California Society of Printmakers: One Hundred Years 1913-2013

California Society of Printmakers: One Hundred Years 1913-2013 is a thorough-going, beautifully illustrated centennial volume.  The California Society of Printmakers was originally founded as the California Society of Etchers in January 1913.

Headline from the San Francisco Chronicle January 19, 1913, p. 27

Robert B. Harshe, a professor at Stanford University and an assistant chief in the fine arts department  the Panama Pacific Exposition, was elected president of the new organization (see more about Harshe in "A Reader's Guide to Modern Art (1914)" from the blog). Other founding officers included prominent California artists Pedro J. Lemos, Gottardo Piazzoni and Ralph Stackpole.

At the heart of this volume is Maryly Snow's 80 page essay "Digging the Archives: The Documented History of CSP's Origins."  This chapter covers the organization's history from its origins through its 1968 merging with the Bay Printmakers Society to become the California Society of Printmakers.  Another chapter, "A Print Dealers Journey With California Prints" by Daniel Lienau provides an helpful overview of printmaking in the Bay Area, including the pre-Society days. 

The chapter "Moving Toward Multiplicity: Printmaking in Northern California--The 1940s to the Present" by Art Hazelwood discusses a wide-range of print making activities in the San Francisco Bay Area.  These include the activities of the Federal Art Project Graphic Arts Workshop that arose from the Tom Mooney Labor School.  It also notes the importance of museums like the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts (at the Legion of Honor) and Oakland Museum of Art.  He also discusses printer-publishers and community based printers.

Another sizable portion of the book is the list of "Current CSP Artist Members."  This a repetition of the format of the California Society of Printmakers 85th Anniversary volume from 1998 which was primarily a catalogue of black and white by members.  The centennial volume improves on this, featuring colors reproductions by its members' works.

Finally California Society of Printmakers: One Hundred Years 1913-2013 includes several appendices.  The first is an index of artist members through the Society's history.  There is also a listing of artist who exhibited in their annual exhibits, by decade.    There are listings of honorary members, associate and patron members.  The fifth appendix provides a chronology of the Society's exhibitions.  Another appendix gives an annual listing of prize winners.  Finally there is a chronological annual listing of the Society's officers. 

The volume also includes a glossary of printmaking terms.  Finally there is an extensive bibliography listing archives, books, journals, newspaper articles and websites.

This book is a fitting tribute to an artistic medium and its striking realization by Northern California artists over more than a century.

The Fan Tree, by Ernest Haskell - 1920 E. H. Furman Prize winner of the California Society of Etchers (source: Smithsonian American Art Museum).

California Society of Printmakers 85th Anniversary: Catalogue of Prints (California Society of Printmakers, 1998).

California Society of Printmakers: One Hundred Years 1913-2013, Maryly Snow, editor; Sylvia Solochek Walters, assistant editor (California Society of Printmakers, 2013).

"Etchers Form a State Organization: Many Local Artists Are Enrolled; Two Exhibitions a Year, With Demonstrations, Are Planned," San Francisco Chronicle (January 19, 1913): 27 (accessed from the San Francisco Chronicle Historical database (Proquest).

"A Reader's Guide to Modern Art (1914)," San Francisco Public Library Art, Music and Recreation Center blog (February 4, 2014).

West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977

In her foreword to West of Center, Lucy Lippard describes the 1960s and 1970s as a time of passion and ideals.  While the book is about art movements across the Western half of the United States, San Francisco, which she describes as "the pulsing heart of the counterculture," occupies a prominent position in this book.

The books editors, Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner, contrast the experimentalism of the West Coast with the New York avant garde: "[T]he counterculture was a movement centered largely in the American West... San Francisco became its hub, serving as an alternative to New York as a site of creative activity."

The counterculture found its impetus for experiment in the various social and political movements of the time.  This aesthetic approach was closely association with movements for social change like The Farm, The Diggers, the Black Panthers, Los Siete de la Raza and others.  It also fostered individual personal transformation and heightening individual consciousness.


West of Center is divided into 20 chapters written by different authrs arranged by four themes: "Communal Encounters," "Handmade Worlds," Cultural Politics" and "Altered Consciousness."  Each of the chapter is beautifully illustrated and is well documented.

Chapters focusing on the San Francisco Bay Area include:

"Collective Movement: Anna and Lawrence Halprin's Joint Workshops" by Eva J. Friedberg

"The Farm by the Freeway" by Jana Blankenship

"San Francisco Video Collectives and the Counterculture" by Deanne Pytlinsk

"Handmade Worlds -- Handmade Genders: Queer Costuming in San Francisco circa 1970" by Julia Bryan-Wilson

"Paper Walls: Political Posters in an Age of Mass Media" by Tom Wilson

"The Print Culture of Yolanda M. López" by  Karen Mary Davalos

"The Countercultural 'Indian': Visualizing Retribalization at the Human Be-in" by Mark Watson

"The Revolution will be Visualized: Black Panther Artist Emory Douglas" by Colette Gaiter

"Signifying the Ineffable: Rock Poster Art and Psychedelic counterculture in San Francisco" Scott B. Montgomery.


West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977, edited by Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner, editors (University of Minnesota Press; Published in cooperation with the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, 2012).

Artists in California: 1786-1940

The two volume, 1249 page reference work, Artists in California: 1786-1940 by Edan Milton Hughes, is a biographical dictionary containing the names of close to 20,000 California artists. It covers the time period from 1786 when Gaspard Duché de Vancy, a member of a French expedition, painted Carmel Mission to the time of the Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939-1940. It includes painters, printmakers, woodcarvers, lithographers, illustrators, sculptors, craftsmen, etchers, and artists in pastels and clay.

The arrangement of the dictionary is alphabetical and the format follows the standard pattern: the artist’s full name, dates and place of birth and death (if known), then a biographical sketch which may include the artist’s schooling and when he came to California. This is followed by the medium in which he or she worked, as well as a list of memberships, exhibitions, awards and the locations where his or her works are held. A ¶ symbol announces the bibliographic sources.

The author, a collector of California art, admits to some difficulty over who to include. Since the time of the earliest colonial explorations the mystique of California has attracted artists. Some of them have only stayed a short time, but their works are suffused with the spirit and the beauty and adventure of the untouched new land. He warns not to be deceived by the length and detail of some biographies. Sadly, very little is known of some of California’s finest early artist, painters like Grace Carpenter Hudson, Will Sparks, Edward Rufus Hill and others. They frequently left an impressive body of work, but no written records, diaries or letters. Fragments of information on them had to be pieced together from many sources. No records exist either of the lives of many minor California artists, artists attached to early expeditions, ‘49ers who turned to art when gold eluded them, or refugees from a Europe caught up in revolutions. Then there are artists whose significance to California art is minor, but their achievements elsewhere have been documented and their biographies, consequently, are well filled out.

The author has included two short papers that should be read by anyone interested in California art. The first is an essay entitled “A Brief History of Early California Art,” and it is just that--a lively, entertaining, intimate summary of how the arts became established in California. The second is called “Chronology,” and it describes in chronological order, beginning with 1850, the important events that shaped the California art world.

This reference book, now in its third edition, is an essential resource for the collectors, scholars, and lovers of California art.