Visceral Processes: Jay DeFeo, Frank Lobdell, Manuel Neri
Visceral Processes
on view September 18 through December 15, 2024
A countercultural aesthetic and attitude permeates through the practice of artists working in the San Francisco Bay Area—a practice grounded in emphasizing process, engaging with everyday materials, and exploring the human condition. These elements unite the diverse and expansive works of Jay DeFeo, Frank Lobdell, and Manuel Neri.
Navigating the West Coast in the post-WWII boom, DeFeo, Lobdell, and Neri emerged as artists at the height of Abstract Expressionism. An American art movement that rejected representation, Abstract Expressionists advocated for abstraction as a means to explore emotion, process, and materiality. By the mid-1950s, Funk art, which existed in parallel with the Beat era, inspired artists to assemble found objects, exploring absurdity and a personal engagement in the ordinary. Countering pure abstraction, artists in the 1960s returned to depicting the human form, a movement known as Bay Area Figurative. Often held in juxtaposition, these movements carry fragments from one to the next. DeFeo, Lobdell, and Neri adapted and later taught ideas from these movements, impacting future generations of artists.
Visceral Processes brings together these three artists to explore the dialogue and attitudes expressed through their sketches, collages, and explorative approach to materials. From the 1950s onward, DeFeo, Lobdell, and Neri embraced an innate need to lean into the common and everyday, seeking a visual language expressive of universal truth and humanity. Their practices sought to uncover and hold space for the raw, visceral components, often devalued and separated from art. By questioning traditional materials and forms to favor the integration of cultural references and symbols of universal conditions, DeFeo, Lobdell, and Neri forged a new language to approach art as experience.
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Visceral Processes is organized by Saint Mary’s College Museum of Art and curated by Britt Royer. This exhibition is made possible by The Jay DeFeo Foundation, Hackett Mill, The Cianne Fragione Trust, and the generosity of private donors and collectors.
The Counterculture Attitude
Following World War II, San Francisco experienced a post-war boom with significant population growth and funding as the GI Bill fueled college and university enrollment. San Francisco’s art school, the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA), became an epicenter for an experimental approach to painting, Abstract Expressionism. Marking a shift of the art world from Europe to America, Abstract Expressionism challenged tra
ditional values emphasizing process, emotion, and exploration of materials. Unlike Los Angeles and New York City, San Francisco lacked a robust commercial art scene, so emerging artists became instructors to supplement their living expenses. In turn, the region developed a unique art attitude reflecting individualism and an aesthetic free of patron parameters.
CSFA employed Abstract Expressionist artists such as Clyfford Still, who emphasized process and individualism. Still's complete rejection of the commercial art world mirrored the developing persona surrounding art in San Francisco. The Beat Generation, emerging in the North Beach neighborhood, emphasized sensory awareness, engagement with the absurd and ideas that worked their way into the Funk art movement. As the 1960s civil rights and anti-war protests washed through the city, artists turned to their practices to engage with these events and respond to cultural injustice.
Connections + Collage
DeFeo, Lobdell, and Neri became interconnected through their art practices in San Francisco during the 1950s. Following his service in the U.S. Army (1942-1946), Lobdell attended CSFA on the GI Bill in 1947. Impacted by Abstract Expressionism's need to explore the human condition, he approached art as "painting his way out" of the psychological impact and traumas experienced in WWII. After graduating, Lobdell began teaching at CSFA. In 1956, Neri attended CSFA and studied under Lobdell. Concurrently, DeFeo settled in a collective art studio near the school on Fillmore Street called Painterland. She modeled for art classes at CSFA, which exposed her to Lobdell’s work. By the late 1950s, Neri moved into Painterland. With the steady influx of artists exchanging ideas, the boundaries between CSFA, alternative galleries, and jazz venues collapsed. Humor, performance, and engagement with the detritus permeated through social groups and influenced how artists approached and elevated space for common or discarded objects.
Assemblage and collage, processes of layering and combining materials into a physical form, became practices to construct meaning and embrace art in everyday life. Visceral Processes includes collage studies and sketches that contributed to other works, such as sculptures and paintings created by DeFeo, Lobdell, and Neri. Experimenting through these mediums enabled artists to repeat and rework ideas rooted in the human experience.
The Figure
The figure represents a central and recurring motif in the work of DeFeo, Lobdell, and Neri. Depicted through degrees of abstraction and modification, the figure draws attention to the underlying expression of the human condition, a root of universal symbolism emphasized by Abstract Expressionism echoed through Beat/Funk art and formally reintroduced in the Figurative movement. Clyfford Still, a leading Abstract Expressionist and professor at the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA), referred to verticality as a symbol and stand-in for the human form. Still depicted slim vertical lines (lifelines) in his large abstract paintings as a symbol for the human struggle. This enigmatic nod to verticality as the figure, a motif of the human condition, echoed through art practice in the San Francisco Bay Area.
As war veterans, Lobdell and Neri were encouraged at CSFA to use painting to work through their life experiences. Lobdell's earlier works, such as No. 21, 1951 and March 1954 - III, maintain a vertical emphasis through different degrees of abstraction and disembodiment of the form. For Neri, the female figure represented humanity and a life-giving force. By abstracting the body and removing individual features, Neri repositioned the figure as a universal metaphor. For DeFeo, the central image became a stand-in for the figure, exemplified through the cross structure in the Florence series. In later work, Lobdell's figures evolved into anthropomorphic symbols such as female fertility figures, stick figures, and buddhas, elevating them directly to a universal spiritual plane. Working through materials and challenging various degrees of abstraction to representation, the raw or visceral feeling of humanity, represented by the figure, unites the visual concerns these artists sought to uncover.
Art as Experience
For DeFeo, Lobdell, and Neri, art existed as a process and experience. Their sketches, collages, and works on paper reflect the depth and attention these artists spent exploring and working through form. In the spirit of Funk art, they approached materials through an explorative lens rooted in culture, advocating that art should not be removed from everyday life. They utilized what materials were available, like plaster, crayons, and rag board and drew from subjects deeply engaged with the personal and sometimes rash elements of humanity.
DeFeo photographed her dog’s discarded cast, Untitled (R. Mutt’s cast), and chose to study and repeat the form of her compass in Untitled (Compass series). This indicates how elements of Funk continued through her later works. Neri’s Window Studies series and Loop Sculpture Studies explore the potential for transforming irregular and imperfect forms. Art was not a thing but rather something that happens; Art takes time. Lobdell’s repetition of symbols and signs reflects how forms are repeated and reapproached across histories and cultures; this is most apparent in his later sketchbook drawings. Through letters, lectures, and drawing sessions, these three artists exchanged ideas, theories, and approaches to art as experiences, a dialogue that existed throughout their art practice.
All photographs by Francis Tatem, 2024.