MAURICE LOGAN (1886 - 1977) - Watercolor Painting

Description: Maurice George Logan (American, 1886 - 1977) This watercolor on Arches paper by Maurice Logan measures 14" x 18" or in the contemporary gold frame dimensions of 18 x 22 and is signed lower right, Maurice Logan. This Impressionist California coastal watercolor by Maurice Logan of a tidepool is done in a vibrant color palette in an Impressionistic style, making this 1950's painting by Logan a quintessential example of his work during this period. Biography: Maurice George Logan was part of the Society of Six, a group in the 1920s led by Selden Gile. The Society members embraced a type of Fauvism, using bright colors in a distinctly bold Impressionist style that at the time reflected a rebellion against the prevalent Tonalism and classical strictures of the day. From childhood, Maurice Logan knew that he wanted to be an artist. His first lessons were given by a local art teacherwhot was paid for by a family friend since Logan's father disapproved of his son's art interests. Later, he began more formal training enrolling in the Partington Art School in San Francisco. After the school was destroyed during the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906, he worked with Richard Partington at the Piedmont Art Gallery. From 1907 to 1913, Logan was enrolled in the San Francisco Institute of Art, became married in 1915, and attended the Chicago Art Institute. Logan eventually moved back to California, where he studied and then taught for eight years at the California College of Arts and Crafts at Oakland. While living with his wife on Chabot Road in Oakland, they became neighbors of Selden Gile, with whom he and others formed the Society of Six, a well-known group of artists who painted outdoors, socialized and exhibited together in and around the Oakland area. By the late 1920s, Logan had already established himself as a leading illustrator in San Francisco. His specialty was creating painted images on demand for advertising work. Someone else would then usually do the lettering and layout work. His expertise with the landscape and the figure made him very versatile. There were few ad agencies at that time. Logan was well liked and was able to make the rounds of customers and come back with jobs to do. Some of his clients were railroads such as Southern Pacific and Canadian Pacific, which wanted landscape travel advertisements. He did a number of landscape Sunset Magazine covers in the 1920s and 1930s as well. In 1935, Logan founded the commercial art business of Logan, Staniford, and Cox. Their accounts included such names as Dole, Lucky Lager Beer, and Ghirardelli Chocolate. Standard Oil of California was another major client. Logan had a distinctive style that served him well until he retired in 1957. Even after that, he occasionally did watercolors on commission for special projects such as Westways magazine covers. During the 1930s, most of Logan's many art exhibitions were of watercolors. He now painted far fewer oils than he did when working with the Six. His son Richard Logan states that his father "liked to work fast, and the watercolor medium suited him." His early efforts have a careful, studied look with small areas of white paper allowed to show between colors and forms. As his work developed, he became a major artist in the new "California School" of watercolorists who worked spontaneously in the landscape. Their goal was to elevate watercolor as an art form in itself and not have it be considered a mere sketching tool. Logan found great freedom in the wet-into-wet technique of painting. This style of watercolor fostered a simplification of objects that is reminiscent of his Society of Six oils. The quick wet-into-wet technique portrays well the damp environments of San Francisco Bay, where Logan sought out his many images of boats, sloughs, docks, and shacks. His colors became dominated by blues, greys, browns, and ochres. The carefully applied areas of color next to patches of white have been replaced with broad tones and a master's quick brush stroke. In the early 1950s, there seemed to have been a new color surge in Logan's oils and watercolor paintings. A much more spacious vista of his landscape is also presented using larger canvases and paper. The darks in many of these later watercolors of the 1950s and 1960s are more dramatically accentuated than ever before. It seems that at the age 70 Logans painting had reached a new peak. Looking over the range of paintings that "Maury" Logan produced, the most powerful in color and abstraction were those done when he was closely associated with the Society of Six. Certainly, these works of the 1920s show the most influences of modern art from Europe. As he spent less time with the Six, the influence of Gile and the others waned and his earlier training in the traditions of Tonalism reappeared to bring a more realist three-dimensional feeling to the work and a substantial softening of his palette. Eventually, the two influences combined, and the bright colors returned as accents or focal points. Although Logan's style and palette changed over the years, he remained committed to painting out in the landscape. While he had a studio at home, his son Richard recalls that "he only did occasional touch-up work at home; his work was exclusively plein air." He loved to spend his weekends outdoors painting, especially around the Bay. Many of the paintings that Logan did during the week as backgrounds for advertisements also remain today as interesting variations on his plein air landscape work. Logan turned out to be the most successful of the Six, financially speaking. He did well as a partner in his own commercial art firm, as a part-time teacher of life drawing at Oakland's California College of Arts and Crafts between 1935 and 1943, and through consistent sales of his watercolors and oils. He exhibited extensively on the West Coast and was in group shows in New York, England, and Japan. He won many prizes and honors, including an honorary doctorate degree in 1956 from the California College of Arts and Crafts, where he was a trustee from 1932 to 1972. In 1954, Logan was named Associate of the National Academy of Design in New York. In 1960, he was voted a full Academician. Two years later, a savage mud slide destroyed 203 watercolors in the basement studio of his house in Oakland. His wife Bertha died in 1963, and he remarried in 1965 to Ruth Trevalier. In 1966, he took a final painting trip to the Southwest and Mexico. He suffered a stroke in 1968 and ceased to paint. Several more exhibitions of his paintings were presented in the 1970s, including a retrospective of his watercolors at the Bohemian Club Art Gallery in 1975. Maurice Logan died on March 22, 1977.

Price: 1950 USD

Location: Dubuque, Iowa

End Time: 2023-12-21T17:36:54.000Z

Shipping Cost: 68 USD