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Art

Some milestones in Bay Area art: Clockwise from top right, Reflected Landscape, 1966-68 by Wayne Thiebaud, Portrait of George, controversial bust of Mayor George Moscone, 1981 by Robert Arneson, Four Men, 1958 by David Park.

STATE SENATE

MAYOR

A Major Critic's Look Back

by Ken Coupland

Art in the San Francisco Bay Area 1945 1980

An Illustrated History

Thomas Albright

University of California Press, 1985

350 pages, $60.00 hardcover, $29.50 paper

T

homas Albright wrote art criticism for the SF Chron-

handsome volume, boasts well over a hundred full color illustrations and over and above that, features a thoroughly absorbing gallery of duotone portraits of the artists represented.

Albright gives as his premise the "unaccountable fact that although the Bay Area has been an important art center for half a century or more at least until the middle of the sixties.

icle for several decades before his death at forty-eight (italics mine] it was second only to

in 1984. Regular readers of Albright's column either loved him or hated him but few could ignore him.

A product of the Beat scene of the late fifties and sixties, Albright staunchly defended the work of his contemporaries often, it seems at the expense of his own objectivity. Cantankerous or effusive by turns, Albright could be scathing in his criticism of younger artists, while he remained supportive of many who were older, and more established. In fact, as his health declined and his appearances in print were punctuated with bouts of illness, his criticism often verged on the reactionary. While his attacks on trendy artists, dubious theme shows, the grant giving process, and "performance art" were often valid, it was understandable when "Albright Sucks" buttons started showing up around town and at gallery openings.

But Albright was capable of writing with stirring eloquence about art. As one gallery owner admitted privately recently, while he often disagreed with Albright's reviews (particularly when Albright was panning one of his shows),

when he reread the offending columns much later, he felt he had plenty to learn from them and that they made a good deal of sense.

Albright applied the same standards he demanded of art to his views on music (he regularly reviewed jazz, with equal brilliance, for the Chronicle). His grasp of the subtleties of classic jazz was well-nigh visionary, but he balked at electrification, badmouthed funk, and would have nothing to do with rock music.

But it was as a critic of art that Albright made his greatest impact, and when his predecessor at the Chronicle passed away, he was virtually alone in his field, so his final project, a definitive history of Bay Area art, was eagerly awaited from the time its publication was posthumously announced. Albright had been working on it right up to his death, and his manuscript was polished how much it is impossible to tell and edited afterwards. Now in print, Albright's magnum opus is a

12 Sentinel USA August 1, 1985

New York no comprehensive study of its unique contribution to the nations artistic and cultural heritage has ever been made."

His study begins with the Twenties, the first glimmerings of an autonomous "Bay Area style", and the first proofs of a mature movement in the WPA murals that centered around the work of Diego Rivera. Moving on to the grand era of Abstract Expressionism, he hits his stride in a description of the heady period when painters Clifford Styll, Mark Rothko, Elmer Bischoff and Hassel Smith were teaching at the SF Art Institute and creating arguably the first and last truly international movement the Bay Area was to see. The figurative school that developed around the same time and the superb canvases of David Park, in particularare sensitively handled by Albright, and the precursors of the Bay Area Funk school, especially Bruce Connor, get similar treatment.

Beyond that, Albright's interest wavers, and with some justification, begins to wane. The works of William

Cantankerous or effusive by turns, Albright could be scathing in his criticism of younger artists, while he remained supportive of many who were older, and more established.

Wiley, Wayne Thiebaud and others from this period do seem to pale by comparison with their predecessors. Albright's handling of the next wave of artists is even more problematic as we sense his dissatisfaction with the emergence of psychedelic art, visionary artists, and the posters and comics of the time. Continued on next page