ERLE
LORAN
Painter, Printmaker, Teacher, 1905-1999
"Fundamentally, any symbolic meaning in an abstract
painting
must derive from the unconscious."
During my formative years, two teachers in particular were very important to me: Margaret Peterson and Erle Loran, both at the University of California in Berkeley.
- Elmer Bischoff, 50 West Coast Artists: A Critical Selection of Painters and Sculptors Working in California
The experience (UC Berkeley) proved important, introducing him to work of the "Berkeley School" modernists Worth Ryder, Margaret Peterson, and Erle Loran, who gave him his first substantial exposure to the ideas of Picasso and Cezanne. When Diebenkorn left Berkeley for Quantico, Virginia, via Parris Island, South Carolina, Loran's book on the compositional principles of Cezanne was among the few items he carried in his duffel bag. Loran's painstaking analysis of the formal structure of French abstraction would make a deep impression on him.
- Susan Landauer, The San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism, University of California Press
Studied at the Minneapolis School of Art and the University of Minnesota. Awarded traveling scholarship in Europe. Taught at University of California, Berkeley, 1936-1970s.
Selected
Solo Exhibitions 1945-1975
Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California, 1947; Pasadena Art Institute,
California, 1947; M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, 1949,
1954; San Francisco Museum of Art, 1952.
Selected
Group Exhibitions 1945-1975
65th Annual Painting and Sculpture Exhibition
of the San Francisco Art Association (from 1961, The San Francisco Art
Institute) at the San Francisco Museum of Art, 1945; 67th Annual,
1948; 69th-70th Annual, 1950-1951; 72nd-73rd Annual, 1953-1954;
75th-80th Annual, 1956-1961; First Spring Annual Exhibition,
California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, 1946; Third
Annual Exhibition of Painting, California Palace of the Legion of
Honor, San Francisco, 1948-1949; Fourth-Fifth Annual Exhibition of
Contemporary Painting, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San
Francisco, 1951-1952; Museu de Arte Moderna, São Paulo, Brazil,
III Beinal, 1955; Contemporary American Painters, 1950-1955,
Stanford Art Gallery, Stanford University, 1956; The Art Bank of
the San Francisco Art Association, 1958-1960, 1962-1964, 1966; First-Fifth
Winter Invitational, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San
Francisco, 1960-1964.