Wikipedia

Byron Randall

Byron Randall (October 23, 1918 – August 11, 1999) was an American visual artist, known for his expressionist paintings and printmaking. He was active in Oregon and Northern California, Canada, Hawaii, Mexico, Scotland, and Eastern Europe. A contemporary of artists Pablo O'Higgins, Anton Refregier, Robert P. McChesney, Emmy Lou Packard (his second wife), and Pele de Lappe (his final companion), Randall shared their left wing politics while exploring different techniques and styles, including a vivid use of color and line.

Byron Randall
Born
Byron Theodore Randall

(1918-10-23)October 23, 1918
Tacoma, Washington, U.S.
DiedAugust 11, 1999(1999-08-11) (aged 80)[1]
San Francisco, California, U.S.
Known forPainting, printmaking
MovementSocial realism, expressionism
Spouse(s)Helen Nelson (1940–1956),
Emmy Lou Packard (1959–1972),
Eve Wieland (1982–1986)
PartnerPele de Lappe (1990–1999)

Randall was an expressionist whose art was strongly responsive to physical environment. Of his paintings he wrote: "the look of them might have been different if I'd grown up anywhere but in Oregon. Brilliant sunlight nursing the green valleys after a long rainy winter . . . there's a powerful bit of environment that would show in a man's work all his life. I've seen that creative communication has a vitality all its own. It's not a refuge from life, but an intensification. It's the practice of humanity. In painting I think the approach that best affirms life is expressionism, and that's why I became and am now an expressionist."[2]

Biography edit

 
Byron Randall, Self Portrait, 1957 (oil)

Born in Tacoma, Washington, Byron Theodore Randall was raised in Salem, Oregon. In 1939 Randall trained under Louis Bunce and Charles Val Clear at the Federal Art Project's Salem Art Center; he subsequently taught there.[3] When he was 20 years old, a solo show at the Whyte Gallery in Washington D.C. brought his work to the attention of Newsweek and launched his professional career.[4]

His first wife was Helen Nelson (1914-1956), a Canadian sculptor, whom he met at the Salem Art Center. Nelson was brought over from New York to be the first instructor in sculpture for the blind at the Center. [5] In 1940 they married and moved to Mexico, where they had a child, Gale, and where Randall continued to develop as a painter, inspired by the vibrant landscape and people.[6] During the Second World War years, while Randall served in the Merchant Marines, in the South Pacific, he continued to paint whenever possible. His experiences at that time influenced his preference for natural forms and bright colors.

After the war, Randall traveled to Eastern Europe, as arts correspondent for a Canadian news agency, where he witnessed and painted the post-war devastation of Yugoslavia and Poland.[7][8] [9]Randall and Helen settled in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco where they had a second child, Jonathan, in 1948. Five years later they left the United States for Canada, to escape anti-Communism. In 1956, Helen died in a traffic accident.[10]

Randall and his children returned to San Francisco where he subsequently married the print-maker and muralist Emmy Lou Packard[11] Between 1959 and 1968 Randall and Packard ran a guest house and art gallery in Mendocino, California.[12] They were political and environmental activists, involved in the campaign to protect the area from commercial despoliation and in the creation of the Peace and Freedom Party. They attended the World Congress for Peace, National Independence and General Disarmament, Helsinki, July 10–15, as U.S. Delegates.[13]

After the end of their marriage,[14] Randall established a guesthouse/art gallery in Tomales, California. He converted a dilapidated chicken coop to become his home and studio, in 1971. This conversion brought him national attention.[15] So did his huge collection of potato mashers.[16] In 1982, he married Eve Wieland, an Austrian wartime emigre. She was his wife until her death from cancer four years later.

For the last nine years of his life, Randall's partner was Pele deLappe, an artist and friend of some 50 years standing.[17] Randall died in San Francisco on August 11, 1999, at the age of 80 after a battle with emphysema.[18]

Career edit

 
Ghetto Warsaw 1947

Randall produced still lifes, portraits, nudes and landscapes, in oil, watercolor, gouache, pastel, and print. Randall's concern for social justice ran across his career, for example in his 1947 "Diabolical Machines" print [19], his 1938 Spanish Civil War painting "Fight for God and Spain" [20], and his prints of dispossessed Jews from the ghettos of Eastern Europe, created from firsthand observation[21]. In the 1960s, Randall satirically explored what was for him the grotesque pageantry of US militarism, using a visual vocabulary of ghastly females, skulls and skeletons that drew upon the folk traditions of Mexican graphic art[22].

The threat of nuclear apocalypse prompted Randall to create a "Doomsday" series[23] of huge oils, in the late 1950s and 1960s. [24] Randall's "Flotsam & Jetsam" mixed media series of the 1980s and 1990s, use cosmological references, skulls, Mickey Mouse, Lucifer, and articulated dolls to ponder the he saw as the chaos, horror, and surrealism, of consumer culture. For a 2004, Fresno Art Museum exhibition of this series, curator Jacquelin Pilar explains: "Fascinated by the recent discovery of “black holes” as compacted energy, the artist responded with a series … that reflected the compacted materialism of American society. These cast-off objects, accumulating and languishing in Salvation Army Thrift shops, served as models of excess. Following each painting … Randall would turn to the linocut as the final exploration of his inquiry."[25]

Randall's art revels in the joyful, sensuous and whimsical aspects of everyday life: male and female nudity, surfing, drinking, dancing, lounging, making music. Randall's love of tools featured across his work, including his popular 'Philo' oil series of West Coast barns, plows and shovels.[26] Randall saw manual labor as affirming the positive elements of a non-industrialized life. This led him to portraits of working people, as hewers of coal and wood, house painters, diggers, laundry women, cooks, carpenters, farmhands, stevedores, sellers of bread, balloons, and chickens. The landscapes of rural Oregon[27], California, Hawaii, Canada[28], Mexico and Scotland stimulated Randall, as a watercolorist, to the use of intensely vivid colors and energetic brushstroke.

Organizing, public art, and peace activity edit

 
ByronRandall1960SF1

Randall saw printmaking as a democratic art form that had an established and international history in mass media. This drew him to Mexico's graphic arts tradition, embodied in its Taller de Gráfica Popular, associated with artists Leopoldo Mendez, Pablo O'Higgins (a close friend of Randall), Francisco Mora, and Elizabeth Catlett. In 1940, Randall worked briefly at the Taller, and he later became an Associate Member.[29] The Taller inspired Randall to establish the co-operative Artist's Guild of San Francisco, in 1945 (serving as President). He served as treasurer of the San Francisco Art Association, and was a member of the San Francisco Artists' Council. In 1947 he became involved in the California Labor School, from which developed San Francisco's Graphic Arts Workshop.[30] Artists of the California Labor School and Graphic Arts Workshop included Victor Arnautoff, Pele deLappe, Louise Gilbert, Lawrence Yamamoto.[31] Members of this leftist circle illustrated the 1948 Communist Manifesto in Pictures, commemorating the Manifesto's centenary with prints by Randall, Giacomo Patri, Robert McChesney, Hassel Smith, Louise Gilbert, Lou Jackson and Bits Hayden.[32]

Randall's commitment to public art led him to murals: in the late 1940s he painted a mural for the historic Vesuvio's Café, in San Francisco's North Beach; in 1954, he painted a fresco in a Mexico City public school; in 1957 he painted a mural for the Young Men and Women's Hebrew Association, in Montreal,[33] and in the 60s he assisted his then wife Emmy Lou Packard in creating the Chavez Student Center bas relief mural at Sproul Plaza, UC Berkeley.[34] He also restored Pablo O'Higgins' mural, 1969, in the Honolulu ILWU headquarters. Randall joined forces with prominent artists Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Charles Wilbert White, and Frank Stella, in protesting the Vietnam War.[35] Randall's activism also led him and Packard to the Soviet Union, in 1964, where they had a show of 48 prints in Moscow's Pushkin Museum, which was featured on Soviet television.[36] And it led him, in the mid-1970s, along with artists Mary Fuller, her husband Robert McChesney, and the Sonoma community, to protest against Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Californian Running Fence installation.[37]

Collections edit

Randall's art is in the permanent collections of

[38]

Gallery edit

  •  
    Byron Randall, 1959, "Golden Gate Bridge", tempera, private collection
  •  
    1947, Diabolical Machine, for 1948 Communist Manifesto in Pictures, Byron Randall
  •  
    Byron Randall, "Nada", Tacuba, Mexico series, 1940
  •  
    Then There Were None, 1959, Doomsday series (Byron Randall) (Jundt Museum)
  •  
    Philo 1964–89, Byron Randall (Private Collection)
  •  
    Byron Randall, Mattox, Philo series, 1963–71, private collection
  •  
    Peppers & Honeysuckle, 1993, Byron Randall (Long Beach Museum of Art)
  •  
    After Rain, Hilo, 1949, Hawaii 1949 serigraph series, Byron Randall
  •  
    Mickey Skull, 1991, Byron Randall
  •  
    Merchant Marine Shipmates, 1943, Byron Randall (Jundt Museum)
  •  
    Lorraine Almeida, 1989, Byron Randall (Long Beach Museum of Art)
  •  
    Cow Landscape, Tacuba Mexico 1940, Byron Randall (Private Collection)
  •  
    Byron Randall,'Glousterman', Tacuba Mexico 1940 series (Mariners' Museum)
  •  
    Rainy Night, 1945 linocut by Byron Randall
  •  
    Byron Randall, Balloon Seller, 1990 (American Ethnic Studies Dept, University of Washington)
  •  
    US Stomp Queens, 1968 Woodcut, Beauty Queen series, Byron Randall
  •  
    Young Woman, Lodz, 1947, print by Byron Randall (LA Museum of the Holocaust)
  •  
    Byron Randall, Wrestlers, 1961
  •  
    Byron Randall, Man Drying, 1968 Nude woodcut series
  •  
    Byron Randall,'Back', Nudes 1968 wood cut series

See also edit

 
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Byron Randall.

References edit

  1. ^ "Byron Randall". SFGate. 19 August 1999. Retrieved 6 April 2019.
  2. ^ Byron Randall, Artist's Statement, Salem Art Center Bush House Solo show, April 27-May 22, 1960, quoted in Withers, Jack. "Oregon Valley Nurtures Art. Artist Only Canvasses It", The Willamette Collegian, April 29, 1960. See also Byron Randall, Artist Statement, Ampex Gallery one-man show, arranged by Art to Industry, Palo Alto, May-August 1977.
  3. ^ Grieve, Victoria (2009). The Federal Art Project and the Creation of Middlebrow Culture. Urbana: U. of Illinois Press. See also McChesney, Mary Fuller: Oral history interview with Byron Randall. (1964, May 12). Archives of American Art, New Deal and the Arts Oral History Project.
  4. ^ 'Western Water Colorist: Young Man Goes East and Gets His First Big Showing', Newsweek, Oct. 16, 1939.
  5. ^ Statesman Journal (Salem, Oregon), Feb 2, 1941, p.12.
  6. ^ Ginny Allen and Jody Klevit, Oregon Painters. Landscape to Modernism, 1859-1959 (Second Edition), Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2021.
  7. ^ Randall, Byron (1947). 'Does Russia Dominate Yugoslavia?'. Soviet Russia Today. Vol 16, no.3 (July).
  8. ^ Statesman Journal (Salem, Oregon), Apr 18, 1947, p. 10.
  9. ^ The Los Angeles Times, Nov 30, 1947, p.28.
  10. ^ 'Artist's Wife Saves Son, Dies Herself', The Gazette (Montreal, Quebec), November 17, 1956, p.3.
  11. ^ The San Francisco Examiner, Jun 2, 1959, p. 49.
  12. ^ The Mendocino Beacon (Mendocino, California), Sep 2, 1960, p. 6.
  13. ^ The Press Democrat (Santa Rosa), Feb 24, 1966, p.2
  14. ^ "Burton Donald Cairns". Pacific Coast Architecture Database (PCAD). Retrieved November 8, 2014.
  15. ^ Fracchia, Charles A. and Jeremiah O. Bragstad (1976). Converted into Houses. New York: Viking Press.
  16. ^ The Lewiston Journal, May 2, 1984; The Free Lance-Star, May 3, 1984; The Pittsburgh Press, May 3, 1984; The Milwaukee Sentinel, May 4, 1984.
  17. ^ deLappe, Pele (2002). A Passionate Journey through Art & the Red Press. Petaluma: s.n.
  18. ^ "Obituary: Byron Randall". SFGate. 1999-08-19. Retrieved 2019-06-25.
  19. ^ In permanent collection of 27 museums, including Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, National Gallery, San Jose Museum of Art.
  20. ^ Held in the Hallie Ford Museum permanent collection:https://willametteart.pastperfectonline.com/webobject/D8159941-D691-4E95-8751-555538524224, Accession number 2019.010.007.
  21. ^ Held in the LA Museum of the Holocaust, http://www.lamoth.info/?p=collections/findingaid&id=15&q=&rootcontentid=16383, Sub-Collection 21: RG-14.21, Byron Randall Collection, 1947.
  22. ^ An example is the 1968 woodcut "Snappy Patriotic Number", AD & A Museum , Accession 2019.013.014, San Jose Museum of Art, Accession 2023.05.06, and six other musuem permanent collections listed below.
  23. ^ The San Francisco Examiner, Feb 18, 1971, p. 27
  24. ^ The Crocker Museum holds "Day at the Beach", 1960; the Jundt Museum holds "Then There Were None", 1959, and Smith College Art Museum holds "Man with a Guitar", 1962, from this series (chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://scma.smith.edu/sites/default/files/SCHEMA%202019%20to%202020.pdf).
  25. ^ Jacquelin Pilar, Exhibition Curator, "Byron Randall Linoleum Block Prints, Fresno Art Museum, March 25-May 30, 2004, exhibition guide".
  26. ^ Monterey Museum of Art's "California Philo Series #241, Farm Machine, 1976", Accession number 2020.013.004, Georgia Museum of Art's "Mendocino, Philo series #48, 1964-71", Accession number 2019.320, and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art's "Mendocino Garden (Philo Series #38)", Accession number 2020:4.29, are examples.
  27. ^ George Gutekunst, Curator's Note, "Byron Randall and the Oregon Coast", One man Show, "60 Watercolors of the Oregon Coast", The Iron Pot Restaurant, San Francisco, November 24-December 31, 1949
  28. ^ "Randall Paintings Depict Life in Canada", Poughkeepsie Journal (Poughkeepsie, New York) Sep 2, 1956, 16
  29. ^ Makin, Jean, ed. (1999). Codex Mendez. Tempe: Arizona State U. See also Prignitz, Helga (1992). El Taller de Gráfica Popular en México 1937–1977. Mexico: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes.
  30. ^ Vogel, Susan (2010). Becoming Pablo O'Higgins. San Francisco/Salt Lake City: Pince-Nez Press.
  31. ^ Ginger, Ann Fagan and David Christiano (1987). The Cold War Against Labor, vol. one.Berkeley: Meiklejohn Civil Liberties Institute. See also Carlsson, Chris (2011). Ten Years that Shook the City. San Francisco: City Lights Foundation Books.
  32. ^ Schneiderman, William, intro (1948). Communist Manifesto in Pictures. San Francisco: International Bookstore.
  33. ^ Gilbert, Dorothy B. (1962). Who's Who in American Art. NY: R.R. Bowker.
  34. ^ 'Artist's Talk Concerns Trends for Art in Architecture', Ukiah Daily Journal, Mar 29, 1960, p. 4·
  35. ^ Frascina, Francis (1999). Art, Politics and Dissent. NY: St Martin's Press.
  36. ^ Packard, Emmy Lou (1964). 'Speaking Out For Peace. Two California artists are exhibited in Pushkin Museum, Moscow'. New World Review, vol. 32, no. 9. (October).
  37. ^ Chernow, Burt (2002). Christo and Jeanne-Claude. NY: St. Martin's Press.
  38. ^ Permanent Collection information drawn from museum websites, permanent collection listings, exhibition and accession newsletters, and Deeds of Gift.

External links edit

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