Painting and Sculpture of the San Francisco Art Association

By The San Francisco Art Association

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1952.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Dec 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520349667

Book preview

PAINTING AND SCULPTURE

THE SAN FRANCISCO ART ASSOCIATION

PAINTING

AND

SCULPTURE

THE SAN FRANCISCO

ART ASSOCIATION

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles 1952

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS London, England

Copyright, 1952, by

The Regents of the University of California

Manufactured in the United States of America

This book is dedicated to the memory of Timothy L. Pflueger, former president and for many years a member of the Board of Directors of the San Francisco Art Association, who was also a pioneer in architecture and throughout his career a loyal friend of all artists.

CONTENTS 1

CONTENTS 1

ERLE LORAN

WELDON KEES

ERNEST MUNDT

PLATES

ERLE LORAN

Californie Artists of the San Francisco Art Association

The San Francisco Art Association has a distinguished record for encouraging the development of modern art. The most courageous artists in our community have for many years turned their eyes to the experiments of the Paris art world rather than to New York and the American scene. This broad point of view is more than ever dominant today, when the new note in American painting shows a search for the values of pure painting so magnificently advanced by Picasso and Braque but now reaching beyond to new levels of expression that reject the objects of the literal world.

Speculations have been offered to explain this devotion among northern California artists to the highest ideals of art, free from commercialism and provincialism. According to some, it is the very absence in San Francisco of adequate buyers and dealers in contemporary art that has made the artist so free. But that is a negative factor, and there seems to be little room for doubt that the activities of the SFAA are mainly responsible for the creative spirit we have seen here. With a membership drawn from both artist and lay groups, the SFAA was organized in 1871 with a constitution that stated: Its objects shall be the promotion of Painting, Sculpture and Fine Arts akin thereto, the diffusion of a cultivated taste for art in the community at large, and the establishment of an Academy or School of Design. The first school of design opened in 1874, but in 1893 the Mark Hopkins mansion on Nob Hill was established as the Mark Hopkins Institute, housing both the art gallery and art-school activities of the association. The great fire of 1906 destroyed the old mansion, but a new building arose from its ashes and