'City Lights' by Joan Savo, 1960, San Francisco Beat Generation, Woman Artist, Bay Area Abstraction

Details

Description

Signed lower right, 'Savo' for Joan Savo (American, 1918-1992) and dated 1960. Additionally signed, verso, on old label and titled, … Read more Signed lower right, 'Savo' for Joan Savo (American, 1918-1992) and dated 1960. Additionally signed, verso, on old label and titled, 'City Lights'. Accompanied by a letter from the artist in which she discusses the painting.
Provenance: The Collection of John and Irmgard Comley
Formerly with Claypoole Freese Gallery
Formerly with Winfield Gallery
Photograph of the Artist courtesy of Frida Forsgren.

Born in Oregon, Joan Savo moved to San Francisco at the age of 21 and was soon immersed in the community of artists and beat poets that made their home in North Beach. During this early period, Savo contributed enthusiastically to the burgeoning underground culture, exhibiting her work at the Telegraph Hill Gallery, the Coffee Gallery and at Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Bookstore. Her preferred coffee shop hangout was Vesuvio's, the legendary Beatnik haunt.

In her ground-breaking study of this period, Frida Forsgren quotes Savo as saying that "...coming to San Francisco was the beginning of a serious period... unlearning everything I had learned about art...". In the literature, Savo is "mentioned in the same breath as the famous figurative California artists of the time, David Park, Elmer Bischoff, Nathan Oliveira, and Richard Diebenkorn; Bay Area critics even hailed her as David Park's successor. Later in life, she was connected with the artists active on the Monterey Peninsula, and her style turned more non-objective and towards color-field works, before she again returned to painting the human form...". In 1971, Savo was appointed artist-in-residence at the International College in Viborg, Denmark and, during her year there, was exposed to the ferment of bold avant-garde ideas that propelled the Scandinavian COBRA movement.

Over the course of a long career, Joan Savo exhibited internationally with success including at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor. Her work may be found in private and public collections including the permanent collections of the Oakland Museum, the Santa Barbara Museum and the Monterey Peninsula Museum of Art among others. We are pleased to offer this large and powerful abstract painted when the artist was forty-two.

Quotations are from 'Beat Lives' and courtesy of Frida Forsgren, University of Agder, Norway.

Reference:
Beat Lives: 13 San Francisco-based Artists of the Fifties, Frida Forsgren, Portal Books, 2013, pages 141-150; Art in the San Francisco Bay Area: 1945-1980, Thomas Albright, University of California Press, 1985, page 311; et al. See less