For the last decade interest in abstract Expressionism has pretended stultified by the era's big subjects gigantic canvases and oversized spiritual claims.

For the last decade interest in abstract Expressionism has pretended stultified by the era's big subjects gigantic canvases and oversized spiritual claims. Now from left field - or rather from the left coast - be deriveds an exhibition that reinvigorates our intellect of late-1940s painting. "The San Francisco drill of Abstract Expressionism," curated by the agency of Susan Landauer for the Laguna Art Museum and generally at the San Francisco Museum of recent Art [through Sept. 29], traces the increase of a fascinating group of artists who were working at the same time as the denizens of the Cedar Bar. Painters with already solid reputations of that kind as Ronald Bladen Edward Corbett, Hassel Smith and Frank Lobdell appear as major figures, while lesser-known artists like as Edward Dugmore, Sonia Gechtoff, Philip Roeber and George Stillman are depicted by surprisingly gutsy, innovative works.

For this viewer, at least, it was a liberating and enlightening present to view Without indulging in canon-bashing, Landauer challenges the hegemony of the recently made known York School by providing convincing examples of an alternate, concomitant style of Ab-Ex painting. These works are wild and sometimes barely disciplined, further the 22 painters surveyed in "The San Francisco School" have more in used by all with each other (and thus can more easily be discussed as a group) than do the rather disparate of recent origin Yorkers.

greatest in quantity of the California artists were, in fact, literally associated with a institute the California School of Fine Arts, or CSFA, in its halcyon years below the directorship of Douglas MacAgy between 1945 and 1950 Given the freedom to create his acknowledge faculty, MacAgy, according to myth hired Clyfford Still after a mysterious man appeared in his office in a drawn out black coat, looking for work and toting a two of his austere abstractions. Still's independence, anti-European slant and loathing for the commercial art world quickly set the tone for the school

Although Still's port loomed large at CFSA, the exhibition makes clear that his works were by way of no means the only sources available to the young painters there. Previous accounts have made a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of the fact that Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt taught summer sessions at CSFA. The show's selections reveal, however, the persuasive influence of other faculty members, particularly Hassel Smith, Edward Corbett, Richard Diebenkorn and Robert McChesney. In her catalogue essay, Landauer details the stylistic unravelling of the group. She explains, "As often as the San Francisco artists may have admired certain fresh York Abstract Expressionists, one would search in vain for the lacy skeins of Pollock the shattered fields of de Kooning, or the slashing diagonals of Franz Kline; until the 1950 there are small in number signs of these artists' influence." As Landauer describes its bottoms Abstract Expressionism sprang out of a hybrid mix of Surrealism, expressionism and experimental abstraction. She makes a convincing case that the progression in a continuously ascending gradation of the style followed an essentially parallel course in recent York and San Francisco.

The freewheeling atmosphere at CSFA has been credited to the postwar influx of observers on the G.I. Bill who were tired of military bureaucracy and unproductive for free expression. George Stillman, single of these student-veterans, explained the psychological underpinning of the San Francisco School: "We had all been f up with regimentation, with being lay in a uniform and told what to do. We were looking for a way revealed of that discipline - a way to be individual, a way to be human." Still's rejection of Cubism, Surrealism and an intellectual approach to art history spoke to scholars who were seeking a cathartic vent for their wartime experiences. The paintings of Frank Lobdell a war veteran who attended CFSA from 1947 to 1950 and later taught there, are characterized through their tortured, black-lined forms. The anguished, birdlike shape in his April 1957 for example, lurches to the top animation of the darkened canvas like a battle-blasted, animated crucifix.

San Francisco, with its craggy and varied landscape, funky Victorian architecture and enthusiasm for jazz, prov to be a complete breeding ground for a recently made known bohemian generation. The iconoclastic experimentation evident in this exhibition clearly f the unravelling of the city's 1950s literary counterculture; this exhibit to might even be seen as a kind of "prequel" to the Whitney Museum's modern exhibition "Beat Culture and the modern America" [see A.i.A., Mar. '96] Although and nothing else Jay DeFeo and Ernest Briggs are included in as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but shows, other San Francisco painters as it is as Hassel Smith, John Saccaro and Sonia Gechtoff effortlessly fit the Beat profile and, in fact, pretend curious omissions from the Whitney exhibition.

Landauer traces CFSA's history during the MacAgy era and tracks a next to the first generation of local painters to the finis the 1950s. Faced with the remarkably tricky task of defining the characteristics of the San Francisco train she observes that these painters shared a choice for rough surfaces, broad areas of color, a "dirty" or an acidic, palette, and undisguised materials. Although the works range from the gorgeous, twilight tonal abstractions of Edward Corbett to Hassel Smith's hip, sexy biomorphs, stylistic borrowings are evident throughout