Frank Lobdell, Charles Strong and Jack Jefferson

Clyfford Still’s pivotal influence on the Bay Area artists from the California School of the Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute where Still taught beginning in 1946), was far-ranging and passionately felt in the works of his students and followers including Frank Lobdell and Jack Jefferson. Frank Lobdell, along with artist Manuel Neri whose work is also on view, were awed by the 1947 exhibition of Still’s paintings at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor; an exhibition cited by art writer Bruce Nixon as “the watershed moment in San Francisco’s emergence as a center of Abstract Expressionism.” Lobdell, initially challenged by Still’s style at the time, was also recovering from the horrors he witnessed in World War II. Ultimately, he found freedom in the new expression as a style devoid of the human figure which allowed him to delve deeply into his responses to war and its inhumanity. Still’s “rawness” in color and technique considerably influenced Lobdell’s approach over time and the relationship became a friendship based on shared criticism and joint admiration. A series of letters are on view in this exhibition as not only examples of the affection held between the artists, but also as a view into the complexity of the Abstract Expressionist movement itself.

Artist Jack Jefferson originally from South Dakota, was considered a superlative student of Still during Still’s San Francisco tenure. Jefferson shared studio space with Lobdell and later both were long-time faculty members at the progressive San Francisco Art Institute. Their student, Colorado-born Charles Strong, also felt a strong connection to Clyfford Still through his professors and enjoyed a personal meeting in Boulder, Colorado in 1960 where the much- admired Still taught for a summer. A former miner, Strong continued to paint in an abstract expressionist manner even after the movement shifted in attention toward the Bay Area Funk artists and all those who reveled in the Beat generation in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Lobdell, Jefferson and Strong remained dedicated over the years to the more formal and endless possibilities of Abstract Expressionism.