Robert McChesney
(1913 - 2008)
ARENA #28
d. 1959
Enamel and sand on canvas
60" x 48"
Exhibited
San Francisco Museum Art Association
at the San Francisco Museum of Art, 1960.
Awarded the San Francisco Art Association Purchase prize award by the considered and sensitive judgment of juror Lloyd Goodrich, director of the Whitney Museum of
American Art, New York City.
Invited by the San Francisco Art Association, Mr. Goodrich brought to this arduous task his expert knowledge and unwavering enthusiasm for the work of American artists.
Reproduced page A-28, Prize Winning paintings. Compiled by Margaret Harold, published by Allied Publications, Nashville, Tenn.
Robert McChesney (1913 - 2008)
Born in Marshall, Missouri, McChesney came to the West Coast in 1936 to study at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. In 1938 McChesney moved to San Francisco and worked with other artists on the giant murals for the World's Fair on Treasure Island.
The war found McChesney employed as a longshoreman, and he entered the Merchant Marines, sailing all over the Pacific. In 1950 he joined the faculty at the California School of Fine Arts, teaching with painters such as David Park, Elmer Bischoff, James Weeks, Ad Reinhardt, Hassel Smith, and others. This was the "Golden Age" of the school, and many of the artists, both students, and teachers, went on to well-deserved success.
McChesney's first solo show was in 1944, and he has had work prominently displayed and exhibited very often since that time, all over the United States, Mexico, and Japan. He works in a strong abstract style, uniquely his own, and characterized by a fine attention to detail and technique. It is this rigorous approach that led the late San Francisco art critic Alfred Frankenstein to term McChesney, a "Master."
McChesney had over forty solo exhibitions, including retrospectives at the Fresno Art Museum, the Nevada Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Art Commission Gallery. His work won several awards and is included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth; Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University, Logan; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Oakland Museum of California; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California; Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts.
Public Collections
The Whitney Museum, NYC; The San Francisco Museum of Art; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Oakland Museum.
Literature
Thomas Albright, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-1980; Mary Fuller McChesney, A Period of Exploration, San Francisco, 1945-1950; Who's Who in American Art; others.