OCTOBER 14 - NOVEMBER 27, 2004
Recent Work 1990-2004
5.23.94 Bleeker
LOB-101-OC
Hackett-Freedman Gallery presents a selection of new, brilliantly hued, large-scale paintings by Frank Lobdell October 14–November 27, 2004. A full-color catalogue, with essay by Bruce Guenther, Chief Curator, Portland Art Museum, accompanies the exhibition.
At 83, Frank Lobdell is one of America’s most significant living painters. Nationally acclaimed since the 1950s, Lobdell continues to paint seven days a week since retiring as head of the Stanford University Art Department in 1991.
In more than 50 years of gallery and museum exhibits in San Francisco and New York, Lobdell has continually pushed his work, reinventing and recycling the ideas behind his imagery, keeping to his tenet that “the purpose of painting is always to go beyond what can be said in words.” This exhibition surveys developments in his painting from 1990 to 2004, a period in which Lobdell’s symbology and palette have grown steadily richer, freer, more life-affirming, and more unified.
“Frank Lobdell is having a late great period,” says Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco curator Timothy Anglin Burgard, who compares Lobdell’s productivity and vision to that of Pablo Picasso in his late years. Burgard co-curated, along with Robert Flynn Johnson of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, a traveling retrospective of Lobdell’s career for San Francisco’s Legion of Honor in 2003. Johnson describes Lobdell as a “master artist” of seemingly unlimited creativity, who calls up archetypal symbols from deep in the unconscious mind to speak to the experience of living.
These recent works represent a high point in what the late San Francisco critic Thomas Albright described as “a constant… evolution in Lobdell’s art…from a somber, sometimes tragic sense of elemental conflict to a lyrical and exalted liberation, from darkness into light.”
This evolution is the product of Lobdell’s years of dialogue with his unconscious, a hallmark that joins him with other great surrealist artists, writes Portland Art Museum Chief Curator Bruce Guenther in his catalogue essay. The region “beyond paint” that Lobdell creates features a group of forms and symbols he has developed over many years, set against luminous and startling colors. The works are neither figurative nor abstract, but comprise a world of the artist’s own making.
Works included in this show were produced at Lobdell’s Pier 70 shipyard studio of twenty years and at his recent studio in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, a close walk from his home. Several works since 2000 were included in a traveling retrospective that originated at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, in 2003, and that has continued this summer at the Portland Art Museum.
Lobdell’s present-day work fuses archetypal forms and symbols (some inspired by Anatolian textiles) with a new, vibrant palette marked by soothing yet dramatic color: pure cobalt blue, cadmium yellow and sea green, milky and underpainted lavender, and vibrant reds for accent. These paintings are inhabited by original objects that are clearly connected to forms in Lobdell’s earliest work.
Studying at the San Francisco Art Institute (formerly the California School of Fine Arts, or CSFA) in the late 1940s, Lobdell was quickly recognized as an exemplar of west coast abstract expressionism, a movement that in scope and ambition paralleled that of the New York School after World War II. Despite the obvious shifts in the appearance of Lobdell’s work over the years, the impact of his early teachers—Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko—and of artists ranging from Picasso, to Goya, to the Neolithic cave painters at Lascaux, reveals itself in his current paintings.
Frank Lobdell was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1921, and studied with Cameron Booth at the St. Paul School of Fine Arts. From 1942 until 1946 Frank Lobdell saw active service in Europe during World War II, where his first-hand witness of war atrocities profoundly influenced his early work. He then studied at CSFA from 1947-1950, with Richard Diebenkorn, Clyfford Still, and Mark Rothko. Lobdell returned to teach at CSFA in 1957, then joined the Stanford University faculty in 1966; he retired in 1991.
Lobdell is a recipient of the Medal for Distinguished Achievement in Painting from the American Academy and Institute of Arts & Letters. His works are held in the collections of the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, the Laguna Art Museum, the Portland Museum of Art, and the Oakland Museum of California, among others. “Frank Lobdell: The Art of Making and Meaning” exhibited at the Portland Art Museum in Summer 2004.