Giacometti and the Devil (from the portfolio 'Twelve Intimate Fantasies')

Nathan Oliveira

This early abstract expressionist lithograph by Nathan Oliveira was the fifth of twelve images included in the suite "Twelve Intimate Fantasies / A Suite of Lithographs by Nathan Oliveira". It was published and printed in Los Angeles by Kanthos Press.

Peter Selz notes in "Nathan Oliveira": "These prints, rapidly produced in a period of two weeks, are not as complete as they might have been. Still, they are fascinating, rather abstract pieces, some playful and others veering toward surrealist dream imagery. Several are dedicated to artists he admired, including Duccio, Michelangelo, Giocametti and Voulkos....The graphics he produced, especially in their melding of meaning and medium, signify Oliveira's adherence to tradition."

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 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.