1878-1949

Theme/Style – Art Nouveau, Modernism, figurative art

Media – Sculptures

Artistic Focus – One of America’s most important 20th-century sculptors, Robert Aitken became known early in his career as a masterful student of anatomy and costume. Always striving to maintain originality in his works as opposed to acting as a mere technician, Aitken produced sculptures in which the figures seem not only alive but about to move; not merely posing but captured deep in thought.

Career Highlights –

• Robert Ingersoll Aitken was born in San Francisco, where he studied at the Mark Hopkins Institute under Arthur Mathews and Douglas Tilden before making the first of two visits to Paris in 1897.
• Aitken then returned to San Francisco, where he won the first of many significant commissions.
• He returned to Paris in 1904 for three years, and then established his studio in New York City, where he spent the rest of his life.
• Although he no longer lived in San Francisco, Aitken contributed several important sculptures to the City’s 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition.
• Robert Aitken’s many other works include the bronze doors to the Charles H. Crocker Mausoleum in San Francisco, and his “Victory” monument, a tribute to Admiral Dewey’s victory at Manila Bay, which stands in the City’s Union Square.

Selection of Works by this Artist

See No Evil, Speak No Evil, Hear No Evil

Love a Lover

Mercury

Theme/Style – Social Realism, WPA themes, Spanish and Mexican motifs

Media – Oils, murals, sculpture, lithographs

Artistic Focus – Maxine Albro’s world travels inspired many of her landscapes and street scenes, and she often paid special homage to her tutelage by Mexican artist Diego Rivera in works featuring Spanish and Mexican themes.

Career Highlights –

• Maxine Albro was born in Iowa in 1893, after which her family moved to Los Angeles, where she grew up.
• After graduation from high school in 1920, Albro moved to San Francisco, where she worked as a commercial artist to finance studies at the Art Students’ League in New York and the Ecole de la Grande Chaumière in Paris.
• After a year in New York and Europe, Albro returned to San Francisco and attended the California School of Fine Arts from 1923 to 1925.
• During one of her many trips to Mexico, Albro studied mural painting with Diego Rivera.
• In 1933 Maxine Albro was one of 26 artists commissioned by the Public Works of Art Project to paint frescoes and create one bas-relief in the newly constructed Coit Tower. Albro’s contribution was her 1934 striking and colorful mural depicting seasonal scenes of California’s agricultural abundance.
• Following the destruction of the Diego Rivera mural in New York’s Rockefeller Center because it included a portrait of Lenin, Albro’s politically progressive views prompted her to present her fellow Coit Tower muralists with a resolution that called the destruction “an acute symptom of a growing reaction in the American culture which has threatened for years to strangle all creative effort…”
• In addition to her murals, Albro produced many canvases, as well as frescoes painted on the walls of private homes in California. She also exhibited widely, at Delphi Studios in New York and the Berkeley Women’s City Club, as well as in San Francisco at the S.F. Art Association, Beaux Arts Club, Gump’s, and the Golden Gate International Exposition.
• Albro married fellow Coit Tower muralist Parker Hall in 1938, and the couple settled in Carmel, California. Albro passed away in Los Angeles in 1966.

Theme/Style – Landscapes, genre, Abstraction

Media – Oils, lithographs

Artistic Focus – Ruth Armer’s work went through various stages, reflecting the phases of her own life. Her early paintings were representational. Later, her style became broader and more expressionistic, and then moved more toward abstraction in the 1950s. By the 1960s her paintings had taken on a hard-edge style.

Career Highlights –

• Born in San Francisco in 1896, Ruth Armer studied at the California School of Fine Arts.
• Armer also studied in New York City at the Art Students League and at the School of Fine and Applied Art under George Bellows, Robert Henri, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and John Sloan.
• Armer’s first one-woman exhibition was in 1922 at Vickery, Atkins & Torrey in San Francisco.
• During the next 50 years, Ruth Armer’s work was exhibited in numerous group shows in San Francisco, as well as solo exhibitions at the Oakland Art Gallery in 1932; the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1936, 1939, and 1950; Gump’s in 1967; and Quay Gallery in 1971-72.
• Outside of the San Francisco Bay Area, Ruth Armer’s paintings were included in exhibitions in New York City including the seminal American Painting Today 1950 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Art: USA: 58 at Madison Square Garden. Her art also was exhibited in Brazil at the Museu de Arte Moderna’s III Bienal in Sao Paulo in 1955.
• Ruth Armer was a trustee of the California School of Fine Arts from the early 1940s until the early 1950s, and she remembered the school generously in her will.
• A lifelong resident of San Francisco, Armer passed away in 1977.

Theme/Style – Impressionism, Modernism, landscapes, figurative art, illustrations, sculpture

Media – Oils, illustrations, etchings

Artistic Focus – Beginning at the turn of the Twentieth Century as an illustrator and Impressionist painter, Gertrude Albright’s artistic career broadened after studies in Europe. She adopted a more Modernist aesthetic. Her palette included more engaging colors and she moved from soft contours to the occasional use of more linear forms in the mid-1920s.

Career Highlights –

• Born in Heysham, England, in 1874, Gertrude Partington immigrated to the U.S. with her family at age six, and settled in Oakland.
• One of seven children who all became active in some field of the arts, Gertrude’s first art teacher was her father, J.H.E. Partington, who himself was a well-known portraitist in the San Francisco Bay Area.
• By the turn of the century Gertrude was an illustrator for the San Francisco Examiner, a position that helped finance her trips abroad where she studied at the Académie Delecluse in Paris with G.X. Prinet and learned the technique of drypoint etching.
• On her return to San Francisco, Gertrude established a studio on Post Street, where she produced etchings, portraits, and scenes of the San Francisco Bay Area, and exhibited often with the San Francisco Art Association.
• In 1913 she co-founded the California Society of Etchers; she also received a bronze medal at San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915.
• In 1917 Gertrude married one of her art students, Herman Albright, and joined the staff of the California School of Fine Arts, where she remained as a respected instructor for nearly 30 years.
• A director of the San Francisco Society of Women Artists, Gertrude Partington Albright continued her active involvement in the Bay Area art community until her demise in 1959.

Theme/Style – Modernism, figurative art, Abstraction

Media – Oils, murals, sculptures, lithographs

Artistic Focus – Many of Ayer’s early paintings were abstractions or semi-abstractions, sometimes with a hint of Surrealism. He sculpted in wood and stone, among other materials. Starting off somewhat representational, his later sculptures were abstract.

Career Highlights –

• Born in San Bernardino, Richard Ayer spent his childhood among the Utes in Utah until at age 15 he moved to Fort Bragg, California.
• Beginning art studies at the college of Marin, Ayer then enrolled at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, where he studied sculpture with Ralph Stackpole.
• Ayer is said to have worked with Hilaire Hiler on the murals for what is now the Maritime Museum in San Francisco. Those murals have an underwater theme, with much fantasy infused in the design.
• Ayer also created many sculptures, especially in the 1940s and 1950s.
• After serving in the Army Air Corps in World War Two, Ayer returned to San Francisco where he lived out his life.

Selection of Works by this Artist

Nude

Theme/Style – Modernism, landscapes, still lifes

Media – Oils, gouaches, watercolors, pastels, ink drawings, lithographs, monotypes

Artistic Focus – Herman Albright’s works reflect both his affection for California and the sheer joy he found in his artistic pursuits. The subtle elegance of his works on paper was compared by critics to the practice of Asian artists; and his paintings of San Francisco Bay Area scenes, as well as many other areas such as Shasta, Monterey and the Eel River, were notable for their inspired, sensitive and lively use of color and varied brush techniques.

Career Highlights –

• Born Hermann Oliver Albrecht in Mannheim, Germany, in 1876, Herman Albright studied music and philosophy at Heidelberg University and traveled throughout Europe.
• Albright continued his travels upon his arrival in the United States around 1900, eventually settling in San Francisco in 1905. There he took a position at the Paul Elder Book Company, where he worked for the next 25 years.
• Originally doing photography as a hobby, by 1915 Albright was studying art and exhibiting in San Francisco, at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915, and at the San Francisco Art Association from 1916 through the 1930s.
• In 1917 he married his art teacher, painter Gertrude Partington, at which time he legally changed his name from Albrecht to Albright.
• Also known as H. Oliver Albright, Herman Albright was active in the San Francisco art community, and by the 1930s was able to devote full time to his art career. He exhibited often throughout the rest of his life, at San Francisco’s California Palace of the Legion of Honor, the Commercial Club, Gump’s Gallery, and the Beaux Arts Gallery, as well as at the California State Fair and the Springville Museum in Utah, winning many awards.
• During the 1930s Albright made a series of lithographs and a series of Chinese ink wash drawings depicting the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge during its construction, both of which were highly regarded and widely exhibited, including a show of the ink wash drawings at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1937.
• Herman Albright passed away in San Francisco in 1944.
• Posthumous exhibitions of Albright’s work include The Art of H. Oliver Albright: An Appreciation at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1947, and a show at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery in New York in 1953.

Theme/Style – California Impressionism, Art Nouveau, Symbolism, Modernism, figurative art, portraits, still lifes

Media – Oils, murals, watercolors, lithographs

Artistic Focus – Mabel Alvarez enjoyed a six-decade career of artistic exploration. Her work is known for its use of high-key color and atmospheric effects reminiscent of traditional Impressionism, as well as for its careful rendering of figures, keen focus and economy of design. Much of Alvarez’ work focuses on themes of youth, growth and regeneration. By carefully selecting colors for their psychological impact, and by incorporating images of women and flowers into many of her canvases, she succeeded in expressing emotion through her art rather than simply offering visual representations of people and places.

Career Highlights –

• Born at Wailua, Oahu, Hawaii, in 1891, Mabel Alvarez settled in Los Angeles in 1906, where she later would study with, among others, Synchromist painters Stanton Macdonald Wright and Morgan Russell.
• Recognized early in her career, Alvarez was one of just three Southern California artists mentioned, along with Conrad Buff and Clarence Hinkle, in the 1934 publication, Art In America: In Modern Times.
• As she progressed in her career, Alvarez’ palette became in certain respects brighter, but also less exacting and more abstract.
• Alvarez’ works have been widely exhibited at sites including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and its predecessor institutions, the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Gene Autry Museum of Western Heritage in Los Angeles.
• Mabel Alvarez passed away in Los Angeles in 1985.

1896-1979

Theme/Style – Social Realism, Regionalism, landscapes

Media – Oils, murals, lithography, mosaic murals

Artistic Focus – Victor Arnautoff created paintings and watercolor works, focusing on portraits, still lifes and rural landscapes in his early years, and moved to more socially conscious themes later in his career

Career Highlights –

• He came to America through China, bringing his wife and children with him, and studied at the California School of Fine Arts before going to Mexico. There he worked as an assistant to muralist Diego Rivera.
• As project director and one of the artists selected to create the famed Coit Tower murals, Victor Arnautoff played a key role in determining the political and social content of the frescoes painted in the San Francisco landmark. His own contribution, City Life, appears to be a lively, non-political melding of downtown San Francisco scenes; however, closer study reveals two leftist newspapers on the newsstand, while the city’s most mainstream daily, the San Francisco Chronicle, is strangely missing.
• Painted frescoes in the Military Chapel at San Francisco’s Presidio, in the Anne Bremer Library of the San Francisco Art Institute, and in high schools and other buildings in the Bay Area.
• Taught art at Stanford University from 1939 until his retirement in 1963 after which he returned to Russia, where he lived out his life.

Selection of Works by this Artist

Bathers

Proposition 18

Theme/Style – Modernism, Surrealism, American Romantic paintings

Media – Oils

Artistic Focus – It took many years, but critics and the public eventually came to recognize what his fellow artists saw early on: Barnes was an accomplished artist, one who took a highly individualistic approach to his work. Often described as a painter who just wanted to paint, not to make a statement nor to gain fame, Barnes’s early canvases offered recognizable backgrounds and groups of people. In his later works the background became infinity, and his people a single man who seemed overwhelmed by his surroundings. There is no superficiality in his work – rather, it offers a simple, yet strong, emotional effect; a polished, jade-like surface that glows with its own inner light; and a nocturnal, fantastic and improvisational mood.

Career Highlights –

• Born in 1880 in Kilmarnock, Scotland, Matthew Barnes came to the United States in 1904, and spent two years in New York City working as an ornamental plasterer.
• When he heard that San Francisco needed skilled laborers after the devastating 1906 Earthquake and Fire, Barnes headed west that same year, and remained in the Bay Area the rest of his life.
• While working a construction job, Barnes happened upon an artist at work – and decided that he wanted to paint. He bought supplies and canvases, and began learning.
• Although Barnes had already established himself as an artist by the time he met Diego Rivera, he assisted the famed muralist in 1931 and 1932, working as a plasterer on several of the artist’s projects, and learning from the master in the process.
• Completely self-taught, Barnes painted for 25 years before selling a canvas, creating some 200 paintings during the last 35 years of his life.
• Matthew Barnes passed away in San Francisco in 1951.

Theme/Style – Modernism, figurative art, still lifes, landscapes

Media –  Oils, murals, printmaking

Artistic Focus – Belle Baranceanu was one of the most respected early California women Modernists. Equally adept at landscape, figure painting and still lifes, Baranceanu painted works reflecting the heritage of the early Modernists who preceded her, rather than the more intellectual, mechanistic approach of some later adherents to the style. Whatever the subject matter or medium, Baranceanu’s work – characterized by the use of deep greens, blues, pinks and gray – reflected her ability to reduce forms and structures of the material world to their sensory essence, and almost always demonstrated the artist’s interest in strongly expressed humanist content.

Career Highlights –

• Born in Chicago in 1902, Baranceanu studied at the Minneapolis School of Art, and under Anthony Angarola at the Art Institute of Chicago.
• Although Baranceanu never gained the fame of fellow artist Georgia O’Keeffe, much of her work of the 1920s applies the same close-up sensibility as O’Keeffe’s flower studies, while adding Baranceanu’s own interest in the abstract compositional properties of flat fields of color, plane and strongly accentuated line.
• Active in Chicago during the 1920s as a teacher and exhibitor, Baranceanu moved to southern California in 1933.
• After settling in San Diego, Baranceanu did murals for the Public Works of Art Project in the La Jolla Post Office and Roosevelt Junior High School.
• Both as an artist and instructor, Baranceanu was a vital force in the San Diego art scene until her demise in La Jolla in 1988.