Hans Burkhardt (1904-), 1959
Paul J. Karlstrom and Susan Ehrlich Turning the Tide: Early Los Angeles Modernists 1920-1956, Barry M. Heisler Introduction Santa Barbara Museum of Art 1990, 1959
Hans Burkhardt (b. 1904), 1990
"Born to an impoverished carpenter and a laundress in Basel, Switzerland on 20 December 1904, Burkhardt was abandoned by his father at the age of three, witnessed his mother die of tuberculosis three years later, and was subsequently placed in an orphanage. After completing his schooling at fifteen, he apprenticed himself to a gardener and spent the next few years in this trade.
"In 1924 Burkhardt immigrated to New York City where he worked as a furniture decorator. Wishing to further himself in this craft, he took courses in design at the Cooper Union School. Four years later, he began to train with artist Arshile Gorky in private tutorials which intermittently spanned a decade . . . By 1937, Burkhardt had grown disenchanted with life in New York and moved to Los Angeles. Supporting himself as a furniture refinisher, he painted evenings and weekends, and built a house on the side of a cliff in Laurel Canyon where he and his wife still live.
"During the 1930s, Burkhardt painted in a Cubist vein indebted to Picasso by way of Gorky. Then, at the turn of the decade, he began to create Expressionist works in which he decried the carnage in Europe. . . . The amalgamation of weapon and beast recalls Picasso's Guernica horse and looks forward to Rico Lebrun's Crucifixtion soldiers . . .
"While Burkhardt frequently railed against social evils, he also applauded West Coast life in a number of handsome abstractions . . . By the Sea of 1945 evokes a casual day at the beach. An azure sky, warmed by the sun, greets the cool Pacific in which Burkhardt regularly swam.
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"In 1959 Burkhardt began to teach, initiating a distinguished career that included positions at California State University at Long Beach, the University of Southern California, the University of California at Los Angeles, Chouinard Art Institute, and California State University at Northridge.
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"Since 1982 his work has appeared in a series of one-man shows at the Jack Rutberg Gallery in Los Angeles.
"Through his painterly, impassioned works, Burkhardt has served as a West Coast master of Abstract Expressionism. Not only did he help to forge that aesthetic during its early stages of growth, but he enriched it with his distinctive vision. He extended Action Painting into the realm of political protest where few of his peers . . . were willing to tread. . . . he prefigured the Neo-Expressionist course of artists such as Anselm Kiefer, Julian Schnabel, and Markus Lupertz. On the other hand, he foreshadowed the bright geocentric expressions of Carlos Almarez, Frank Romero, Astrid Preston, and Joe Fay.