JOHN
SACCARO
Painter, Printmaker,
Teacher, 1913-1981
"... the highest purpose of any work of art is the intensification of conciousness."
The challenge that Saccaro accepts is to have taste
and that something more which comes through well-established performance.
In Saccaro this is style.
- The Artist's Environment: West Coast, The Amon Carter Museum of Art,
Fort Worth, Texas, 1962-1963
While not closely associated with Hassel Smith's Potrero Hill group
(Julius Wasserstein, Roy De Forest, Adelie Landis, Sonia Getchoff, James
Kelly, among others), John Saccaro was among the most innovative and imaginative
of the gesture painters in the Bay Area.
- Susan Landauer, The San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism,
University of California Press
I used to knock myself out with these paintings. Sometimes I'd wait forty minutes or an hour before I'd make a stroke on the damn thing. And what it was to me was a new type of energy.
- John Saccaro, quoted in A Period Of Exploration: San Francisco 1945-1950 by Mary Fuller McChesney, The Oakland Museum, 1973
Education
and Teaching
Studied at the California School of Fine Arts, San Francisco, 1951-1954.
Taught at University of California, Los Angeles, 1963-1964.
Selected
Solo Exhibitions 1945-1975
San Francisco Museum of Art, 1959-1960; M.H. de Young Memorial Museum,
San Francisco, 1946, 1956, 1960; Oakland Art Gallery, 1958; Bolles Gallery,
New York, 1962.
Selected
Group Exhibitions 1945-1975
72nd-73rd Annual Painting and Sculpture Exhibition of the San Francisco
Art Association (from 1961, San Francisco Art Institute) at the San Francisco
Museum of Art, 1953-1954; 75th Annual, 1956; 78th- 79th Annual,
1959-1960; Museu de Arte Moderna, São Paulo, Brazil, III Beinal,
1955; California Painters: 40 Painters, Municipal Art Center, Long
Beach, 1956; 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; Third-Fourth
Winter Invitational, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San
Francisco, 1962-1963; The Artist's Environment: West Coast, Amon
Carter Museum, UCLA Art Galleries and the Oakland Art Gallery, 1962-1963;
A Period of Exploration: San Francisco 1945-1950, The Oakland Museum,
1973.