Acclaimed abstract expressionist
Sonia Gechtoff, a prominent abstract expressionist on the West Coast early in her career and later a mainstay of the New York City art scene, died on Feb. 1 at a hospice center in the city. She was 91.
Her daughter, Susannah Kelly, confirmed the death.
Ms. Gechtoff made a quick and substantial impression in San Francisco, where she had arrived in 1951, a time when the Bay Area art scene was bubbling. An early oil, “Self Portrait,” made in 1954 when she was still in her 20s, is now in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution. That same year she was represented in a group show of young painters at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
She was also becoming well known in the California art world, with solo exhibitions at outlets like the de Young Museum in San Francisco and the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, both in 1957.
But in 1958, she and her husband, the artist James Kelly, whom she had married in 1953, decamped for New York. Though she was identified with the Abstract Expressionist genre her whole life — her early work has been the focus of a rediscovery recently — she experimented with styles and materials throughout her career.
In 1976, when Hilton Kramer of The New York Times called her “one of the most gifted artists of her generation,” he was reviewing a show of her pencil drawings.
Sonia Alice Gechtoff was born on Sept. 25, 1926, in Philadelphia, into a family with art in its genes. Her father, Leonid, was a painter, and her mother, Etya, was a gallery owner and manager.
Ms. Gechtoff received a bachelor of fine arts degree from the Philadelphia Museum School of Art (now the University of the Arts) in 1950. After moving to San Francisco, she largely abandoned figurative work in favor of the abstract.
It was a time of envelope pushing among artists, which included experimenting with ways to apply paint other than with a brush. (Jackson Pollock’s drip-painting period began in the mid-1940s.) Ms. Gechtoff started working with the palette knife.
“The palette knife has been used for ages to mix and move paint, but until Sonia’s generation, the brush ruled as far as the mechanism to apply paint to canvas,” Marshall Price, the Nancy Hanks curator of modern and contemporary art at Duke University’s Nasher Museum of Art, wrote in an email. “Sonia refined her palette knife technique, and by the late 1950s the slashing marks, often applied in a vortexlike way, were a hallmark of her work.”
Reviewing Gechtoff’s first New York exhibition after her move east, a 1959 show at the Poindexter Gallery, the critic Dore Ashton wrote in The Times that the technique had produced “a surface similar to the overlapping feathers of a wet bird.”
However it was described, it made Ms. Gechtoffstand out in a genre thatwas largely male. A 1961 article in The Times about a brewing boycott by artists, in response to fire-code restrictions that threatened their lofts, said that “some big box-office names” had pledged to support the strike. It then listed 21 of those names, among them Robert Motherwell, Jasper Johns and Willem de Kooning. Ms. Gechtoff was the onlywoman on the list.
Ms. Kelly said that having two artists as parents made for a “home environment filled with creativity” for her and her brother, Miles, a musician who also survives their mother. Artists and other friends of their parents were always stopping by to talk art, politics, film and more.
Ms. Gechtoff was still displaying that spiritedness late in life. A 2011 article about her in Art in America magazine began, “Tough, straight-talking abstract painter Sonia Gechtoff is currently being rescued from ill-deserved obscurity.”