West Coast Women of Abstract Expressionism

Furthering Berry Campbell’s focus on women artists working in the 1950s, we are pleased to present West Coast Women of Abstract Expressionism, a group exhibition featuring 24 women artists living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area. After World War II, the avant-garde art world shifted from Paris to New York, making the downtown scene in New York the center of the Abstract Expressionist movement. Concurrent with the scene in New York, San Francisco was its parallel on the West Coast as a bohemian enclave. Much like the few recognized women Abstract Expressionists from the East Coast, only a handful of women artists from the West Coast have broken into the larger art world canon, most notably Joan Brown, Jay DeFeo, Deborah Remington, and Sonia Gechtoff. These women are a narrow representation of the robust and diverse community living and working on the West Coast in the 1950s.

When speaking of the freedom that the Bay Area scene granted the women artists during the 1950s, Gechtoff recalled:

There was none of that macho bullshit. When I came to New York I was horrified at how the female artists were being disregarded. I think it was different in San Francisco because there were no commercially viable galleries….It gave us permission to be more experimental.[1]

Ground zero for many of the West Coast women was the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA). Professors like Douglas MacAgy, Doris (Dorr) Bothwell, and Clyfford Still were active in the New York scene and brought fresh ideas and a renewed energy to the school. Students who passed through CSFA were Ruth Armer, Bernice Bing, Lilly Fenichel, and Emiko Nakano, among others. Another center was the University of California, Berkeley with graduates Jay DeFeo, Claire Falkenstein, Zoe Longfield, and Masako Takahashi.

This exhibition highlights the work of recognized artists such as Joan Brown, Jay DeFeo, Sonia Gechtoff, and Deborah Remington, while bringing to light many of the significant artists that have only recently begun to be receive much-deserved research and recognition. Artists featured are Ruth Armer, Katherine Barieau, Bernice Bing, Adelie Landis Bischoff, Pamela Boden, Dorr Bothwell, Joan Brown, Marie Johnson Calloway, Jay DeFeo, Claire Falkenstein, Lilly Fenichel, Sonia Gechtoff, Nancy Genn, Ynez Johnson, Zoe Longfield, Emiko Nakano, Irene Pattinson, Margaret Peterson, Sonya Rapoport, Deborah Remington, Frann Spencer Reynolds, Nell Sinton, Masako Takahashi, and Ruth Wall.

West Coast Women of Abstract Expressionism opens with a reception Thursday, June 1, 2023, 6 - 8 p.m. and is on view through July 1, 2023. The exhibition is accompanied by a 46-page catalogue with an essay by Frances Lazare. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. - 6 p.m. or by appointment. For further information please call at 212.924.2178, visit our website at www.berrycampbell.com, or email at info@berrycampbell.com.

[1] Sonia Gechtoff quoted in Rosemary Cartens, “The Divine Dozen: Sonia Gechtoff’s Star Still Shines Brightly,” June 22, 2016. https://www.wordsandpaint.com/wildlife-best-stories/divine-dozen-sonia-gechtoff.

 
‘None of that Macho Bullshit:’ Painting and Possibility in San Francisco, 1945-1960
By Frances Lazare 

In 1955, Jay DeFeo moved across the San Francisco Bay, leaving Berkeley, home for her college years, for a small, walk-up apartment in a simple four-unit building at 2322 Fillmore Street in the city’s Upper Fillmore district. DeFeo’s arrival solidified 2322 Fillmore’s reputation as a kind of “Grand Hotel,”[1] which housed a rotating cast of painters, poets, and musicians, including Bay Area notables like painters Sonia Gechtoff, James Weeks, Joan Brown, and her sculptor husband Manuel Neri, the poets Michael and Joanna McClure, and, for a brief period, the artist Bruce Conner who, by 1957, claimed San Francisco as the natural choice for a young artist to begin his—or, in the case of our protagonists, her—career.[2] Nicknamed “Painterland,” 2322 Fillmore Street was the site of numerous gatherings, parties, and “exhibitions” and soon became the focal point of a start-up scene of intertwined artists’ studios and cooperative galleries that DeFeo described as an ever-expanding “network of people–friends of friends of friends of friends of friends.”[3]

If 1950s San Francisco was considered the “natural choice” for the bohemian cadre centered in San Francisco’s northern end, it was decidedly less apparent to the rest of the nation. Conventional wisdom holds that, in the years after the Second World War, the headquarters of the international avant-garde shifted definitively from Paris to New York. The status of New York as the art world capital and of Abstract Expressionism as a national style was ensured by art world authorities and mass-market magazines alike, who published articles that extolled the virtues of abstract paintings by Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning to a broad audience. By 1950, Life magazine speculated that Jackson Pollock might well be the greatest living painter.[4] Yet, in the middle of the 1940s, a group of ambitious young painters and curators began to flock to the opposite coast, and San Francisco emerged as a national stronghold of Abstract Expressionism. Somewhat liberated by their isolation from the “art world” proper, artists on the Bay Area scene—at the heart of which was the group of enterprising women showcased herein—experimented with a kind of improvisational and spontaneous expression that mirrored the expressive currents emerging in New York, but which remained rooted in the unique topography and institutional particularities of the San Francisco Bay region.

Bay Area abstraction grew up around museums and art schools—particularly the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA)—and the artists’ hangouts that sprung up around them rather than within the commercial infrastructure of the dealer-gallery axis. Under the direction of Grace McCann Morley, the San Francisco Museum of Art (later renamed the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) brought a who’s who of European modernists to the city in a series of groundbreaking exhibitions that rival the activities of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Beyond her exhibition program, one of Morley’s most significant acts was bringing the young curator Douglas MacAgy and his wife, Jermayne—one of the first women in the United States to earn her Ph.D. in art history and an influential curator in her own right—to the city from Cleveland in 1941. Their dual promotion of Abstract Expressionism was rooted in the fundamental necessity of dialogue and exchange between artists and media, thus cultivating the fertile creative conditions from which the women-led second wave of Bay Area abstraction would soon develop.

And, if the San Francisco scene was overlooked by national critics—owing largely to apprehensions about regionalism and local style that were especially heightened on the heels of Depression-era Populism—the vitality of the San Francisco scene was being recognized in an international context. In the pages of the French magazine Cimaise, critic Kenneth Sawyer surmised that “between 1946 and 1949—the San Francisco Bay Area was the most aesthetically advanced region in the United States.”[5]

Not coincidentally, the years that Sawyer identifies as San Francisco’s prime coincide almost directly with Douglas MacAgy’s tenure at the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA), the first in a sequence of events that contributed to the school’s rise as a hotbed of creative activity that nurtured the careers of a rigorous and aesthetically diverse group of artists. The new energies stirring at the CSFA owe arguably as much to political circumstance as MacAgy’s individual character. From the mid-to-late 1940s, CSFA was invigorated by the large influx of veterans—like the painter Richard Diebenkorn, known for his eclectic abstractions that speak to the Bay Area’s atmospheric light and space—who enrolled in the school as a part of the GI Bill, which offered tuition-free college education to soldiers returning from war. According to the painter Hassel Smith, the GIs were a “swinging bunch” who redefined the typical CSFA student from Sunday painter to “working artist.”[6]

Seizing on the dual influx of cash and students, MacAgy endeavored to revive the sleepy art school and cultivate a livelier and more rigorous atmosphere. His first order of business was to scrap the previous faculty. Among the handful of instructors who remained of the prior regime was Doris “Dorr” Bothwell—who made important contributions across the mediums of watercolor, sculpture, collage, as well as pioneering screen-printing as a fine art medium on the West Coast, and whose 1957 City Dusk is presented in this exhibition. Bothwell was joined by emerging talent, including Ansel Adams as head of the photography department and Clyfford Still as head of painting. Though he was later grouped with the New York School of Abstract Expressionism (as noted in the famous “Irascibles” photograph by Nina Leen that appeared in Life magazine in January 1951), Still’s impact on the course of American painting is arguably the most legible through his legacy as an educator at CSFA, where students—particularly GIs who had seen heavy combat during the war—responded to the rawness of the painter’s cliffs of jagged color. Still was met with suspicion as an outsider by local faculty like Hassel Smith, but was nonetheless joined at CSFA by fellow New Yorkers Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko, who regularly taught summer sessions during MacAgy’s tenure—evidence of a porousness between the coasts that was obscured by persistent debates over east versus west.

Abstract Expressionism soon swept through the Bay Area in a nearly “instantaneous” fashion.[7] MacAgy began reinvigorating the school’s social life by making studio facilities available at all hours, encouraging open studios, and inviting musicians and poets to perform. He also spearheaded the faculty’s formation of The Studio 13 Jazz Band.[8] The band mainly played Swing and featured MacAgy on drums, David Park on piano, Elmer Bischoff on trumpet, and John Schueler on bass. The painter Wally Hedrick, who later married DeFeo and lived with her on Fillmore Street, played banjo, and painter Deborah Remington danced alongside. Though not officially a part of the CSFA curriculum, the band played often at the school and in venues in nearby North Beach, directly precipitating the kind of inter-media co-mingling that defined later San Francisco avant-gardes, including amongst the inhabitants of 2322 Fillmore and nearby artist-run galleries.

In 1950, both Still and MacAgy abruptly departed the CSFA. This shift coincided with the critical consolidation of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism, which soon eclipsed the San Francisco scene. At the same time, Abstract Expressionism’s hegemony in San Francisco was challenged by the same artists who were once its foremost practitioners, like David Park and Elmer Bischoff, who soon turned to a kind of loose realism that married action painting with tenants of figuration. This stylistic sea change marked the end of the period that the French critic Kenneth Sawyer had designated as the Bay Area’s most “aesthetically advanced.”

Critics be damned, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, San Francisco artists continued to push the boundaries of abstract painting, expanding their cultural world beyond MacAgy and the California School of Fine Arts. Indeed, in a 1988 interview, the painter Walter Kuhlman remembers that while the mid-to-late 1940s were the “the so-called golden years…in some respects [they were] just the beginning. The real growth occurred after the school broke up.”[9]

The CSFA had played a vital role in cultivating a vibrant, cross-media avant-garde and provided artists with a framework for a creative community in which sociability—in the form of studio visits and jam sessions—was a vital part of the artistic process rather than merely an ancillary indulgence. But this community was relatively isolated, a “monastery on a hill,”[10] as one faculty member described it, whose sweeping bay views were far removed from the bohemian neighborhood below. In the early 1950s, the locus of avant-garde activity expanded beyond the academy’s walls. Artists began infiltrating the bars and restaurants of the nearby North Beach neighborhood and, soon after that, the Fillmore, where they found cheap rent and even cheaper beers.[11]

Women became increasingly prominent in this start-up scene in the early 1950s. Bernice Bing married her practice as a dynamic, abstract painter with her work as a community organizer, working at the Neighborhood Arts Program, and founded the Scroungers Center for Reusable Art Parts (SCRAP), a creative re-use center aimed at minimizing waste.

Back on Fillmore Street, DeFeo and Brown were the beating heart of “Painterland.” According to Bruce Conner, the women endeavored to knock down the wall that divided their studios so that they could work together at all hours.[12] Deborah Remington, for her part, was a founding member of the avant-garde gallery co-operative, the 6 Gallery, located just up the street at 3119 Fillmore. Despite the gallery’s legendary openings and parties, it was more of a gathering point than a viable commercial venture; it “couldn’t ever sell anything because [the artists] weren’t adept at that sort of thing.”[13] Remington, who was a descendant of the Western artist Frederic Remington, understood the value of gallery co-operatives. In 1953, the painter held the first solo show of her early sensuous, earthy abstractions at the artist-run gallery King Ubu in 1953.[14] Once that gallery shuttered, the 6 Gallery opened in the same space, with Remington partially at its helm.

Within this experimental “sort of empty garage,”[15] the second-wave San Francisco abstractionist Sonia Gechtoff had her first solo show, “Paintings by Sonia Gechtoff,” in October 1955. Art critic Alfred Frankenstein’s review of that show in the San Francisco Chronicle attests to the achievement of Gechtoff’s “big canvases with broad ribbons of pigment...”[16] Just a few years later, Gechtoff’s work was highlighted on an international scale when her work was included in the 1958 Brussels World Fair, USA Pavilion, “[17] American Painters.” Despite this international achievement, the painter locates her practice squarely within the local context. Speaking of the poverty but also the freedom of the San Francisco Bay in the 1950s, Gechtoff recalls:

“There was none of that macho bullshit. When I came to New York I was horrified at how the female artists were being disregarded. I think it was different in San Francisco because there were no commercially viable galleries….It gave us permission to be more experimental.”[17]

The in-your-face machismo of the hard-drinking, rough-and-tumble New York School painters and their paradoxical commitment to the purity of abstract painting and its universal implications is well documented. Recalling time spent at the Cedar Tavern, the notorious watering hole frequented by Jackson Pollock and company, artist Miriam Schapiro later wrote, “Under no circumstances were you to consider yourself a human being who arrived there for the same purpose that the men did.”[18] Women and people of color who painted within this milieu faced the inevitability of seeing their work evaluated through the lens of their particularized identity, as when the critic Harold Rosenberg dismissed Helen Frankenthaler’s poured paintings as analogs for the female body on the grounds that the painter privileged the chance operations of her acrylic paint, allowing fluid to leak out and stain the canvas rather than engaging in proactive or heroic “action.”[19]

Nonetheless, Frankenthaler is firmly entrenched in the canon of American Modernism; not so the women abstractionists congregating in 1950s San Francisco. Othered on the basis not only of gender but also geography, that this entire group of women has been all but omitted from the annals of art history—save for DeFeo, who is made to stand in for all San Francisco women—is evidence of the field’s sustained geographic and gendered biases. But the questions of margin and center had different stakes for Bay Area women who were already on the fringes of Abstract Expressionism’s dominant formation and thus harbored no fantasies about escaping the particularities of identity or locale. Instead, these women related to their regional art world, which flourished outside of the commercial realm, and whose specificity and local character informed the very form of their paintings. Immersed in a start-up scene of their own making, art historian Susan Landauer suggests, these painters may have benefited from the paradoxical freedom lent by obscurity.

The painter Zoe Longfield embodied this very kind of unencumbered attitude. Though she was a trusted student of Clyfford Still’s at CSFA—and one of the few artists of either sex who was allowed to take his much-vaunted graduate painting seminar—Longfield was admired for her ability, as one student remembers, to “put on blinders and work with no influence at all.”[20] Her oeuvre thus displays a wide formal range that complicates the notion of “signature style”—a concept especially loaded in histories of the period in which gesture acts as a mark of personal style and authorial presence. During her years at CSFA, her paintings ranged from biomorphic abstractions to the loose and more explosive canvases that earned her a reputation as a master of “unrestrained colors and unrestrained shapes.”[21]

If the “experimental openness” of San Francisco’s localized avant-garde drove Longfield’s chameleon-like ability to inhabit different painterly modes without the anxiety of influence, the heterogeneity of the city’s scene also drove the reemergence of collage-based practices—emerging from Cubist papier collé and Dadaist assemblage earlier in the twentieth century. In 1950s San Francisco, modernist collage practices like layering and montage reemerge across painting, writing, and sculpting. Whether achieved by adhering scraps of tissue paper on a wooden support, as in the case of Lilly Fenichel’s Collage (IV), or via trompe l’oeil as in Ruth Armer’s oil on canvas Abstraction #251, or the molten, melting metal of Claire Falkenstein’s Untitled (Fusion), the appearance of discrete but overlapping elements approximated the cross-fertilization of artists and media that characterized the California School of Fine Arts under MacAgy, and which subsequently defined the colony on Fillmore Street.

Beyond the comingling of artists across media, the post-war resurgence of collage, as a medium that emphasizes the fusion of discrete elements into a new whole, emerges from the overlapping and intermingling of bodies within the city’s rapidly shifting racial and socioeconomic geographies. In the early 1950s, when the CSFA students began to spill into the nearby North Beach, the neighborhood was home to the city’s population of Italian immigrants, who, like the artists who flocked there, cultivated a sense of community and were isolated from mainstream American culture. The situation in the Fillmore was equally complex. When DeFeo moved into 2322 Fillmore, less than a decade had passed since the neighborhood’s Japanese residents were removed forcibly from their homes during the government’s internment of Japanese Americans. During the war, Fillmore became a vital center of the bebop revolution and home to a large community of Black Americans, and when it ended, the Japanese American population returned to the neighborhood, followed shortly by an influx of primarily white artists.[22] Against this shifting ground, the intersecting and overlapping of distinct groups within the city’s Fillmore neighborhood became a kind of living collage.

Indeed, the city’s changing demographics raised the stakes of the question of obscurity for artists of color active within the San Francisco School, including Baltimore native Marie Johnson Calloway. Calloway’s shift from loosely painted, abstracted landscapes to politically engaged assemblage, which she called “sculpted paintings,” may have coincided with the city’s ongoing cycle of urban blight and renewal. Building projects often left debris scattered in the streets, which artists used as the basis for creation.

The ongoing effects of racialized discrimination in San Francisco took a more painterly form in the canvases of the Japanese American painter Masako Takahashi. Takahashi was born in Topaz Internment Camp in Utah during WWII and later moved to San Francisco with her family, and, fortuitously, won a high school art contest for a scholarship to the CSFA. There, Takahashi produced energetic abstractions that conveyed meaning and emotional intensity through vigorous, looping marks and searing hues. The paintings of Chinese American painter Bernice Bing are also shaped by the specific character of the city’s sociocultural landscape, which she married with a deep engagement with its physical landscape. Bing was born in San Francisco’s Chinatown to Chinese American parents in 1934 when the discriminatory effects of the turn-of-the-century Chinese Exclusion Act were still deeply felt within Chinese American communities across the United States. The residual effects of this discrimination left Bing relatively estranged from her cultural heritage—a gulf she attempted to bridge through paint. Known to friends and colleagues simply as “Bingo,” Bing fused elements of Bay Area Abstract Expressionism with Chinese calligraphy and references to art history—as in the case of the Velasquez Family—to produce sensitive but energetic works in earthen palettes.[23] In 1963, Bing left San Francisco for the Napa Valley countryside, where she worked in the Mayacamas vineyards. Having spent her entire life in the urban Bay Area, the drama of the more rural Mayacamas Mountains impressed itself on Bing and catalyzed a series of experiments with impasto, applying washes over solid colors whose various weights and drying times created material analogs for terrain. Bing approached the canvas as a pictorial means for evoking the specificity of the Northern California topography.

This experiential and sensorial mode of conveying the particulars of their environment was shared by many West Coast women, including Emiko Nakano, Irene Pattinson, and Nell Sinton, whose horizontally banded abstractions evoke the orientation and sensation of traversing the local landscape without representing it outright. We need only to look at Emiko Nakano’s Night Landscape (Setting Sun and Rising Moon) to imagine the sensation of standing at the top of Russian Hill, watching the city take shape below.

Joan Brown spoke explicitly about the ways that San Francisco’s quality of light and proximity to the water shaped her painterly practice. “There still is this damn psychic energy I’ve talked about that has to do with this place and this body of water,” Brown recalls in a 1975 interview for the Archives of American Art.[24]

The character of San Francisco’s unique artistic community in which “children and friendship seemed more important to the artists than did a successful career or money-making”[25] also made its way into her paintings. In her Reaching for That Chicken at Jacks, Brown invokes the specific contours of the artistic community she found at 2223 Fillmore, potentially recalling an evening spent carousing at Jack Spicer’s—another founding member of the Six.[26] The vibrant colors, irregular shapes, and worked surface of this painting typify the energetic abstractions of her early years. “I loved the application as well as the look of the paint, right out of the gallon can,” Brown remembered. “I loved what happened when I was using the trowel, the physical exuberance of just whipping through it with a big, giant brush.”[27]

In the 1960s, no longer satisfied with her materially driven abstractions, Brown began to experiment with a range of new genres and painterly styles, but her commitment to the Bay remained constant. Ultimately, the figurative style for which she is most known developed out of an engagement with Bay Area Figuration married with the bright and expressive colors of her early career.

For Brown and all of these West Coast women, it was San Francisco or nowhere. Be it the particulars of the Mayacamas Mountains, the view from Russian Hill, or the character of the Fillmore; these artists found creative freedom on the margins. Bucking the ‘rhetoric of purity’ identified by the art historian Mark Cheetham as a central aspiration of twentieth-century abstractions universalizing ambitions, West Coast women seized on the local and the particular, allowing the specificities and particularities of place to play a formative role in the composition of painting.

1. Thomas Albright, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-1980: An Illustrated History, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 91.
2. Bruce Connor, quoted in Rebecca Kelley Young Schoenthal, “North Beach to Haight-Ashbury: Underground Artists and Community in 1950s San Francisco,” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Virginia, January 2005.
3. Oral history interview with Jay DeFeo, 1975 June 3–1976 January 23. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
4. “Jackson Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?” Life, August 8, 1949, 42-45.
5. Kenneth, Sawyer, “L’expressionisme abstrait: La phase du Pacifique,” Cimaise (Paris), no. 7 (June 1954): 3–5.
6. Hassel Smith, quoted in Thomas Albright, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 19.
7. Albright, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 37.
8. Schoenthal, “North Beach to Haight-Ashbury,” 40.
9. Walter Kuhlman quoted in Susan Landauer, The San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 123.
10. Elmer Bischoff quoted in Young Schoenthal, “North Beach to Haight-Ashbury,” 77.
11. Ibid, 2.
12. Interview with Jay DeFeo, Archives of American Art, 18.
13. Oral history interview with Bruce Conner, 1974 August 12. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, unpaginated.
14. Albright, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 53.
16. Alfred Frankenstein quoted in Schoenthal, “North Beach to Haight-Ashbury,” 170.
17. Sonia Gechtoff quoted in Rosemary Cartens, “The Divine Dozen: Sonia Gechtoff’s Star Still Shines Brightly,” June 22, 2016. https://www.wordsandpaint.com/wildlife-best-stories/divine-dozen-sonia-gechtoff.
18. Miriam Schapiro quoted in Patricia Albers, Joan Mitchell: Lady Painter: A Life, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 175.
19. Lisa Saltzman, “Reconsidering the Stain: On Gender and the Body in Helen Frankenthaler’s Painting,” in Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History After Postmodernism, edited by Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 373.
20. Susan Landauer, “The Advantages of Obscurity: San Francisco Women Abstract Expressionists,” lecture at the Denver Art Museum, September 2016.
21. Albright, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area,
22. Kelley Young Schoenthal, “North Beach to Haight-Ashbury,” 150-156.
23. Linda Keaton (ed.), Bingo: The Life and Art of Bernice Bing, (Sonoma: Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, 2019), 2. Kelley Young Schoenthal, “North Beach to Haight-Ashbury,” 164.
24. Oral history interview with Joan Brown, 1975 July 1-September 9. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
25. Joan Brown, paraphrased in Richard Candida-Smith, Utopia and Dissent: Art. Politics and Poetry in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 253.
26. Schoenthal, “North Beach to Haight-Ashbury,” 164.
27. Caroline, Harris, “San Francisco or Nowhere: The Necessity of the Bay to Joan Brown’s Art.” SFMOMA, March 23, 2023. https://www.sfmoma.org/read/san-francisco-or-nowhere-the-necessity-of-the-bay-to-joan-browns-art/.