Bull Series I

 

Nathan Oliveira

  1928 - 2010 (biography)

1956  

four-color lithograph, one counter-etched stone 

24 x 32 1/8" image 

pencil, lower right 

proof, outside edition of 8 

pencil titled ("Bull"), dated, and inscribed proof in lower margin 

Skovronsky 24; illustrated on page 32 in Nathan Oliveira Print Retrospective: 1949-1980 

ivory Basingwerk Parchment 

published 

artist 

24458 

$6,000.00 

An example of Oliveira's early mature lithographic work in which he visited the subject of the bull, an animal whose symbolic mystique had recently been revived by Picasso's own series of eleven lithographs entitled The Bull. The oft-rendered beast, found even on the cave walls of Lascaux, is done justice in the Oliveria's representation of power, heft, and singularity of the male Bos taurus - a subject he first depicted in 1952. Like many artists of the time, Oliveira did away with precise rendering in favor of the physicality of Abstract Expressionism in order to capture the essence of the subject.

Oliveira did a series of three "Bull" images in 1956/57, all using the full stone to delineate the image: the first used a single stone and was printed in black and white in a few proofs only; the second was this work, printed with four colors and one counter-etched stone using black, red, and red-brown in an edition of 8; the third was printed in two colors - black and brown, in an edition of 10, all on Basingwerk Parchment paper. This printing obscures the subject in a dark haze of deep red, like blood, forcing the viewer to spend time adjusting their vision to see the massive bull. Not an easy subject, but then, it's not meant to be.

He would return to the subject again in the late 1960s when he created 'Tauromaquia 21' a series inspired by plate number 21 from Goya's own La Tauromaquia series of 33 etchings based on the violent and powerful bullfighting sport.

Nathan Oliveira (born Nathan Vargus Roderick), was born in Oakland, California on 19 December 1928. His parents were Portuguese immigrants who had their family name, Rodrigues, changed at Ellis Island. Nathan’s father died when he was an infant and his mother later married another Portuguese immigrant, George Oliveira. Originally considering becoming a bookbinder, a chance encounter with a Rembrandt portrait in high school changed Oliveira’s trajectory. At the close of the second World War, the Oliveira family relocated to San Francisco where they settled in the Haight-Ashbury district. Nathan Oliveira graduated from George Washington High School in San Francisco in 1946 and the following year he enrolled in the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland where he studied with Otis Oldfield, Karl Baumann, Hamilton Wolf, and Glenn Wessels. He also studied with Max Beckmann at Mills College in Oakland during the summer of 1950. Oliveira received his BFA degree in 1951 and his MFA degree in 1952 from the California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC). Oliveira taught printmaking and watercolor at CCAC during the school years 1952 and 1953, and then spent two years in the U.S. Army working as a cartographic draftsman at Fort Winfield Scott, Presidio Army Base, San Francisco. In 1955 Oliveira began teaching painting at California College of Arts and Crafts and drawing and printmaking at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute). In 1956, he began drawing with the Bay Area figurative group that included David Park, Richard Diebenkorn, Paul Wonner, William Theophilus Brown and Elmer Bischoff.

In 1959, Oliveira was the youngest painter included in the important exhibition New Images of Man at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A survey of five years of his paintings and works on paper was shown at the Art Gallery of the University of California, Los Angeles in 1963, and a fifteen-year survey of his paintings was organized by the Oakland Museum of California in 1973. He had a print retrospective in 1980 at California State University, Long Beach, and the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco organized a survey of his work in monotype in 1997. Oliveira exhibited internationally and is considered one of the most prominent artists of the Bay Area Figurative Movement, though he never considered himself a part of any particular genre, showing the influence of abstract expressionism and post-impressionism as well. Nathan Oliveira died in Palo Alto, California on November 13, 2010.