1. AbEx in San Francisco key decade: 1940 into 1950s

   Thesis:
   "Field" painting had an important impetus, if not an origin, in the painting made in San Francisco in the 1940s - particularly the highly serious approach of Clyfford Still

   1. Clyfford Still (1904-80)
   2. Rothko and Reinhardt in San Francisco
   3. Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993)
   4. Others: Hassel Smith and Frank Lobdell
2. The promotion of an "école du pacifique" by curator Michel Tapié
   1. Mark Tobey - US (1890-1976)
   2. Georges Mathieu - France (b. 1921)
   3. Jiro Yoshihara - Japan (1905-1972)

Slide List

Still Brown Study 1935
Still Untitled 1945 (covert self-portrait)
Still Indian Red and Black 1946
Still 1949-G 1949
Lobdell April 1957
Diebenkorn Untitled 1949
Diebenkorn Albuquerque 1952
Diebenkorn Berkeley No.37
Diebenkorn Berkeley No.57 1955
Dixon Study in Red & Green #13 1958
Smith ALone with the Killer 1948
Tobey Broadway (tempera) 1936
Tobey Pacific Transition 1943
Yoshihara Work 1961
Mathieu Composition 1953
Mathieu Black and White on Brown 1955

Clyfford Still, Untitled, 1946

Still's work, too, synthesized symbolic self-portraits with a landscape sensibility -- but how are his surfaces and effects different from Rothko's?

Richard Diebenkorn w/H. Smith, Untitled, 1949
Richard Diebenkorn, Berkeley No.37
Hassel Smith, Alone with the Killer, 1948
James Bud Dixon, Study in Red & Green #13, 1958
Frank Lobdell, April, 1957

Many students (Diebenkorn, Lobdell) and fellow faculty (Smith, Dixon) were influenced by Still's palette, insistence on abstraction, or morbid rhetoric.