Looking Back: Art in the San Francisco Bay Area 1945-1980

Occasionally  we’ll pull something from the history of the Bay, reading longtime SF Chronicle art critic Thomas Albright’s take in Art in the San Francisco Bay 1945-1980 (1985) makes us thoughtfully rub our chins and wonder what precisely has evolved in the last forty odd years. How has this place changed?

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Many forces have combined to give San Francisco its unique identity as a cultural center. For one, it has a certain "genius of place"... one of the great glamour capitals of the world…, an international mecca for devotees of pleasure, plain or fancy… Coexisting with its urbanity is a deep-seated local reverence for nature, which has preserved a subtle but strong rapport with the heritage of the area's early Native American inhabitants and has made the Bay Area a stronghold of conservationists. For an artist, especially, the area is distinguished by such basic features as its characteristic light "There's a cultivation of white here, the violent white of those plaster structures," Claes Oldenburg, who lived briefly in Oakland in the early 1950s, once observed.

Above all, the Bay Area’s cultural life has always remained rooted in the kind of congenital split personality that characterized San Francisco’s historic origins. Its early settlers were primarily adventurers, outcasts, and ne'er-do-wells, lured by gold and the prospect of instant wealth. But they also aspired to all the fine things that money could buy—including culture….

Hence the split personality: on the one hand, the parvenu’s pretensions to urbanity and high culture (which San Francisco shares with every other provincial American city, though with somewhat more justification than most of them); on the other, the frontiersman’s readiness to take risks, and to holler "bullshit!" at the first sign of pomposity.

On the surface, "the City"— as San Francisco likes to regard itself—cultivates a genteel, aristocratic image; underground, it breeds the volatile rebelliousness that has given birth to the  ost revolutionary and social cultural movements of the past two generations: the Beats, the hippies, the student protest movements, the push for gay rights.

In keeping with the singularity of its character and history, the San Francisco Bay Area has developed a distinctive and vigorous artistic tradition. This is not to say that Bay Area art forms an isolated or coherent regional "school." San Francisco… Bay Area artists have created a major body of American painting and sculpture (and photography as well) that reflects certain recurring attitudes. Independence, bluntness of speech, a stern austerity or elemental rawness, and a dedication to the vernacular are some of them. Others are an affinity for the mystical expressions of non-Western religions; a predilection for the eccentricities and broad humor of the "naïve" folk artist; and a persistent dedication to simple (and not-so-simple) "realism"—an abiding interest in the verities of light and landscape, the irreducibles of the figure and of portraiture. In the dialectical tug-of-wars that are always straining the seams of contemporary art, Bay Area artists have generally favored homegrown elements over imported ones, personal experience over the supposed imperatives of art history, and a conception of art as vision, process, and act of communication rather than as a matter of pure form.

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