MARCH 01 - MARCH 29, 2003
Drawings
Untitled, Jan. 74
LOB-038-MM
"Drawing is the source of it all. You can’t just look. You have to get involved with it to know what you are looking at. In other words, you really have to look.—Frank Lobdell
Hackett-Freedman Gallery presents a rarely exhibited group of figurative drawings by San Francisco artist Frank Lobdell March 6-29, 2003. The show includes more than a dozen stellar drawings executed between 1959 and 1974 in drawing sessions in which Lobdell and other Bay Area artists, notably the late Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff, participated.
This exhibition celebrates the opening of "Frank Lobdell: The Art of Making and Meaning," a survey spanning five decades of this master artist's paintings, drawings, and lithographs, on view at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco's Legion of Honor March 1 - May 25, 2003. A concurrent exhibition of Lobdell's sketchbooks, "The Evolution of Imagery: The Sketchbooks of Frank Lobdell," is also on display at the museum. A comprehensive full-color monograph chronicling Lobdell’s prolific career accompanies the exhibitions.
Lobdell began his weekly drawing practice in 1959, when Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff asked him to join their group after David Park had to leave due to ill health. The drawing sessions not only provided the three friends with a chance to draw from a live model, but it also allowed them time for lively discussions about painting and mutual support.
When he joined the staff of Stanford in 1966, Lobdell continued weekly drawing sessions with a new group that included his colleague, Nathan Oliveira, and other Stanford professors. The drawing sessions were crucial to Lobdell’s practice as an artist, providing an opportunity for him to hone his eye and his hand, and inspiring the development of the vocabulary of shapes that dominate his abstract paintings.
Although widely recognized as one of the premier post-war American abstract painters and a major player in American Abstract Expressionism, Lobdell has also long been admired by other artists for his daring and original drawings done from the model. In quality and freshness, Lobdell's drawings are considered by curators and critics to be the equal of those by his illustrious drawing companion, Richard Diebenkorn.
Employing the languid and confident line that characterizes his abstract paintings, Lobdell created sensuous and beautifully composed drawings of female nudes with ink and wash. January 1974, a drawing of a model lounging across two chairs, exemplifies Lobdell’s mastery of the figure. He plays up the contrast between the linearity of the furniture and the soft curves of the model’s flesh, using washes to suggest weight and shadow on the model’s hips and torso.
Lobdell’s figures are assertively physical, and he does not shy away from portraying the sexuality of the poses, some of which are blatantly erotic. Often the figures are highly abstracted, complexes of forms rather than individual bodies.
Despite considerable early recognition in San Francisco and New York, Lobdell remains something of an enigma. He is known for working with a "monastic commitment" to the principles of creative intuition—a philosophy he credits to the powerful influence of his mentor at the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA), the late Clyfford Still. Lobdell has always sought privacy, telling an interviewer in 1960, "being anonymous is really the best condition to be able to create."
Frank Lobdell was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1921 and studied with Cameron Booth (a former student of Hans Hofmann and an enthusiast of European Abstraction) at the St. Paul School of Fine Arts. From 1942 until 1946 Lobdell saw active service in Europe during World War II. He then attended CSFA (now the S.F. Art Institute) from 1947-50, where he studied with Diebenkorn, Still and Rothko. Lobdell returned to teach at CSFA in 1957, then joined the Stanford University faculty in 1966, retiring after 25 years.
Lobdell is a recipient of the Medal for Distinguished Achievement in Painting from the American Academy and Institute of Arts & Letters. His work is included in the collections of major museums, including the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California; The Oakland Museum; The M.H. de Young Museum; and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington D.C.