TWO OPENING RECEPTIONS:
SATURDAY, MARCH 14, 2009
3—6 pm Denenberg Fine Arts
6—9 pm Couturier Gallery

Couturier Gallery and Denenberg Fine Arts are delighted to present simultaneous exhibitions of the work of Edward Hagedorn (1902 – 1982), a true California Modernist. Approximately seventy-five works spanning the 1920s through the 1940s, a rich trove of paintings on paper, drawings and prints, reveal the hand of a master draftsman and political satirist. Hagedorn rejected the general trend of local California landscapes and coastal views, becoming virtually the single voice of Expressionism in the state in the early 20th century.

Political and theoretical struggle dominated European and American art in the three decades represented by the works included in this dual exhibition; at this period great art ideas flourished within the enlightening influences of Cezanne’s intelligent spatial restatements and Picasso’s cornucopia from elaborate cubist explorations to surrealism, classicism, and beyond.

Surrealist , Classical, and Expressionist influences are all seen in the work of the eccentric Bay Area German-American Edward Hagedorn. His work is often charged with organic forms drawn from the deep subconscious set in landscapes filled with volcanic eruptions and celestial phenomena. He populates dark visions with his fellow man as demon, mob, victim and dreamer, in temperas, watercolors, pastels, woodcuts, linocuts, etchings, dry points, and lithographs of high quality.

Much of Hagedorn’s inspiration derived from the Germans. He parted company with other California artists of the 1920's and '30s, many of whom were, rather, influenced by the French movements of Impressionism, Cubism, and, especially, Fauvism. German influence is particularly evident in his graphic work of the late 1920's and early 1930's. His deep etchings or ferociously gouged relief prints abound with images of huge skeletons marching through cities, destroying populations. There are hints of the macabre work of James Ensor, a key precursor to both the Expressionists and the Surrealists.

Hagedorn's imagery is not simply a reflection of German Expressionism--his original work of the 1930's is also intensely surreal. He used a dark palette to powerful effect, contrasting bold outlines with shocking colors and starkly rendered forms for impact. In one large work, a huge 'pea-pod,’ whose interior resembles a spinal column, looms over a sea of dark green waves of unspecified substance--perhaps water, perhaps grass. In another, a cruciform--part human, part flower--towers over another green sea and dark sky. Thick lightning cracks open black skies, forking down on barren hills.

In a different mode and mood, Hagedorn's female nudes in pastel, tempera or line drawing achieve a handsome simplicity reminiscent of Maillol, or the classical elegance of Picasso and Matisse of the 1920s. A surrounding nimbus of color creates a pulsating energy field that gives the pastel figures in particular real movement. The temperas are drawn with bold black outlines, the forms filled with a modulated, almost monochromatic palette.

Born in Berkeley, California, Hagedorn (1902-1982) was legally adopted and raised by his maternal grandmother and aunt; his mother had died giving birth. In 1927, his father, a severe Prussian, disowned him for exhibiting a painting of a female nude at the Oakland Museum, his second public showing. After briefly attending the San Francisco School of Fine Arts as early as age 16, Ed and his longtime friend Paul Carey opened a studio together in the so-called "Monkey Block" of Montgomery Street, a haven for artists and other bohemians such as John Atherton, Jacques Schnier & Ruth Cravath. In the late 1930s an inheritance from Hagedorn’s grandmother and aunt made him increasingly independent, and he seems to have withdrawn to the seclusion of his studio/residence at 2436 Woolsey Street in Berkeley, where he died in 1982.

Hagedorn was critically acclaimed during his lifetime. Galka Scheyer, the private art dealer, historian, collector, and founder of the Pasadena Museum of Art (now the Norton Simon Museum) who represented and introduced the “Blue Four” to the United States (Kandinsky, Feininger, Klee and Jawlensky) offered to exhibit his work and asked him to join the "Blue Four"-- but he rejected her overture. Scheyer purchased a number of his drawings that remain with the Blue Four Collection now in the Norton Simon Museum. According to fellow-artist Paul Carey, who described his colleague: "'Ed was an outsider, a 'loner,' a tall thin man with a hooked nose who walked down the street looking like a question-mark; he had no use for success."

Edward Hagedorn’s work may be found in numerous public collections including:
Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Art, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA; University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson, AZ; The Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY; Carnegie Art Institute, Pittsburgh, PA; The Chicago Art Institute, IL; Duke University Museum, Durham, NC; The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, England; Getty Center for the Study of American Art History, Los Angeles, CA; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH; Huntington Museum, Pasadena, CA; The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. ; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Department of Graphic Art; New Orleans Museum of Art, LA; Northwestern University Museum, Evanston, IL; The Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA; Oakland Museum, CA; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, OR; Riverside Museum of Art, CA; Salisbury State University Museum, MD; San Diego Museum of Art, CA; University of Minnesota Museum of Art, Minneapolis, MN.; Whitney Museum of Art.

Accompanying these unusual simultaneous exhibitions is the recently published first monograph, “Edward Hagedorn: California Modernist, Restlessness and Restraint” (Stuart Denenberg and Beverly Denenberg, editors; published by Denenberg Fine Arts, Inc., 2009). The book will be available at both venues.

For additional information and/or images please contact:
Couturier Gallery ([email protected] , 323-933-5557) or
Denenberg Fine Arts ([email protected] , 310-360-9360)