Movement and Migration
Abstract expressionism from California to Newyork is explored in a show currently on view at Anita Shapolsky Gallery
Lawrence Calcagno (1913-1993) was brought up in the midst of nature on his family’s ranch near Big Sur, California. He observed the landscape and taught himself to paint. It wasn’t until he returned from World War II that he began studying art under the G.I. Bill at the California School of Fine Arts where one of his teachers was Clyfford Still. Still’s rich color and thickly applied paint would influence Calcagno’s work throughout his life. He is included in the exhibition, CANY: Post-war Migration of Abstract Expressionists at Anita Shapolsky Gallery in Newyork, through November 22, “a group exhibition of select Bay Area and Los Angeles artists who followed the surge of abstract expressionists across the country in the 1950s to participate in the
flourishing sister movement: the New York School of Abstract Expressionism.” It also includes work by Ernest Briggs, Herman Cherry, John Hultberg, Richards Ruben and Jon Schueler. CFSA was the center for the Bay Area School of Abstract Expressionism.
CFSA’S director, Douglas Macagy, had been hired in 1945 “to revitalize and modernize the overly traditional program. He began by hiring a plethora of young artists, including Richard Diebenkorn, Stanley Hayter and Clyfford Still.”the gallery explains,
“While the CSFA cultivated its own unique school of abstract art, it also exposed its students to Newyork abstract artists like Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt through summer sessions from 1947 to 1949. Hultberg found Rothko’s guest lectures about the New
York art scene convincing and he decided to continue his practice on the East Coast. Briggs, Calcagno and Schueler followed suit in the early 1950s, a migration catalyzed both by Still’s decision to move to Newyork.”
Calcagno continued his studies in Paris and Florence from 1950 to 1956 and had his first one-man show at the prestigious Martha Jackson Gallery in Newyork in 1955. He wrote of his work,“painting was the one avenue through which I could find psychical tolerance and be released. My life has always been motivated not by intellectual or rational considerations but more by a subjective compulsion, by what I love.”
Cherry was born in New Jersey in 1909, brought up in Philadelphia and moved to Los Angeles with his family when he was 15.There, he designed blueprints for 20th Century Fox and later studied under Stanton Macdonaldwright at the Otis Art Institute. His travels brought him from coast to coast several times before he settled in Woodstock, New York, in 1945. He was a noted abstract painter in the ’50s, spent over a decade teaching and, in 1975, stopped painting to write poetry. He returned to painting and, in the last years of his life, painted colorful abstractions such as Cocoon 5, 1988. He wrote of his work, “I want the surface to live.”
The gallery notes,“while the two schools shared a belief in the active process of painting to express one’s innermost thoughts and feelings, the Newyork artists were more heavily affected by trends in European art.the Californian artists in this exhibition created a style that was truly American, often rooted in natural forms rather than urban landscapes.”