Sonia Gechtoff (September 25, 1926 – February 1, 2018) was an American
abstract expressionist
Abstract expressionism is a post–World War II art movement in American painting, developed in New York City in the 1940s. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York at the center of the ...
painter
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface (called the "matrix" or "support"). The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, and ai ...
. Her primary medium was painting but she also created drawings and prints.
Early life and education
Sonia Gechtoff was born in Philadelphia to Ethel (Etya) and Leonid Gechtoff. Her mother managed art galleries, including her own East and West gallery located at 3108 Fillmore Street in
San Francisco
San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...
. Her father was a highly successful genre artist from
Odessa
Odesa (also spelled Odessa) is the third most populous city and municipality in Ukraine and a major seaport and transport hub located in the south-west of the country, on the northwestern shore of the Black Sea. The city is also the administrativ ...
, Ukraine. He introduced his daughter to paintingActon, David, The Stamp of Impulse: Abstract Expressionist Prints, p. 110, The Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA, 2001. and "had ersit beside him at his easel with a brush and paints and beginning at age six he was there to spur eron".
Gechtoff's talent was recognized early and she was put in a succession of schools and classes for artistically gifted children. She graduated from the
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) is a museum and private art school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Career
In 1951, Gechtoff relocated to San Francisco, sharing her social and professional life with Bay Area artists such as
Hassel Smith
Hassel Smith (born Hassell Wendell Smith Jr.; April 24, 1915 – January 2, 2007) was an American painter.
Biography
Hassel Smith was born in 1915 in Sturgis, Michigan. During childhood and adolescence his family alternated between homes in ...
, Philip Roeber, Madeline Dimond,
Ernest Briggs
Ernest P. Briggs Jr. (1923–1984) was a second-generation Abstract Expressionist painter known for his expressive, sometimes calligraphic brushwork, his geometric compositions, and revolution in abstract painting that secured New York City's po ...
,
Elmer Bischoff
Elmer Nelson Bischoff (July 9, 1916 – March 2, 1991) was a visual artist in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Bischoff, along with Richard Diebenkorn and David Park, was part of the post-World War II generation of artists who started as abstract pai ...
Deborah Remington
Deborah Remington (June 25, 1930 – April 21, 2010) was an American abstract painter. Her most notable work is characterized as Hard-edge painting abstraction.
She became a part of the San Francisco Bay Area's Beat scene in the 1950s. In 1965, ...
. She was immersed in the heady culture of the San Francisco Bay Area Beat Generation. According to Gechtoff, female abstract expressionists in San Francisco (such as
Jay DeFeo
Jay DeFeo (March 31, 1929 – November 11, 1989) was a visual artist who first became celebrated in the 1950s as part of the spirited community of Beat artists, musicians, and poets in San Francisco. Best known for her monumental work ''The Rose' ...
,
Joan Brown
Joan Brown (born Joan Vivien Beatty; February 13, 1938 – October 26, 1990) was an American figurative painter who lived and worked in Northern California. She was a member of the "second generation" of the Bay Area Figurative Movement.Glu ...
, Deborah Remington, and Lilly Fenichel) did not face the same discrimination as their New York counterparts. After moving she studied lithography with
James Budd Dixon
James Budd Dixon (November 26, 1900 – December 1, 1967) was an American Abstract Expressionist painter and printmaker. He was a member of the "Sausalito Six" group of San Francisco Bay Area painters.
Family and education
James Budd Dixon was bor ...
at what is now called the
San Francisco Art Institute
San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) was a private college of contemporary art in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1871, SFAI was one of the oldest art schools in the United States and the oldest west of the Mississippi River. Approximately ...
. She rapidly shifted to work as an
Abstract Expressionist
Abstract expressionism is a post–World War II art movement in American painting, developed in New York City in the 1940s. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve international influence and put New York at the center of the ...
.
Some of her most well-known artwork was done in the Bay Area, including the lyrical Etya which is in the Oakland Museum of California.
Gechtoff married James "Jim" Kelly, another noted Bay Area artist, in 1953.
She gained national recognition in 1954, when her work was exhibited in the Guggenheim Museum's Younger American Painters show alongside
Willem de Kooning
Willem de Kooning (; ; April 24, 1904 – March 19, 1997) was a Dutch-American abstract expressionist artist. He was born in Rotterdam and moved to the United States in 1926, becoming an American citizen in 1962. In 1943, he married painter El ...
,
Franz Kline
Franz Kline (May 23, 1910 – May 13, 1962) was an American painter. He is associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1940s and 1950s. Kline, along with other action painters like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Mothe ...
,
Robert Motherwell
Robert Motherwell (January 24, 1915 – July 16, 1991) was an American Abstract Expressionism, abstract expressionist Painting, painter, printmaker, and editor of ''The Dada Painters and Poets: an Anthology''. He was one of the youngest of th ...
, and
Jackson Pollock
Paul Jackson Pollock (; January 28, 1912August 11, 1956) was an American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. He was widely noticed for his " drip technique" of pouring or splashing liquid household paint onto a hor ...
.
Shortly after her mother Ethel died in 1958, Gechtoff and Kelly moved to New York, where they immediately became a part of the New York art world. She was represented by major New York galleries, among which were Poindexter and Gruenebaum, receiving consistently excellent reviews for her work. Teaching appointments and visiting professorships to
New York University
New York University (NYU) is a private research university in New York City. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded by a group of New Yorkers led by then-Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin.
In 1832, the ...
,
Adelphi University
Adelphi University is a private university in Garden City, New York. Adelphi also has centers in Manhattan, Hudson Valley, and Suffolk County. There is also a virtual, online campus for remote students. It is the oldest institution of higher ed ...
,
Art Institute of Chicago
The Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago's Grant Park, founded in 1879, is one of the oldest and largest art museums in the world. Recognized for its curatorial efforts and popularity among visitors, the museum hosts approximately 1.5 mill ...
and the
National Academy Museum and School
The National Academy of Design is an honorary association of American artists, founded in New York City in 1825 by Samuel Morse, Asher Durand, Thomas Cole, Martin E. Thompson, Charles Cushing Wright, Ithiel Town, and others "to promote the fi ...
, among others, were part of her professional life.
Aesthetics
As a teenager, Gechtoff was heavily influenced by
Ben Shahn
Ben Shahn (September 12, 1898 – March 14, 1969) was an American artist. He is best known for his works of social realism, his left-wing political views, and his series of lectures published as ''The Shape of Content''.
Biography
Shahn was born ...
's style of social realism/sup>, an international political and social movement that drew attention to the struggles of the working class and the poor.
Gechtoff cited
Clyfford Still
Clyfford Still (November 30, 1904 – June 23, 1980) was an American painter, and one of the leading figures in the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, who developed a new, powerful approach to painting in the years immediately follo ...
's influence on her style (whom she met through her friend Ernie Briggs, but with whom she never studied). She took important lessons about line and shape from Still's work, and is sometimes referred to as a "second-generation Abstract Expressionist".
Her distinctive style emerged in the early 1950s: bright, bold works on "big" canvases.Albright, Thomas, "Art in the San Francisco Bay Area: 1945-1950: An Illustrated History", University of California Press, 1985, p. 52. Many of her works, like ''The Angel'' (1953–55), are abstracted self-portraits. Gechtoff used vibrant colors and thick, energetic brushstroke to suggest a central figure whose arms stretch across the
picture plane
In painting, photography, graphical perspective and descriptive geometry, a picture plane is an image plane located between the "eye point" (or '' oculus'') and the object being viewed and is usually coextensive to the material surface of the w ...
. In 1956 she inaugurated her complex "hair" drawings, masses of line that tangled into wispy shapes that float on the paper. Her bold, swirling compositions won her a place in the United States Pavilion at the
Brussels World's Fair
Expo 58, also known as the 1958 Brussels World's Fair (french: Exposition Universelle et Internationale de Bruxelles de 1958, nl, Brusselse Wereldtentoonstelling van 1958), was a world's fair held on the Heysel/Heizel Plateau in Brussels, Bel ...
in 1958.
Later in her career, after moving to New York, Gechtoff began drawing inspiration from the
Brooklyn Bridge
The Brooklyn Bridge is a hybrid cable-stayed/ suspension bridge in New York City, spanning the East River between the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn. Opened on May 24, 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge was the first fixed crossing of the East River ...
, classical architecture, and the sea, whose forms are recognizable in her later series of collage-like paintings. Gechtoff continued to develop her work throughout her career, never staying with one style. Always abstract, her work began to incorporate graphite after a switch to acrylics from oil. The result has given a sense of linear rhythm to her work. She also developed an interest in doing a series of work on a theme as well as sets, multiple canvases comprising a single complete work. One of her final set of works is the six canvas series "Skip's Garden".
According to Charles Dean, whose collection of Abstract Expressionist prints was acquired by the
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The library is ...
, Gechtoff was "the most prominent woman working in California in the '50s".
Notable exhibitions
Group exhibitions
* USA Pavilion, Brussels World Fair: "17 American Painters", 1958
* Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1977
* Guggenheim Museum, New York, "Younger American Painters 1954-55"
* Bella Pacifica-Bay Area Abstract Expressionism" at the Nyehaus Gallery, New York 2011
* "Women of Abstract Expressionism" at the Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, California 2017
Solo exhibitions
* Six Gallery, San Francisco, 1955
* De Young Museum San Francisco, 1957
* Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles, 1957,1959
* Poindexter Gallery, New York, 1959, 1960
* Gruenebaum Gallery, New York, Works on Paper, 1975-1987
* "The Ferus Years", Nyehaus Gallery, New York, 2011–12
Awards
* 1963 – Ford Foundation Fellowship, Tamarind Lithography
* 1988, 1994, 1998 – Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant
* 1989 – National Endowment for the Arts, Mid-Atlantic Grant
* 1993 – Elected into the
National Academy of Design
The National Academy of Design is an honorary association of American artists, founded in New York City in 1825 by Samuel Morse, Asher Durand, Thomas Cole, Martin E. Thompson, Charles Cushing Wright, Ithiel Town, and others "to promote the fin ...
* 2013 – Lee Krasner Lifetime Achievement Award
Public collections
*
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...
, New York, New York
*
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a modern and contemporary art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art, and was ...
, San Francisco, California
*
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.
It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of ...
, New York, New York
*
Whitney Museum
The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District, Manhattan, Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude ...
, New York, New York
*
Menil Collection
The Menil Collection, located in Houston, Texas, refers either to a museum that houses the art collection of founders John de Menil and Dominique de Menil, or to the collection itself of approximately 17,000 paintings, sculptures, prints, drawing ...
, Houston, Texas
References
Further reading
"Drawings by Extraordinary Women" The Museum of Modern Art, July 22, 1977, No. 55.
"The Cool Revival: Sonia Gechtoff in San Francisco" by Hirsch, Faye, Art in America Magazine (on-line), 01/21/11.
by Kramer, Hilton, The New York Times, January 8, 1982.
* Kramer, Hilton, "Reflections on Sonia Gechtoff", essay for Works on Paper, 1975–1987, a show at the Gruenebaum Gallery, 1987.
* "Sonia Gechtoff: Four Decades, 1956-1995: Works on Paper", Schick Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, July 13-September 17, 1995.
* "Sonia Gechtoff: New Works January 5-February 13", Gruenebaum Gallery, Ltd, New York, 1982.
* "The Most Difficult Journey-The Poindexter Collection of American Modernist Painting", The University of Washington Press, 2002.
"Can We Still Learn to Speak Martian?" by Yau, John, April 29, 2012, in Hyperallergic, an on-line forum/newsletter