"The Bay Area, in certain aspects and among the few who were informed, anticipated by over nine years both New York and Paris."
- Clyfford Still, 1956

The San Francisco School was more "sensual, emotionally supercharged, painterly in an intuitive way, and connected with nature" than its counterpart in New York.
- Caroline A. Jones, Bay Area Figurative Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1950-1965

In a review of the second annual at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in 1947, Arthur Miller (Los Angeles Times art critic) wrote that the West Coast paintings were "far more 'advanced' than most of the Eastern ones" and that "San Francisco's moderns luxuriate in the abstract and non-objective."
- San Francisco Opens Second National Annual, Art Digest 22, 1947
- Between Friends: Still and the Bay Area, by Peter Selz, Art in America 63, 1975

I do know that as far as what was happening out there (NY) and what was happening here (Bay Area), there was a big difference. There was a difference in attitude, a difference in the projection of ideas.
Edward Dugmore, quoted in A Period Of Exploration: San Francisco 1945-1950 by Mary Fuller McChesney, The Oakland Museum, 1973

It was fun.... it was a time of risk regardless of the outcome and I think the best things that have come out of that period are precisely from that attitude. Risk. Take a chance... It's hard to live up to that kind of idea but I think it was there and some of the best American painting ever done was the result of it.
Edward Corbett, quoted in A Period Of Exploration: San Francisco 1945-1950 by Mary Fuller McChesney, The Oakland Museum, 1973

From the mid-1940s to the late 1950s, San Francisco and, in particular, the California School of Fine Arts, provided the setting for an important wing of Abstract Expressionism, commonly known as the San Francisco School. San Francisco Abstract Expressionism differs from the New York version in certain respects. Not being a product of a frenzied metropolis, it is perhaps slower, less flashy, and more deeply rooted in nature. At the same time, it is equally expressive of the post-world War II experience, with its peculiar ambivalences and swings of mood between ecstatic expansiveness and painful introspection. Certainly, there were instances of reinventing the wheel, but nearly all the San Francisco Abstract Expressionists believed with Elmer Bischoff that they had access to a "limitless variety of undreamt of ways of coming alive on canvas."

Source: Susan Landauer, 'The San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism,' University of California Press