Biography

Biography Below from the Hackett Freedman Gallery: http://www.hackettfreedman.com/templates/artist.jsp?id=JEF
Jack Jefferson (1920–2000) was a major figure in what has been called "the San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism," a west coast postwar explosion of abstract painting and sculpture that occurred at the same time that the New York School began. His paintings have been defined as "tough," "questioning," "nondecorative," and "uncompromising" and consist of organic forms rendered with a raw, vigorous brushstroke. He typified a quiet, forceful, and intensely private form of Abstract Expressionism.

Jefferson returned from the battlefields of WWII having seen horror firsthand. Jefferson studied (and later taught for twenty years) at the San Francisco Art Institute, where Richard Diebenkorn and David Park had taught and where Mark Rothko had been a visiting professor. Many friends observed that Jefferson, alone among his peers, actually lived by the stringent ethical and artistic code espoused by his mentor and close friend Clyfford Still. Still, in turn, considered Jefferson among his most talented students. Throughout his life, Jefferson eschewed fame in order to pursue his art. His determined commitment to avoid self-promotion and follow his own path strongly influenced succeeding generations of San Francisco painters.

Jefferson's early works are dark and emotive, with overlapping, interlocking forms. In 1954, a number of his Mission Street paintings—a series that art historian Gerald Nordland has called "a watershed in [Jefferson's] painting career"1—were included in a traveling exhibition organized by the American Federation of the Arts. In the early 1960s, Jefferson executed his Embarcadero series, large-scale abstractions with muscular brushwork and vibrant colors, which have been compared to the late Berkeley-period canvases of Richard Diebenkorn.2 By 1968, Jefferson began painting exclusively on paper due to severe allergies he developed from exposure to oil paint and turpentine. These late works are notable for their lyricism and contemplative nature.3

Jack Jefferson's work is held in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the San Jose Museum of Modern Art, the Oakland Museum of California, and the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, among others. In 2001, one year after his death, the San Jose Museum of Art mounted a retrospective of his work.

1. Gerald Nordland, "Rediscovering Jack Jefferson" in Uncompromising Vision: The Art of Jack Jefferson (San Francisco: Hackett-Freedman Gallery and the Wiegand Gallery, Notre Dame de Namur University, 2004).

2. Ibid.

3. Charles Shere, "Jack Jefferson: Paintings on Paper" in Uncompromising Vision: The Art of Jack Jefferson.

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