S4

Robert Pearson McChesney

The East and West Galleries in San Francisco exhibited "Duet" and the "S" series: S2, S3, S4, and S5 in August of 1951, there were 4 impressions of "S4" noted. The East and West Galleries was owned and directed by Ethel "Mrs Leonid" Gechtoff, the mother of AbEx painter Sonia Gechtoff.

"S4" is a ssurreal, modernist abstraction in the vein of the artist’s watercolors, drawings, paintings, and prints from the late 1940s.Later in the 1950s he seems to have dropped all reference to the figure and created paintings and prints in pure abstraction. When interviewed about his work, McChesney stated: “I was part of the scene in San Francisco right after World War Two when the California School of Fine Arts was booming and there were very many interesting artists around. I was influenced by those artists a great deal but I worked out a method and a direction in my painting which is my own. I’ve been developing that ever since and I have found it extremely interesting.”

Allan Temko wrote of McChesney in Artforum in 1963: “Of the generation of Western artist, who shortly after the last War emerged as a powerful group of abstractionists, McChesney has seemed to me the steadiest and most deliberate, and in some ways the most sensitive and refined. If he was less eager to abandon representationalism than were some of his contemporaries, his eventual commitment to his own abstract vision of the natural world has been no less total or searching than theirs.”

Robert Pearson McChesney [Mac] was born in Marshall, Missouri on 16 January 1913. He graduated from Marshall High School in 1931 and then studied at the School of Fine Arts at Washington University in St. Louis between 1933 and 1934. McChesney headed to Montana where he worked as a bus driver at Glacier National Park and on the construction of Fort Peck Dam before heading to California where he studied at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles between 1936 and 1937. During the winter of 1937, McChesney arrived in San Francisco and found employment on the WPA Art Project. He painted ship murals for the USS Monterey and was assigned to the mural project for the Federal Building for the Golden Gate International Exposition which opened on 17 February 1939 on Treasure Island. He also assisted Anton Refregier with the murals for the Rincon Annex Post Office in San Francisco.

A Bohemian at heart, he set up his studio in North Beach in San Francisco and hung out with artists at the Iron Pot Cafe and the Black Cat. Politically vocal, McChesney joined marches against racial, labor, and governmental injustices and was an organizer for the Labor movement.

During World War II, McChesney served in the US Merchant Marine in the South Pacific theater. These exotic cultures had a profound impact on the imagery of his shipboard paintings. After the war, he returned to San Francisco where his first solo show was held at the Raymond and Raymond Gallery in 1944. In 1949, McChesney sailed round the world on the USS President Monroe and that same year he married fellow artist, Mary Fuller. McChesney joined the faculty of the California School of Fine Arts in 1950 and taught serigraphy and life drawing.

During this time, he lived in Point Richmond where he shared a house with Mary Fuller, Hassel Smith, Edward Corbett, and Weldon Kees. After losing their jobs as a result of spurious McCarthyism, McChesney and Fuller left in 1951 for a year in Mexico where they lived in Ajijic and San Miguel de Allende. The following year they relocated to rural Sonoma County, California where McChesney hand-built a house and studios on the top of Sonoma Mountain in Petaluma.