1960s Coit Tower San Francisco Painting by Frank Koci

Details

Description

Koci, an active painter in San Francisco from the 1950s until his death in 1983, is known for his painterly-synthesis … Read more Koci, an active painter in San Francisco from the 1950s until his death in 1983, is known for his painterly-synthesis of Expressionist influences from artists such as Beckmann, Nolde, Kirchner, Soutine and Grosz. He was a close observer of the North Beach Beat scene and his paintings were sold by Henri Lenoir from within his now-famous bar Vesuvio. Thomas Albright, in Art in the San Francisco Bay Area 1945-1980, has written that Koci’s “strongest work represented a remarkable union of naïveté and canny sophistication.”

The details of his life are as fascinating as his artwork. Koci worked as a cowboy, farmhand, silent film extra, theater actor, and merchant seaman, in addition to being and outsider artist and self-taught painter. In his obituary from the April 8, 1983 edition of the San Francisco Examiner (found in the Library’s Artists File) he was described as “a kind of peoples’ artist, a very unusual man.” See less