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Polynesian Woman, 1942, painting on canvas, 46” x 36”
William Wolff, an artist known for his bold woodcut prints on literary and mythological subjects, was born in 1922. A San Francisco native, Wolff spent his entire career in the Bay Area, studying at the California School of Fine Arts (later SFAI) before World War II, and at Mills after his return. He received a MA in art in 1951 from the University of California at Berkeley. He shared a studio with James Weeks in the Marina district from 1949 to 1955 and painted from the figure with Charles Griffin Farr's circle. He showed paintings at the Lucien Labaudt Gallery in the Fifties and woodcuts at City Lights Books in the early Sixties.
Wolff found his artistic direction making woodcut prints, using the modernist flattening and compression developed in his earlier paintings to explore the religious, philosophical and literary themes gleaned from his extensive reading in several languages. He worked for more than thirty years at the Graphic Arts Workshop, a cooperative print shop in San Francisco. He taught at the San Francisco School District’s Youth Guidance Center from 1957 to 1983. Wolff served as president of the California Society of Printmakers from 1988 to 1990. He encouraged younger artists generously, although he was reticent regarding his own distinctive humanistic work.
Although he studied etching with Gordon Cook and lithography from Richard Graf in the late Sixties, and pastel with Rupert Garcia in the late Eighties, Wolff's best-known works remain his color woodcuts, with their rough-hewn simple shapes and boldly stylized imagery belying their emotional complexity. It is the emotional complexity, based on Wolff's literary and philosophical sensibility, that separates him from most of the Bay Area figurative painters who are his contemporaries. While their painterly work is fundamentally esthetic, aiming at visual delight, Wolff's work, despite his appropriation of modernist devices (abstraction, simplification, bright flat color, and collage-based composition), has quite a different goal, older, and perhaps impossibly ambitions: the investigation of man's place in the cosmos. Modest enough and bibliophile enough to revere the canons of western drama, mythology and religion, he is also ambitious enough to use them for personal ends. Although we clearly are viewing an allegorical or metaphoric world, the effects and emotions are felt, and the viewer responds, almost without knowing why. The images strike a chord in us rarely struck these days.
William Wolff was an artist and man of great integrity, wisdom and good humor. In today's art world, William Wollf is a rarity, an anomaly: a contemporary artist who, like Blake and Rouault before him, found continuing relevance in religion and literature, and forged powerful imagery from his investigations. Although he was never well known in the San Francisco art world, his woodcuts and other prints stand the test of time. Due to the efforts of a number of artists who work to keep his work before the public, Wolff's prints have been acquired by several eminent museums including the Achenbach Collection at the Legion of Honor, The Whitney Museum of American Art, the New York Public Library, the Oakland Museum of California and the Library of Congress.
Born: December 31, 1922, San Francisco, CA
EDUCATION
MA, University of California, Berkeley, 1951
BA, University of California, Berkeley, 1950
Studied at the California School of Fine Arts 1939-1943
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2011 William Wolff: Persons & Portraits, ArtZone 461 Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2009 William Wolff: A Printmaker’s Odyssey, ArtZone 461 Gallery, San Francisco, CA
William Wolff: Paintings form the Estate, ArtZone 461 Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2007 William Wolff: The Invisible City, Warnock Fine Arts, San Francisco, CA
William Wolff: Paintings form the 1950s-1960s, Charles Campbell Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2002 Masquerade and Revelation: A William Wolff Retrospective, Heart Art Gallery,
St. Mary’s College of California, Moraga, CA, catalogue
1999 Write the Things Which Thou Hast Seen, woodcuts, etchings and paintings by William Wolff
Fetterly Gallery, Vallejo, CA, catalogue
1988 Woodcuts, Warner Roberts Gallery, Palo Alto, CA
1987 Pastel Drawings, F. J. Michaels Gallery, San Francisco, CA
1984 Woodcuts, F. J. Michaels Gallery, San Francisco, CA
1981 Recent Woodcuts, Printmakers Gallery, San Francisco, CA
1976 Actor Print Series, Berkeley Stage Company, Berkeley, CA
1975 Etchings and Woodcuts, Marquoit Gallery, San Francisco, CA
1975 Select Arts, San Francisco, CA
1974 Printmaker’s Gallery, San Francisco, CA
Vintage 1870 Depot Gallery, Napa Valley
1972 Serigraphs, etchings, Psyche and Symbol Gallery, Berkeley, CA
Etchings and Woodcuts, Marquoit Gallery, San Francisco, CA
1969 Etchings, Lithographs, Serigraphs, Print Room, John Bolles Gallery, San Francisco, CA
San Francisco Arts Commission woodcut show, San Francisco, CA
1968 Woodcuts, Trutton Gallery, San Francisco, CA
1962-1968 Prints shown at Original Prints Gallery, San Francisco, CA
1962 Woodcuts, City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco, CA
1955 Oil Paintings, Lucien Labaudt Gallery
AWARDS AND HONORS
2000 Honored by the Graphics Arts Workshop for his many years of artistic contribution
1976 Purchase Award, Annual San Francisco Arts Festival
1967 Graphics Award, Rochester Festival of Religious Art, Rochester, New York
1951 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Annual Art Show, Drawing Award
1960 Oil painting on Extended loan to the Oakland Museum
PUBLIC COLLECTIONS
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
New York Public Library, New York
Library of Congress, print collection, Washington, DC
Hearst Gallery, St. Mary’s College of California, Moraga, CA, collection
Achenbach Collection, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, CA
Janet Turner Print Gallery, Chico State University, Chico, CA, collection
The Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA, collection
Fresno Art Museum, Fresno, CA, collection
Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley, CA, collection
Fetterly Gallery, Vallejo Community Arts Foundation Collection, Vallejo, CA
City and County of San Francisco, collection
Print Club of Albany, Albany, NY, collection
ARTISTS BOOKS
1993-2002 in collaboration with Paper Crane Press, Half Moon Bay, CA
5 Artists Folio
The Shakespeare Folio, 12 artists
Poems - Poetry of James Campbell, 14 woodcuts with letterpress
Simon Peter Saith Unto Them, “I go a fishin’,” 5 etchings with letterpress
1962 in collaboration with San Francisco Arts Commission
Poets and Printmakers
Associations: Graphic Arts Workshop, San Francisco, CA member since 1970
California Society of Printmakers, Berkeley, CA (Past President 1988-1989)
TEACHING EXPERIENCE
1994 Guest Speaker, Academy of Art College, San Francisco, CA
Catherine Julie Cunningham Visiting Scholar, Lectured on “James Weeks: An
1992 Artist’s View” College of Notre Dame, Belmont, CA, Spring
1957-1983 Special Ed., San Francisco School District, Youth Guidance Center
1980 Introduction to Woodcut Printmaking, Fort Mason, San Francisco
Animation Workshop Artist in Residence with Todd Flinchbaugh
1971 SF Museum of Art
PARTNERS COLLECTION
WILLIAM WOLFF
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