Artist Spotlight
Roy De Forest’s “Untitled,” 1978
Cottrell-Lovett Collection
From the New York Times article by Roberta Smith published April 9, 2020:
Roy De Forest’s Greatness Shines Even in a Virtual Display
This Bay Area artist’s enduring, multifaceted achievement deserves more respect from New York than it has garnered thus far.
De Forest was a member of a talented generation of artists that started emerging in the Bay Area in the early 1950s, among them Joan Brown, Peter Saul, Robert Arneson, H.C. Westermann, William T. Wiley, Franklin Williams and Maija Peeples-Bright. They absorbed and then mostly rejected the tenets of early Abstract Expressionism promulgated by Clyfford Still in his few years teaching at what is now the San Francisco Art Institute, and opted for images and high jinks over abstraction and high seriousness. Their linguistic quirks, which registered most often in titles, were awakened by the free-form poetry of the Beats. And many of them — De Forest in particular — pursued a kind of hallucinatory visual overload in advance of the counterculture.
Read full article: New York Times