ARTIST OVERVIEW
Emerson Woelffer (1914-2003) was one of California's foremost painters, collagists, and teachers and a pioneer of abstract expressionism on the west coast. In the late 1950s, he was instrumental in bringing the ideas and influences of European modernism to Los Angeles at a time when the nascent art scene there was disconnected from avant-garde movements in New York and San Francisco. His close friend and contemporary Robert Motherwell described Woelffer as having, “abstract expressionism…in his blood.” Woelffer referred to himself as an abstract surrealist, explaining “…the part that I took from surrealism is not the look of the painting but the approach to it-which is entirely automatic. I paint first and think afterwards.”
Born in Chicago, Woelffer studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, from 1935 to 1937, where he experienced the work of Matisse, Picasso, Miró, Kandinsky, Motherwell, and Matta. He later formed a close relationship with the Hungarian-American artist Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, from whom he absorbed the elements of constructivism into his own intuitive works. After the war, Woelffer taught at Josef Albers' pioneering Black Mountain College in North Carolina. He later traveled to the Yucatan, where he began a lifelong fascination with pre-Columbian and tribal art, and Italy, where he first started juxtaposing isolated brushstrokes on contrasting, flat fields of color, before arriving in Los Angeles in 1959.
Starting in the late 1940s, Woelffer began painting aggressively colored works, using jagged, primitive forms that speak to his lifelong interest in primitive and tribal art. In the 1950s, he embarked on his Number paintings, a series of hieroglyphic works that are reminiscent of Adolph Gottlieb's early 1940s "pictographs," with letters, numbers, and punctuation establishing a syncopated rhythm across the picture plane, and that also presage the mark making employed in contemporary graffiti art. These calligraphic marks and lines reflect the free form, highly personal approach that Woelffer applied to abstraction throughout his oeuvre.
In the 1960s, Woelffer pared down his imagery and simplified his visual language. Paintings from this period often feature a single stroke of paint laid down on a monochrome background. He was also fascinated with the visual properties of paper. During the 1970s and 1980s, he created papier collés that consisted of clipped papers held together with glue or pins, sometimes using the exposed white surface of the torn paper as though it were a stroke of white paint. In the 1990s, he executed a series of minimalist, black-and-white works-white calligraphic brushstrokes on black, prepared paper-that are reminiscent of certain aspects of Asian art. Woelffer also practiced sculpture and was a noted lithographer.
A legendary teacher, Woelffer inspired generations of California artists, first at Los Angeles's Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts), from 1959 to 1973, and later at the Otis College of Art and Design, where he taught until 1989. His students included Ed Ruscha, Larry Bell, and Joe Goode. Woelffer has been the subject of several career retrospectives, including the Santa Barbara Museum (1964), Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. (1974), and the 2003 inaugural exhibition at CalArt's REDCAT gallery "Emerson Woelffer: A Solo Flight, which was curated by Ruscha and accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with an essay by art historian Gerald Nordland.
Woelffer's work is held in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, among many others.
