Biography

Edward Dugmore is best known for his grand-scale abstractions characterized by vibrant color, densely textured paint, and spontaneous gestures. He was one of the first generation of abstract expressionist painters to emerge from the rich artistic environment of San Francisco’s California School of Fine Arts during the post-World War II years.

Dugmore began studying art at the Hartford Art School in Connecticut, where he forged a friendship with fellow student John Grillo. Both developed a taste for European modernism gleaned from exhibitions at Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum and also from working with visiting artist Alexander Calder during the Hartford Festival of 1936. Following graduation, Dugmore married, continued to paint, and studied one summer with Thomas Hart Benton at the Kansas City Art Institute before being drafted into the Marine Corps. He served stateside for two years and afterward returned to Hartford.

A 1947 Clyfford Still exhibition in New York proved to be the catalyst for Dugmore’s move to San Francisco. Still had been teaching at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) since 1946. Grillo had also been there studying since his military discharge, and he urged his friend to head west. Dugmore enrolled in Still’s graduate painting seminar—essentially an open studio that encouraged interaction, discussion, and debate among students, a model that was cultivated throughout the school. Still’s mentoring left a lasting impression on both the look of Dugmore’s paintings and his artistic approach.

Dugmore left San Francisco in 1950, going first to the University of Guadalajara, Mexico, then to New York, where he eventually reunited with Still and fellow CSFA students Ernest Briggs and Jon Schueler. Whether by choice or by chance, the group never quite integrated into the “action painting” scene; rather, they remained independent in both style and temperament.

23rd Street, the location of Dugmore’s New York studio, is a classic example of the earthly organicism common to the paintings of San Francisco school artists, and bears the markings of Dugmore’s close connection to Still.1 The work is monumental from the standpoint of both physical scale and emotional impact. A relentless progression of alternating blood-red and charcoal-black palette-knife strokes climb upward and off the canvas. They are vigorous and powerful, yet carefully controlled. The painting contains no explicit references to nature, but its earthy palette of reds, blacks, and olive greens coupled with the thrusting paint strokes suggests that some natural force is at work. Still’s influence is clear in the darkly pigmented and densely textured surface, and in the considered treatment of the paintings edges. 23rd Street successfully melds the artist’s California past with the New York present in which it was painted. It exhibits many of the key elements of the San Francisco school of abstract expressionism—a visible connection to the natural world, a sense of roughness, spontaneity and freedom, and a distinct break with early-20th-century European modernism. And it shows the confidence of a mature artist in command of his materials and his technique.

Dugmore went on to a rich teaching and painting career, receiving recognition through two NEA grants and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant. Although some critics have identified him as a member of the second-generation New York school of abstract expressionism, he never truly shed his identity as a California artist. San Francisco is where he experienced his most fundamental artistic growth, where he forged friendships that would influence him for years, and where he and his wife hoped to return in their declining years.2 Although Dugmore’s work shifted focus from time to time, he never veered far from the essential lessons of abstraction that took root during his time at the California School of Fine Arts. —M.H.S

1. The case for the San Francisco school of abstract expressionism is convincingly made by Susan Landauer in her book The San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
2. The artist’s daughter, Linda Dugmore Shannon, in conversation with the author, 30 March 2004.

(SJMA Selections publication, 2004)

Artist Bio from http://www.moellerfineart.com/artists/edward-dugmore/

Edward Dugmore (1915-1996), an American abstract expressionist, produced art that was spontaneous and uninhibited by intellectual considerations. The composition of his paintings is based on large interlocking areas of relatively flat color that evoke associations to peeling walls, maps, horse hides, geological strata, and polished sections of minerals. In 1948, Dugmore took advantage of the G. I. Bill and moved out west to San Francisco to further his studies in art at the California School of Fine Arts, where he studied with Clyfford Still, who was influential on his development, both as an artist and a close friend. The Howard Wise Gallery first exhibited his work in Cleveland in 1960, followed by two solo shows in New York in 1961 and 1963.

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