Excerpt from ‘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,” 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. 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.”
city’s Upper Fillmore district. DeFeo’s arrival solidified 2322 Fillmore’s reputation as a kind of “Grand Hotel,” 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. 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.”
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. . .
Biography by Frances Lazare
Designed by Mark Robinson
Published by Berry Campbell
Printed by Meridian, Rhode Island
