SAN FRANCISCO

In 1983, San Francisco art critic Thomas Albright predicted that the “beguiling gamesters” of the day would soon be on the wane, and that the “almost monastic commitment” to “probity and high moral purpose” exemplified by painter Frank Lobdell was due for a comeback. The Reagan era, however, exemplified other values. Lobdell’s gritty, “saturnine” existentialism never became trendy, though it was highly respected by serious (in both senses) collectors.

What impressed Albright and depressed the socialites about Lobdell is manifest in his monumental oil paintings of the Dance series, eight of which are being shown again after an almost forty-year hiatus. The painter, a combat veteran of World War II, was marked by the horrors he witnessed, and cites E. M. Remarque’s observation that war has no survivors. Those traumatic experiences pervaded and even powered his early mature work, just as outrage fueled Picasso’s creation of Guernica, a powerful influence on the teenaged prewar Lobdell.

The Dance paintings are based on Vietnam-era studies of college performers. All feature a trio of faceless, isolated figures set against abstract backdrops: a central Tinker Toy figure, all stick-like limbs and putty-like joints, en pointe; on the left, a heavy-limbed figure in a similar pose, but reversed, a mirror reflection of the first dancer; on the right, a figure assembled in the boneyard of Messrs. Picasso & Moore. Despite minor deviations, the template persists throughout the series, which is rich with art history. Besides Picasso’s splintered weeping women from the Forties, and his 1925 tattered terpsichorean in Three Dancers, Matisse’s eurhythmic Golden Age dancers from the Fauve period, and Raphael’s and Botticelli’s classical Three Graces also inhabit these figures.

That stately humanist statuary devolves here, however, into ravening monsters with toothy beaks and beady eyes impaled or glued on pointed necks: Surrealist demoiselles. Essayist Bruce Guenther interprets them as maenads or bacchantes, the wild Dionysiac women who rushed through the mountains ecstatically devouring those they encountered after ripping them to bits. Lobdell depicts our constant psychic battle between warring selves—terror-powered death drive versus enlightened rationality—with bracing, unbeguiling dark humor.

“Dance VII,” 1970, Frank Lobdell, Oil on canvas, 611⁄4" x 88"
Photo: PHOCASSO/J.W.White Courtesy of Hackett-Freedman Gallery