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Erle Loran

El Capitan (1974)

 72 x 52 inches

Oil on canvas

Signed en verso

Erle Loran was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1905. Loran received his academic training at the University of Minnesota and Minneapolis College of Art and Design, where he studied with notable regionalists such as Cameron Booth. A central figure of the Berkeley School of painting, Loran began his career as a realist painter working primarily in watercolor but turned to abstraction in the late 1940s as the Bay Area art scene was shaped by visiting abstract painters like Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, and Hans Hoffman, whom he worked closely with at different points in his career. His later abstract work is distinguished by atmospheric compositions in which color plays an emotive role and alludes to organic forms.

Loran began teaching at UC Berkeley in the late 1930s, around the time that he began his career as an artist, and retired after nearly 45 years in 1981. While at UC Berkeley, he also served as the head of the department. As department chair, he shaped the university’s art program by hiring notable faculty such as David Park, Joan Brown, and Peter Voulkos. During his tenure, Loran’s students included Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, Sam Francis, Jay DeFeo, and Fred Martin.

Loran is widely recognized as an influential Bay Area artist whose creative and intellectual output included scholarship, art criticism (for example, as the San Francisco correspondent for Art News), and teaching. His 1943 book Cezanne’s Composition, was widely influential in international art circles shortly after it was released. The book was the result of a sabbatical in Aix-en-Provence, where he lived in the artist’s studio for a brief time. In total, he spent four years in Europe, beginning in 1926.

Loran’s works are held in public collections across the U.S., including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, de Young Museum, SF MoMA, the Croker Art Museum, Denver Art Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, University of California, Berkeley.

He died in Berkeley in 1999.

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