Chest Patterns III: No. 22 from "The Nude Man"

Beth Van Hoesen

In selecting the project of doing a portfolio of etchings, using the nude figure of the opposite sex as a theme, Beth Van Hoesen was one of a few women artists willing to take on the challenge (much to her father's chagrin).

Van Hoesen’s subjects are not always the classic virile strong men either, but instead are of varying proportions, age and race. They are not sexualized - just matter-of-fact physiques that Richard Lorenz described as “unheroic and posed in decidedly non-classical postures.” She enlisted her friends to pose. The project was done in collaboration with her friend and printer/publisher Kathan Brown who had opened her Crown Point Press in 1962 and began publishing in 1965, the year this was done.

This image is number 22 from a series of 25 images of nude men done by Beth Van Hoesen in 1965, published by Crown Point Press, Berkeley, California, printed there by Kathan Brown 1965. The paper is folded at the left margin to create a portfolio.

The total edition was 50, 25 of which were bound and another 25 were issued as boxed portfolios. Provenance: From the collection of Los Angeles art dealer Felix Landau.

Beth Van Hoesen was born in Boise, Idaho on June 27, 1926, to Enderse and Freda Van Hoesen. She was raised in Mesa Orchards, Idaho but moved with her mother to Greenwich, Connecticut where she attended preparatory school. As a result of the Great Depression and the resultant loss of property and job opportunities, her family moved to Long Beach, California. Van Hoesen graduated from David Starr Jordan High School in Long Beach and enrolled in Stanford University in 1944.

Van Hoesen studied at Escuela de Pintura y Escultura de la Escuela Esmeralda in Mexico City and the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco in the mid 1940s, and received her Bachelor of Arts degree in 1948 from Stanford University. After graduation, she went to France where she studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts de Fontainebleau in 1948, and at the Académie Julian and Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris from 1948 to 1950.

Upon returning to the San Francisco Bay Area, she re-enrolled in the California School of Fine Arts and it was during this time that she studied with Clyfford Still. She met her future husband, artist Mark Adams, at the school and they married in 1953. Several years later they purchased a 1910 fire station in San Francisco and converted it into studio and living spaces.

Beth Van Hoesen worked exclusively in printmaking beginning in 1956 and a solo exhibition of her prints was mounted the following year at Stanford Art Gallery, Sanford University. For many, she was considered the Grand Dame of printmaking in the Bay Area. She was a member of the Bay Printmakers Society and the California Society of Etchers.

She was given the Award of Honor in Graphics from the San Francisco Arts Commission in 1981 and the Distinguished Artists Award in 1993 from the California Society of Printmakers. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is represented in the collections of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Brooklyn Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Modern Art New York, Norton Simon Museum, Racine Art Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. The Portland Art Museum (Oregon) is the repository for Beth Van Hoesen's print archive.

Joseph Goldyne praised her: “For Van Hoesen, drawing has been akin to breathing. It is something she has always done, what all her looking as led to, and her body of drawings alone would be more than sufficient to give her prominence in her period and among her peers.”

Beth Van Hoesen died in San Francisco, California on November 16, 2010.