The late William Wolff was an artist and man of great integrity, wisdom and good humor. It was a privilege to meet him by accident in the mid 1970s and to admire his work and know him (though not intimately—we were both too shy for that) until his death in 2004. Although he was never well known in the San Francisco art world, his woodcuts and other prints stand the test of time when much of the highly touted work of the postwar period retains appeal now only to the historian and specialist. 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.

The current show features work by six of Wolff’s printmaker friends and colleagues, John Connelly, Gordon Cook, Richard Correll, Art Hazelwood, Stanley Koppel, and Anthony Ryan, most of them associated with San Francisco’s Graphic Arts Workshop, and it affords the new viewer a good sampling of Wolff’s themes in woodcut, etching and serigraph. The title of the show comes from Wolff’s poetic and inspiring notion that artistic people of all cultures and epochs are the citizens of an invisible and eternal polity. It is typical of Woolf to place such emphasis, in an intensely competitive field, on the collegial adventure of creativity. The following article was written on the occasion of Wolff’s retrospective at St. Mary’s College in Orinda in 2002, “Masquerade and Revelation: A William Wolff Retrospective.” I hope that it can serve to introduce this wonderful artist whose deep humanity radiates from everything he made to new admirers.

Masquerade and Revelation

Sometimes the way is beautiful. (Title from Rouault’s print series Miserere)

Those in the Bay Area fortunate enough to know printmaker William Wolff through his artwork or his teaching over the last sixty years cannot but be delighted with this retrospective. The Hearst Gallery at Saint Mary’s College featured several Wolff woodcuts in last year’s The Artist And The Bible: Twentieth Century Works on Paper, and has recognized in him a rarity, anomaly, even, in today’s art world: a contemporary artist who, like Blake and Rouault before him, finds continuing relevance in religion and literature, and has forged powerful imagery from his investigations. On view here are over 100 works: woodcuts, etchings, lithographs, drawings and paintings, dating from the 1940’s to the present. Art lovers just now discovering William Wolff can join us older fans already clapping our hands for joy. Thanks to Art Hazlewood, editor of the California Society of Printmakers, author of the illuminating catalogue essay, and friend of the artist; and Julie Armistead, Hearst Art Gallery Registrar. Besides creating this show, they have added to the gallery’s permanent collection a trove of fifty prints donated by the artist, dedicated to the memory of his late beloved daughter Maria.

A San Francisco native, Wolff has 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 and UC Berkeley after his return. He shared a studio with James Weeks 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. 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.

The Man who never in his Mind & Thoughts traveld to Heaven Is No Artist.—William Blake

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 – to engage in a dialogue with them. G.K. Chesterton once described the authentic conservative (as opposed to our current media blowhards) as a man who takes equality so seriously that he does not limit his interlocutors to the living: even his own [artistic] fathers may, after all, be right. In a stylistic/historic sense Wolff’s work is conservative, its formal ideas derived from the innovations of the early 20th century. But, like other art that endures, where invention transcends and transforms sources, and creativity sparks matter into life, it is of two natures: partaking of its time (and a window into that time) and timeless. One religious writer (Leon Bloy?) influential when Rouault created his Miserere series ninety years ago opined that the crucifixion and other religious mysteries took place eternally in a perpetual transtemporal present. Good art likewise stays good: why else frequent museums?.

I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create.—William Blake

Yet Woolf’s art, pervaded by the big questions, never becomes sentimental or dogmatic; it never sinks to the mystagogic kitsch of an Odd Nerdrum Wolff’s mutely expressive figures, often reduced almost to head and hands (indicative of his enthusiasm for puppetry and theater), enact dramas of transfiguration and transcendence. Although we clearly are viewing an allegorical or metaphoric world –the figures belong to no particular period or country, and the buildings and cities are not quite real– 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. They are religious but not religiose, and contemporary viewers haven’t learned to tell the difference; or they’re uncomfortable with such unfashionable notions in art made after, say, 1800.

Since the early 19th century, artists have, like much of secular society, struggled with the religious urge and the question of where to direct it* (and aren’t religious and artistic impulses both efforts to correct life, to paper over the fissures of reality?). According to Art Hazelwood’s catalogue essay, “the question of where his [Wolff’s] beliefs might fit in his art is not easy to answer. To this question the artist has always remained silent.” Here’s the theory, for what it’s worth, of a sympathetic artist. Wolff, like many artists, dislikes orthodoxy and fixed hierarchies, and he refuses to put himself and his work into categories defined by others. That he is interested in religion as an artistic concern, that he has religious feelings in the broadest sense, of that there can be no doubt: his generosity, modesty and lack of egotism are bywords. No doubt he would consider it presumptuous and discourteous to impose his beliefs (or doubts) on others. Jorge Luis Borges described one of the friends of his youth, aptly named or nicknamed Almafuerte (Strong Soul) as “a mystic without faith.” Wolff would balk at such dramatic terminology, but I believe that mysticism is there in the work. Trends come and go, ebb and flow in the art world, with the Next Big Thing our perfect wave. Bill Wolff has kept at his work, with pencil, paper, graver, ink, and, for burnishing prints, a worn wooden spoon. But the work he has created over sixty years has deep roots, sustains itself in adverse conditions, and is evergreen.

*Robert Rosenblum’s Friedrich, Rothko and the Northern Romantic Tradition details the displacement of religious feelings into the painted landscape and eventually into abstraction.

William Wolff, Oranges, 1966, Color woodcut, 13x18"

William Wolff: The Invisible City will be on view at Warnock Fine Arts from July 1-July 29, 2007.