963: A Symphony In Four Parts that will take place from January 11th to March 5th, 2011 at David Nolan Gallery, Nyehaus, Franklin Parrasch Gallery and Leslie Feely Fine Art. Characterized by tonal, harmonic, and rhythmic instability, the 6 Gallery exemplifies the ‘50s at its most restless, carefree and experimental. The work shown at the gallery within its short life span (1954 to 1957) ranges from expressionism, to surrealism, illusionism, 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’ professors 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 Francisco and Los Angeles scenes related to New York but on different channels.

There were two different ways of constructing 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 project 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 members 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, Hayward King, John Allen Ryan and David Simpson. Its mission—clear but never explicit—was to show both teachers’ and students’ work alike.

have a solo show at Ferus Gallery in L.A.), Hassel Smith and Bruce Conner. The mentors were Jack Spicer (then teaching in the English department at CSFA), Hassel Smith, Elmer Bischoff, Richard Diebenkorn and Kenneth Rexroth. CSFA was the focal institution of the moment, but others, including Black Mountain College (through the influence of Robert Duncan) and the Ferus Gallery of Ed Kienholz and Walter Hopps were palpable influences.

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 backgrounds, lived their lives as adventurers, without compromise, with mutual encouragement and participation.

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

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 Manhattan 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 Beat movement – as the avantgarde of this period would later be called and to which these artists belonged—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 student rebellions at Berkeley in 1963. It was a movement against “the gray, chill silence, the intellectual void, the spiritual drabness” and the oppressiveness of the times, McCarthyism a palpable force against dissent.

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

Given the times, artists realized that before they made art, they had to create a culture in which to make art.

“Whatever lives needs a habitat, a proper culture of warmth and moisture to grow...” as Gary Snyder put it.

But I have nothing Shall have nothing but this Immediate, inescapable and invaluable No one can afford THIS Being made here and now —Philip Whalen

From the beginning, the 6 wanted poetry, TO SEE poetry on the walls along the works of art. They wanted to hear it, and they arranged for Michael McClure to organize a poetry reading.

Lacking time, McClure delegated to a young New Yorker he had just met, Allen 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 McClure 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 remembered afterwards. Something…but nobody remembers what. Jack Kerouac (who memorialized the event in his novel The Dharma Bums), Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Jack Spicer were present, as was an astonished audience of 150. Everyone present (except for a reporter for The Chronicle, 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 farther east. While one could still visit the Beatnik shrines of North Beach, the Beat scene had disappeared into academe, both its own academic version (The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, e.g.) and within regular curriculums.

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

Fourth Movement: Three Dimensional Abstraction or Tension Beneath Calm

In the San Francisco Bay Area, Abstraction 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 BETWEEN 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.

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

While they were the inheritors of an Abstraction that came to them as a tradition and a vocabulary of constraint, 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 regionalism all came back, but before the wave breaks, it’s all glory.

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.

West coast artists also looked to Zen, to Jazz, and to the sheer overwhelming 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 history; 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.

The methods they individually employed–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 talking about creation, about free creation, about starting from scratch, breaking with the past, destroying the past, destroying the demand of the past, of Europe, 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)

Bay Area Abstraction (also known as “Ecole du Pacifique”, “Hybrid Abstraction,” “free-form” or “first sensation”) flourished under the auspices of Douglas 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 reflection of American military history.

The period after WWII was a great social mixer. The waves of GI Bill students created an influx that allowed creative writing and art programs to thrive; ar-

When resigning in 1950, McAgy cites as his main reason the fact that a palpable change was occurring, particularly 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 Schueler, Hassel Smith, Elmer Bischoff, Richard Diebenkorn, and Frank Lobdell.

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 Charlie 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 after, as something full-grown and radically 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 engaged, but apparently obscure work of the action painters.

Contrary to the absolutist revolutionaries that influenced them (Clyfford Still, Ad Reinhardt and Rothko to name a few) this generation embraced interaction as a way of life. Teachers and students played in a band (CSFA’s “Studio 13” Jazz Band). Twelve of Still’s students (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 Diebenkorn and Frank Lobdell amongst them, was known as the “Sausalito Six” and met at Lobdell’s studio. Classes—Hassel Smith’s, Clay Spohn’s, Edward Corbett’s, David Park’s—were conducted as talks, energetic discussions, impromptu exercises.

The conflicts and splintering that followed 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 curators is a gut reaction mingled with curiosity, a belief that there is more than we’ve been lead to believe. That beyond canvases that explode with unresolved 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 ceramics 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 becomes one of the most revered teachers at the Otis College of Art and Design. 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 beginning, 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 endurance 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 threedimensional 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 compositions. As the surface activity grew, the paintings grew larger and, fantastically, 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.

David Nolan Gallery Bruce Conner Jay DeFeo Sonia Gechtoff Wally Hedrick Jess Collins James Kelly Deborah Remington Hassel Smith

Wally Hedrick Physical Experience #1 1963 Oil on canvas 39.5 x 97.5 in.

Sonia Gechtoff The Angel 1953-55 Oil on canvas 72 x 67 in.

James Kelly Embarcadero II 1956 Oil on canvas 32.5 x 25.5 in.

Jay DeFeo Untitled (Berkeley) 1953 Tempera and acrylic on ragboard 22.125 x 28 in.

Deborah Remington Untitled 1953 Oil on canvas 39 x 51 in.

Deborah Remington Untitled 1953 Oil on canvas 39 x 51 in.

Hassel Smith The Houston Scene 1959 Oil on canvas 69 x 118 in.

Jess Ex. 1 - Laying a Standard: Translation #1 1954 Oil on canvas 30 x 24 in.

Bruce Conner Chou Rat 1959 Mixed media assemblage with metal, string nylon, paint and fabric, et al.

18 x 6 x 6 in.

Jess Blasted Beauty 1954 Collage 30 x 24 in.

James Kelly Plexus 1955 Lithograph 39 x 27 in.

Deborah Remington On the Scene 1954 Color lithograph 14.75 x 21.25 in.

Deborah Remington Fast Company 1954 Color lithograph 21.25 x 14.75 in.

Deborah Remington Fleur de Mal 1959 Ink on paper 59 x 39.875 in.

Bruce Conner Shoes 1960-1964 Shoes, beads, fringe, snakeskin, fur, fabric, gold leaf, and paint Shoe size 10.5 D

Jay Defeo Untitled (Florence) 1952 Tempera on paper 21.625 x 24.125 in.

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

Hassel Smith Untitled 1961 Graphite on paper 16.5 x 22 in.

Deborah Remington March 1964 Oil on canvas 57.25 x 49.5 in.

Bruce Conner Yin Yang, April 29, 1962 Calle Napoles 77-4, Mexico City, Mexico 1962 Pencil on paper 25 x 18.875 in.

Deborah Remington Soot Series 2 1963 Soot on muslin 18.5 x 13 in.

Deborah Remington Soot Series 1 1963 Soot on muslin 20.75 x 17 in.

Nyehaus Elmer Bischoff Ernest Briggs Richard Diebenkorn Edward Dugmore Sam Francis Deborah Remington Jon Schueler

Ernest Briggs Untitled Dec. 1952 Oil on canvas 92 x 68 in.

Ernest Briggs Untitled Dec. 1958 Oil on canvas 94 x 69.5 in.

Sam Francis Untitled (SF58-041) 1958 Watercolor on paper 40 x 25.75 in.

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

JON SCHUELER Toward Morning III 1951 Oil on canvas 38 x 49 in.

Edward Dugmore Untitled 1953 Oil on canvas 71.5 x 40.5 in.

Jon Schueler Transition 1955 Oil on canvas 54 x 60 in.

Hassel Smith Untitled 1957 Oil on canvas 46 x 24 in.

Peter Voulkos Teapot 1959 Glazed ceramic 12 x 13 x 10.5 in.

Elmer Bischoff Untitled 1948 Oil on canvas 59.5 x 53 in.

Hassel Smith Untitled December 1953 Oil on canvas 69.5 x 62 in.

Frank Lobdell Fall 1957 Oil on canvas 75 x 70 in.

Jon Schueler Abstract, III 1949 Oil on paper 18.75 x 23.75 in.

Jon Schueler Abstract, IV 1949 Oil on paper 23.75 x 18.75 in.

Jon Schueler Abstract, V 1949 Oil on paper 23.75 x 18.75

Leslie Feely Fine Art Elmer Bischoff Ernest Briggs Edward Corbett Richard Diebenkorn Frank Lobdell Hassel Smith

Elmer Bischoff Untitled 1950 Oil on canvas 66 x 56 in.

Ernest Briggs Untitled 1951 Oil on canvas 71.5 x 70 in.

Frank Lobdell 1 August 1948 1948 Oil on canvas 35.5 x 27.5 in.

Edward Dugmore Osgood Place 1956 Oil on canvas 66.25 x 58 in.

Richard Diebenkorn Sausalito 1949 Oil on canvas 45.125 x 33.375 in.

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

Hassel Smith Untitled 1958 Oil on canvas 72 x 52 in.

Edward Corbett #97 circa 1963 Oil on canvas 26 x 22 in.

Elmer Bischoff Untitled (Feb’ 52) 1952 Oil on canvas 66 x 62 in.

Franklin Parrasch Gallery Joan Brown Edward Dugmore Sam Francis Hans Hofmann Peter Voulkos

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

Joan Brown AI Jolson’s Mammy #2 1960 Enamel on canvas 69 x 69 in.

Peter Voulkos Untitled Stack 1971 Ceramic, cobalt, and clear glazes 42 x 12 diam in.

Peter Voulkos Stack 1979 Glazed Ceramic 46 x 15 in.

Peter Voulkos Hans Brinker 1958 Ceramic 36.5 x 35 x 14 in.

Edward Dugmore Untitled 1966 Oil on canvas 12 x 16 in.

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

Edward Dugmore Untitled #004 1963 Oil on paper mounted on board 10.75 x 13.5 in.

Hans Hofmann Untitled 1946 Ink and gouache on paper 18 x 24 in.

Peter Voulkos Untitled Painting 1961 Vinyl paint, lacquer and sand on canvas 48 x 51 in.

Bella Pacifica Curators: Jacqueline Mir贸 & Tim Nye Editor: Jacqueline Mir贸 Special Thanks to Tim Porges Design: Kyle LaMar Nyehaus 358 W 20th St, #2 New York, NY, 10011 P: 212 366 4493 | F: 212 366 4498 www.nyehaus.com