![]() The next year, he hired Elmer Bischoff and Clyfford Still. To make up the core of the new painting faculty, he hired four painters he had met as curator - Edward Corbett, David Park, Hassel Smith and Clay Spohn. ![]() This week's question: What San Francisco intersection was known in the late 19th century as "Cape Horn," and why? See More Collapseįor his part, Douglas MacAgy set about remaking the staid CSFA into a center of artistic experimentation. The last question: After benches were installed in Golden Gate Park around 1880, what supposed crisis erupted? Jermanyne MacAgy staged the first Jackson Pollock exhibition in San Francisco in 1942, following that with one-artist shows by Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Arshile Gorky and Clyfford Still. MacAgy and his then-wife, Jermanyne, who was acting director at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, quickly became the most important champions of contemporary art in the Bay Area. The board agreed, and MacAgy was appointed director on July 1, 1945. MacAgy offered to run the school, on the condition that he be allowed to revise the curriculum and hire faculty as he saw fit. In 1944, the board of trustees considered closing the dying school and selling off the real estate.Īt that moment, salvation appeared in the form of 32-year-old Douglas MacAgy, a curator at the San Francisco Museum of Art. Enrollment plunged, and in 1942 the school’s director quit because there was no money to pay his salary. The Great Depression and World War II hit the school hard, and by the 1940s it was on life support. In the 1920s and 1930s, Richard Candida Smith writes in “Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry and Politics in California,” it “had the reputation of having the most conservative curriculum in the state, with a faculty that steadfastly clung to the beaux-arts academic tradition.” Founded in 1874, the CSFA was a typical fine-arts college of its era, attracting large numbers of female students who wanted to acquire “accomplishments” to make themselves more marriageable. In 1945, few expected the California School of Fine Arts to even survive, let alone become a center of cutting-edge art. And remarkably, it was a bunch of World War II veterans who made that development possible. During that time, the school played a significant role in the development of Abstract Expressionism, one of the most important artistic movements of the 20th century. ![]() The artists and movements associated with the institution include Diego Rivera, Ansel Adams, Minor White, Manuel Neri, the Bay Area Figurative School, the funk movement, and too many others to list.īut the most crucial period in the school’s long history, when it transformed itself from a moribund finishing school for debutantes into a white-hot center of artistic experimentation and a force to be reckoned with in modern art, took place in just five years, from 1946 to 1950. Yet for decades, the school - known as the California School of Fine Arts until 1961- was a major force, not just on the Bay Area art scene, but on the national one. The 148-year-old art school on the northeast slope of Russian Hill had been struggling for years, plagued by declining enrollment and financial woes. When the San Francisco Art Institute closed its doors on July 15, the city lost one of its oldest and most important cultural institutions. The school, which closed in July, was a major force for years on the Bay Area and national art scene. “The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City,” painted by Diego Rivera in 1931, is displayed in a private gallery at the San Francisco Art Institute in July.
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