Fascinated by photography after his mother got him a camera in a Kodak promotional giveaway, he swept the floors at a Canal Street photo studio and took photos for the Police Gazette, a pulp magazine with “a readership that required a certain kind of picture,” as he described it to the Times. In 1939, he was hired to shoot for … Read More

Born in Port Arthur, Texas in 1925, Robert Rauschenberg’s art is characterized by an irreverent and innovative approach to images, mediums, and disciplines. While stationed with the U.S. Navy at Camp Pendleton, San Diego, Rauschenberg was inspired to become a professional artist by his first museum visit to the Huntington Library in San Marino. Following his honorable discharge from the … Read More

Internationally recognized artist John McCracken commenced developing his earliest sculptural work while in grad school at California College of Arts and Crafts along with Minimalists John Slorp and Peter Schnore, and painters Tom Nuzum, Vincent Perez, and Terry StJohn, 1964, 1965. Equally well known Dennis Oppenheim, enrolled in the M.F.A. program at nearby Stanford, was a frequent visitor to this … Read More

Sam Maloof is acknowledged as one of the finest woodworkers of our time. As a leader of the California modern arts movement, he designed and produced furniture infused with profound artistic vision for more than half a century until his death in 2009. Maloof’s work was the subject of a prestigious retrospective at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery … Read More

A pioneer in the development of Minimalism and Conceptual art in the 1960s and 1970s, LeWitt was born in Hartford, Connecticut to a family of Jewish immigrants from Russia. His mother took him to art classes at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. After receiving a BFA from Syracuse University in 1949, LeWitt traveled to Europe where he was exposed to … Read More

One of the twentieth century’s most profound Abstract Expressionists, American artist Samuel Lewis Francis (1923-1994) is noted as one of the first post-World War II painters to develop an international reputation. Francis created thousands of paintings as well as works on paper, prints and monotypes, housed in major museum collections and institutions around the world. Regarded as one of the … Read More

Richard Diebenkorn grew up in San Francisco and attended Stanford University, and later the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute). Although well established as an abstract painter, Diebenkorn returned to figuration in the mid-1950s. He incorporated the dominant expressive painting style into representational canvases, often landscapes. In 1966, he moved to Santa Monica and returned … Read More