MARCH 07 - APRIL 27, 2002
Three Phases 1947–2001
17 October 1947
LOB-013-OC
"The purpose of painting is always to go beyond what can be said in words" – Frank Lobdell
Hackett-Freedman Gallery presents a rare exhibition of paintings and drawings of Frank Lobdell from the late 1940s until the present, March 7–30, 2002. The entire gallery will be devoted in March 2002 to displaying rarely exhibited works from the three most significant phases of Lobdell’s career. A selection of these works will continue to be on view in the gallery through April 27. The exhibition provides an unprecedented opportunity to view the extraordinary diversity of Lobdell’s career and places in context the evolution of his personal iconography and visual symbolism.
Frank Lobdell is one of San Francisco’s most significant abstract painters and a major player in American Abstract Expressionism. Despite considerable early renown in San Francisco and New York, Lobdell remains something of an enigma. He is renowned 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, the late Clyfford Still. Lobdell's intense concentration on his own process makes for unpredictable output and infrequent exhibitions. These factors and others have kept Lobdell mostly out of the limelight, even as he approaches 80. Lobdell has always sought privacy, telling an interviewer in 1960, "being anonymous is really the best condition to be able to create."
The scope of the works to be exhibited thus details 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."
The show provides a full view of Lobdell’s early, densely expressive works from the 1940s and 1950s, continuing with the more figurative and calligraphic work of the 1960s and 1970s. The show concludes with Lobdell’s work from 1980 to the present, in which his fusion of archetypal geometric forms and symbols (some inspired by Anatolian textiles) merges with a newly vibrant palette.
Lobdell’s early abstractions were powerful expressions of the effect of war on his psyche; as he said, "[I] can’t be content with prettiness when a feeling of turmoil seems most characteristic of our times." In 31 December 1948, Lobdell uses a predominantly black, sienna and ochre palette, and a tough surface redolent of the work of his teachers Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko, but with a harsher, more fervent urgency. The work 17 October 1947 is broken into sections, containing more defined forms with figurative connections to the work of Picasso and Klee, and suggestions of prehistoric forms.
October 1965 is representative of the dynamic and urgent sense of motion typical of Lobdell's works from the 1960s. Forms such as crescent moons, barbed spinning wheels or crowns of thorns, and whirling limbs are recurrent images, which have their roots in Lobdell’s earlier work and from artistic influences including Rembrandt and Goya. The forms are often angled toward one edge of the canvas, as in Winter 1969, emphasizing the thrusting, rushing movement of the images.
The late 1960s and early 1970s were a transitional period in Lobdell’s work; he moved toward a more lyrical and less apocalyptic vocabulary. In Dance II (1969), almost calligraphic figures move in arabesque over and through circular and elliptical forms. Spring (1972) also provides an important connection between earlier and emerging iconography: fields of background color are shot through with linear trails and spirals, which, as the artist’s work has progressed, has become increasingly defined and dominating.
Lobdell's most recent work includes vibrant canvases. They are marked by a palette of soothing yet dramatic color: yellow and green, milky and underpainted lavender, and vibrant reds for accent. These paintings are inhabited by objects which are neither figurative nor abstract, but which are clearly rooted in Lobdell’s earliest work. The world depicted in the third phase of Lobdell's work is full of movement, activity, joy, and bounded emotion.
Frank Lobdell was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1921 and studied with Cameron Booth (a former student of Hans Hofmann and enthusiast for European Abstraction) at the St Paul School of Fine Arts. From 1942 until 1946 Frank Lobdell saw active service in Europe during World War II, an experience which profoundly influenced his early work. He then studied at 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; he retired in 1991, after twenty-five years of teaching. 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, and the Oakland Museum of California, among others. He is represented by Hackett-Freedman Gallery.
NOTES/QUOTES:
8 May 1960 ARTS MAGAZINE
Lobdell's works have a "feeling of sleep" like the "unfathomable slumber of Morpheus". (Images) "not of death...but are images of revelation and transformation"
DORE ASHTON, NYT 4-19-60:
Lobdell is "one of the few SF painters who have been able to take the lessons of Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko, and do something with them."
[He has] "developed a symbolic imagery that stays close to the primordial mythic themes that (these older painters) were exploring around 1946."
[The symbols] "serve to engender an atmosphere—a dark, almost chaotic atmosphere of beginning."
ARTS 10/1960
[Lobdell] "aspires to a symbolic vision which might contain the fullest measure of human complexity that painting is capable of while remaining wholly abstract."
"skin of paint" is from clyfford still; and now a hallmark of bay area painting.. but "beneath the hard and long-worked paint is a saturnine morality"
THOMAS ALBRIGHT, 1980's
"archetypal symbols" from deep in the unconscious mind
influ: Rembrandt, Goya, Picasso, etc.