Zoe Longfield
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Comment: Among the cited sources: "Archives of the Estate of Zoe Longfield Etigson, Davis, CA", Longfield's "Application essay for James D. Phelan Award in Literature and Art", "Interview with Susie Alldredge, trustee of the estate of Zoe Longfield Etigson, December 2020." How may the interested reader access these and verify the descriptions in the draft/article of what they say? Hoary (talk) 08:19, 18 January 2021 (UTC)
- Dear Hoary: Thanks for your feedback. The paintings were done by Zoe Longfield in the 1940s/50s but they are currently in my possession and the photographs were taken by me. (Separate images of two of these paintings, taken by another photographer, have been published in the Women of Abstract Expressionism book, which is in my reference list.) How do I properly cite these images for the wiki page? Also, please advise if/how I can cite primary source material taken from her archives. Thanks for your help.Susieall2012 (talk) 19:54, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
- Thank you for asking; I've responded on your talk page. -- Hoary (talk) 00:05, 27 January 2021 (UTC)
Zoe Longfield (1924–2013) was an American abstract expressionist artist in the San Francisco Bay Area. She was a participant in the first generation of Abstract Expressionism, which occurred primarily in New York and San Francisco in the last half of the 1940s. Longfield was one of the earliest women artists working in this movement and is featured, along with fellow student Frank Lobdell and others, in a now well-published photo from the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA) in 1948.[1] During her brief active years, Longfield produced a significant body of paintings, prints, and drawings showcasing a unique visual aesthetic.
Early life
She was the only child of Peter and Tatiana (Kasansava) Golovinsky, immigrants who fled Russia during the Revolution. After her father's death, her mother remarried fellow Russian emigre Maxim Dolgopoloff, who became Zoe’s stepfather. In high school Zoe changed her legal surname from Golovinsky to Longfield, a loose English translation of Dolgopoloff (dolgo = "long," pole = "field").
Zoe attended Edward Robeson Taylor Grammar School, Portola Junior High School, and Balboa High School. Zoe was an athletic youth who competed in numerous ice skating exhibitions throughout her adolescence and early twenties.[2]
Education
Zoe Longfield was born in San Francisco in 1924. After graduating from high school in 1941, she attended the University of California, Berkeley, from 1941–1944. There, she studied painting with Margaret Peterson, John Haley, and Erle Loran, who helped found the "Berkeley School" of abstract expressionism.[1] After graduating with a B.A., she attended the California Labor School from 1946–1948 and then attended the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA), the predecessor of today’s San Francisco Art Institute, from 1947–1949. At CSFA, she studied under an extraordinarily innovative and influential faculty whose members included Clyfford Still, Richard Diebenkorn, Edward Corbett, and Mark Rothko.[3] One of only a few women in her class, she studied alongside classmates Ernest Briggs, Edward Dugmore, Frank Lobdell, Horst Trave, and others.[3]
Art and influence
Embracing Clyfford Still’s anti-commercial approach toward creativity, Longfield and eleven other students from his inner circle collaborated to open the landmark Metart Gallery in April 1949.[4] Derived from the term "metamorphosis" or "metaphysical arts," the Metart Gallery was established as a cooperative in which each member, for a small monthly fee, had use of the entire space for one month per year in order to exhibit his or her works. Occupying a former laundry on Bush Street in downtown San Francisco, the gallery was the first of a series of such cooperative art galleries in San Francisco during the 1950s.[5][6] Each taking a month to individually show original works were artists Jeremy Anderson, Ernest Briggs, W. Cohantz, Hubert Crehan, Edward Dugmore, Jorge Goya, William Huberich, Jack Jefferson, Kiyo Koizumi, Zoe Longfield, Frann Spencer, and Horst Trave.[7]
Although the gallery closed after only a year, it helped to launch the artistic careers of several of its members, including Briggs and Dugmore. Exhibits at the Metart earned acclamatory reviews in the San Francisco Chronicle by the well-known art critics Alfred Frankenstein and R. H. Hagan. Of Longfield’s show in December 1949, Hagan wrote, "Of all the numerous artists who have taken up the new credo of arbitrary (or spontaneous) expression in unrestrained colors and unrestrained shapes, Miss Longfield impresses me as one of the most successful."[8] The gallery closed after a final exhibit by Clyfford Still in the spring of 1950. Still’s final Metart exhibit was highly anticipated and well received. Soon after, he departed the San Francisco Bay Area for New York City.[9]
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Within the abstract idiom, Longfield experimented with both thicker and thinner paint applications. At times she employed techniques borrowed from watercolor painting, applying thin washes of oil over the visible white primer of her canvases.[1] She employed a unique vocabulary of forms, primarily organic but occasionally including more architectural elements. Hagan writes: "One of [Longfield’s paintings], titled No. 9, is a finely arranged creation of blues, blacks, and chalky white in which I, at least, detect something of a skull motif. I also enjoyed her symphonic treatment of bone-like shapes in powder blue and mustard yellow, labeled No. 4. But don’t press me for an explanation—it would be purely ectoplasmic."[8]
Longfield painted a number of noteworthy paintings, including Untitled (1949), a large piece currently held in the Blair Collection of Bay Area Abstract Expressionism[3] and promised as a gift to the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento. Her work also appears in the catalog for the Women of Abstract Expressionism exhibit,[1] organized by the Denver Art Museum.
Exhibitions
- Metart Galleries, San Francisco, 1949
- San Francisco and the Second Wave, Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, 2004; Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, 2004-2005; Monterey Museum of Art, Monterey, 2005; Fresno Art Museum, Fresno, 2005
Personal life
Longfield died in 2013 in San Francisco from congestive heart failure. She passed most of her life unrecognized as a painter. Interest in her work was rekindled following the appearance of her painting, Untitled (1949), in the San Francisco and the Second Wave: The Blair Collection of Bay Area Abstract Expressionism exhibition at the Crocker Art Museum in 2004.[3]
References
- ^ a b c d Marter, Joan (2016). Women of Abstract Expressionism. Denver and New Haven: Denver Art Museum and Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0914738-62-6.
- ^ "A Protegee at 16, She'll Be a Sensation at 20". San Francisco Chronicle. January 18, 1941.
{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ^ a b c d Landauer, Susan (2004). San Francisco and the Second Wave: The Blair Collection of Bay Area Abstract Expressionism. Sacramento: Crocker Art Museum. ISBN 1-884038-10-7.
- ^ Press release for Metart Galleries, April 1949; Stable Gallery Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.
- ^ “Metart Gallery Experiment in Non-Commercial Exhibitions,” San Francisco Art Association Bulletin 15 (September 1949): n.p.
- ^ "New Metart Is Opened in San Francisco". Berkeley Daily Gazette. September 22, 1949.
{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ^ Landauer, Susan (1996). The San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-08611-2.
- ^ a b Hagan, R.H. (December 11, 1949). "Around the Galleries". San Francisco Chronicle.
{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ^ Albright, Thomas (1985). Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–1980: An Illustrated History. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-05193-9.
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