Artist Biography & Facts

Emerson S Woelffer

Best known for his boldly colored abstract oil and acrylic canvases with jagged forms in sometimes dense compositions Emerson Woelffler was active in this style until his later years when macular degeneration made working in color difficult.

He then began using white crayons on black paper in a looser style. He was also a sculptor and lithographer and lived in both Chicago and Los Angeles.
Emerson Woelffer was a native of Chicago where he worked at the Institute of Design under Moholy-Nagy, and earned a B.A. Degree and taught there in 1942. Later he was instrumental in bringing modernism to Los Angeles where he taught at the Chouinard Art Institute (now Cal Arts) from 1959 to 1973.

He also taught at the Otis College of Art and Design until 1989. Earlier he had been a teacher at Black Mountain College where he associated with Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell. In 1967 and 1967, he went to Europe on a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and in 1970, he was an artist-in-residence at the Honolulu Academy of Arts.
Retrospectives of his work were held at the Santa Barbara Museum in 1964, the Phillips Collection in 1974, and the Otis Gallery in 1992. During his lifetime, exhibition venues included the Museum of Modern Art, the Corcoran Biennial, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Pennsylvania Academy.

Sources:
Art in America, May 2003
Peter Hastings Falk, Editor, Who Was Who in American Art

The following, submitted November 2003 by Katherine Tozier, is from the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph newspaper article, 9/1/52


Emerson Woelffer is the only Coloradoan with an invitation to exhibit in the Carnegie International Exhibition. Woelffer's "O equals X2" is one of 100 paintings by American artists. Woelffer has exhibited his paintings in every large city in the United States and in France and Switzerland. He has had a one-man show in Vermont, Chicago and New York.

Last Spring Woelffer's works were shown in the American Painters Exhibit at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. The Exhibition presented the works of painters who, in the opinion of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, deserve wider recognition.
Mr. Woelffer has been head of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center School since 1950.

The following is from Tobey Moss:

Initially I was primarily interested in the lithographs Woelffer made at Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles...in 1961, in 1966/67, in 1970. He introduced me to his other prints also: the lithographs and few etchings made at the Colorado Fine Arts Center in 1951-54, that built on the vocabulary of surrealism and calligraphy towards an abstraction that seldom related to figuration.

In the early 1960s, he accepted an invitation from June Wayne to work at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles and continued at the Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, NM when it moved in 1971; he made many editions over the next decades and his 'romance' with lithography never waned.

My appreciation of his prints was broadened soon to embrace his paintings, drawings and collages. In 2000 he created lithograph Venice II at Tamarind trained Ed Hamilton's Studio in Venice, California. Soon afterwards, unfortunately, his waning eyesight impeded further work.

Emerson Woelffer was a pioneer of the Abstract Expressionist movement with his friend Robert Motherwell. In paintings and collages of clipped papers, held together with paste or pins, Woelffer worked in broad color fields with incorporated gestural expressiveness. This became a recognized vocabulary of forms and symbols that informed his printmaking as well.

EMERSON S. WOELFFER (1914-2003)

Once dubbed “the Grandfather of L.A. Modernism,” the Chicago-born Emerson Seville Woelffer was active as an innovative painter, collagist, and educator throughout his long and prolific career. A pioneering Abstract Expressionist, Woelffer’s brightly-colored work reveals Cubist and Surrealist influences. Known for advocating a “paint first and think afterwards” approach, his seemingly simplistic abstract canvases investigate the complex relationship between the power of the human unconscious and the limits of the medium. “There is no idea to begin with,” Woelffer contended. “I just start and it works or it doesn’t. It’s not about anything like a tree or an apple.”

Coming of age in Chicago during the Great Depression, Woelffer appreciated the improvisational nature of jazz music, a sensibility he would later apply to painting through gestural variation, energetic strokes, and a rhythmic use of line. From 1935 to 1938, Woelffer, a high school dropout, studied at the Art Institute of Chicago while employed as a janitor, early evidence of his enduring work ethic. He joined the Works Progress Administration arts program in 1938 as an easel painter, followed by a two-year stint as a topographical draftsman for the United States Air Force. The director of the New Bauhaus in Chicago (later the Chicago Institute of Design), László Moholy-Nagy, invited Woelffer to join the faculty in 1942. His experiences there brought him into contact with the modernist idiom of the day, and his interactions with students caused him to re-examine his own practice. He also exhibited in group shows at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, participated in the Whitney Museum Annual (1949) and won the Pauline Palmer Prize for painting at the Art Institute of Chicago (1948).

In 1949 Emerson Woelffer and his wife Dina, a fine art photographer, visited North Carolina. At the request of Buckminster Fuller, the couple taught a two-month summer course at Black Mountain College. A last-minute invitation from Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner then took the Woelffers to New York before they headed to Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. Exposure to Pre-Columbian art led Woelffer to incorporate totemic figures and vibrant colors into his abstract paintings.

The Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center extended a job offer in 1950, which the Woelffers accepted. While there, Woelffer established lifelong friendships with artists-in-residence Ynez Johnston and Robert Motherwell. The Colorado period marked a critical development in Woelffer’s oeuvre as he began to embrace the accidental and the absurd through the Surrealist technique of automatic writing, or automatism. The mountain environs inspired Woelffer to shift to a cooler-toned palette as he addressed the vast openness of the landscape.

Between 1957 and 1959, Woelffer traveled in Europe and enjoyed an extended residency on the Italian island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples, where he experimented with abstract collages and paintings featuring enlarged calligraphic strokes. He returned to America in 1959 and subsequently joined the faculty at Chouinard Art Institute (later the California Institute of the Arts) in Los Angeles, where he instructed notable emerging artists until 1973. One of his Chouinard students, Ed Ruscha, later described Woelffer as “an American original, a tender tough guy who turned a lot of people on to the beauty of abstract painting.” In 1974, Woelffer was named chair of the art department at the Otis Art Institute (now the Otis School of Art and Design). His tenure lasted until his retirement in 1989, and he was widely admired for his interdisciplinary approach in the classroom. An endowed scholarship fund in his name provides support for promising young artists and designers. Suffering from macular degeneration, Woelffer switched to drawing with white crayon on black paper in his final years of artistic activity.

Having already won a prestigious Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1967, Emerson Woelffer received the Guggenheim’s 1988 Francis J. Greenburger Award, “a prize that honors established artists whom the art world knows to be of extraordinary merit but who have not been fully recognized by the public.” Woelffer’s work is represented in the collections of such distinguished institutions as the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, among others.

The Johnson Collection, Spartanburg, South Carolina
thejohnsoncollection.org