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Abstracts By the Bay

A new book discovers the West Coast
origins of Abstract Expressionism

By Ann Elliott Sherman

Wander through the Abstract Expressionist segment of the San Jose Museum of Art's American Art 1940-1965 exhibit and the imagined soundtrack running through your mind will most likely be "New York, New York." According to Bay Area curator and writer Susan Landauer's The San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism, this "well-worn pattern" found in surveys of Abstract Expressionism mistakenly presumes that painters outside of Manhattan "missed the germinal period" of the genre.

Through careful research, Landauer has arrived at the myth-busting conclusion that the same "evolutionary stages" of Abstract Expressionism witnessed in New York in fact emerged simultaneously across the United States. What's more, during the late '40s and early '50s, San Francisco painters affiliated with the California School of Fine Arts (now known as the San Francisco Art Institute) were generally recognized even by the East Coast press as the most avant-garde in their commitment to experimental abstraction.

Landauer makes plain that she's not trying to unseat the gods in the New York pantheon, and goes out of her way to avoid any regional boosterism while she calmly and rationally refutes the recognized gospel that all significant developments in nonrepresentational painting had their genesis in the Big Apple.

What she does advocate is placing the development of Abstract Expressionism within the broader context of postwar American culture. A disillusioned rejection of prewar ideologies in favor of a "neo-romantic" emphasis on the individual vision, feeling and imagination; a desire to communicate in a global idiom; and a subversive response to attacks on modernism--all of these factors fueled challenges to convention.

The "San Francisco look"--rough textures, broad expanses of color in a murky or organic palette, and an implied projection of form beyond the confines of the canvas--is largely attributed by Landauer to a decided anticlassicism and a brazen anticommercialism only possible in a city that lacked much of an art market.

Add the "galvanizing" effects of teachers like Clyfford Still and Clay Spohn. Infuse an older student population dominated by veterans on the GI Bill ready for a new start in a booming postwar California city with a heritage of nonconformity. With all those elements in place, you have the makings of what Landauer terms the San Francisco School, with its "consensus by negation."

Once the analytical framework has been laid, Landauer traces the individual development of various members of the S.F. School during the "golden age" of the '40s and on into the '50s, when painters and poets collaborated in happenings of "collective expressionism" and experimentation. Unlike the antagonistic relationship between the New York lions of abstraction and the practitioners of the Pop, Minimalism and Hard-Edge Abstraction movements that followed, Landauer notes that, in San Francisco, the major movements of the '60s, Figuration and Funk, "grew out of, rather than in opposition to, Abstract Expressionism."

She suggests that perhaps the endurance of the movement's core principles--an antiformalist ethic and idiosyncratic exploration of subjective feeling and experience--reflects the nonconformist cultural identity of northern California more than just the legacy of Abstract Expressionism. This helps to explain why the slick, candy-colored L.A. look of the same period never caught on in the Bay Area.

The book is both a critical work of art history and the catalogue for an exhibition currently on view at the Laguna Art Museum that is scheduled to open at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art this July. While there is no doubt a lot of crossover between the two target audiences, Landauer's style of writing is definitely aimed at the informed general public, rather than at art history academics.

Like any historical study, the book is extensively footnoted, and it is in the footnotes that Landauer most often allows for extended excerpts from interviews that inject a more personal, entertaining tone into what is a rather sober-sided discourse. Clearly, Landauer has taken the high road, striving to present an argument above reproach, not merely to replace an Eastern-based heroic myth with a West Coast version. A sexy bestseller it isn't, but anyone seriously interested in contemporary American art will appreciate its insights.

Landauer has succeeded in crafting a solidly researched, well-written history that seeks to give credit where it is due without resorting to strident revisionism or parochial prejudice. She balances scholarly erudition with a nonpatronizing clarity, and demystifies the confluence of time, place and personalities that gave rise to a uniquely American phenomenon. The San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism will no doubt alter the conventional interpretation of postwar American art history, and that's no small accomplishment.

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The San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism, by Susan Landauer, UC Press and Laguna Art Museum; 271 pages; softcover; $60 cloth, $34.95 paper.


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