Biography from William A. Karges Fine Art - Beverly Hills:
| A native of California, Maurice Logan studied with a number of San Francisco’s finest instructors, starting with Richard Partington. He further studied with Theodore Wores, and Frank Van Sloun at the San Francisco Institute of Art, and at the Art Institute of Chicago and the California College of Arts and Crafts, where he ultimately taught between 1935-1943.
Throughout the 1920’s, Logan painted and exhibited with a group known as “the Society of Six.” Devoted to the colorist principles of the French Fauvists, the Six banded together to share costs, rents, ideas, and exhibitions spaces. Logan’s works were grew more subdued as he aged, and by the end of the 1930’s he had abandoned his colorful palette entirely. |
Biography from AskART:
| Born north of San Francisco near Calistoga on Temescal Dam Lake,
Maurice Logan was an adept watercolor and oil painter of ghost towns,
desert landscapes, and marine scenes. The artists he most admired
were John Singer Sargent and Joaquin Sorolla.
He was part of the
Society of Six, a group in the 1920s led by Selden Gile that espoused
bright color (Fauvism), a sense of region, Impressionist style, and
rebellion against the prevalent Tonalism and classical strictures of
William Keith and Arthur Mathews. The Six exhibited together at the
Oakland Art Gallery. Later in his career, he reverted to a
Tonalist style.
From childhood, Logan wanted to be an artist,
and he took his first lessons from a Miss Clara Cuff. A family
friend paid for the lessons because Logan's father disapproved of his
son's art interests. However, young Logan was encouraged in
artistic expression by the many artists who came to paint in the
Temescal Lake area and also by the Bohemian atmosphere of writers he
met there including Jack London and Ambrose Bierce.
He enrolled
in the Partington Art School in San Francisco, and after the school was
destroyed by the earthquake worked with Richard Partington at the
Piedmont Art Gallery. Supported financially by his brothers and never
by his father, he became the first student to enroll in the
post-earthquake San Francisco Institute of Art, where from 1907 to
1913, he studied with Theodore Wores, John Stanton, Christian Nahl, and
Frank Van Sloun, and learned conservative, atmospheric styles of
painting. In 1914, he first had his work exhibited, the occasion being
the San Francisco Art Association's 1914 Annual Spring Exhibition.
In
1915, he secretly married Bertha Kipke, a young woman whose family were
a part of the camping group at Lake Temescal and whom he had known for
many years. He studied at the Chicago Art Institute and then returned
to California where he studied and then taught for eight years at the
California College of Arts and Crafts at Oakland. He and his wife
lived on Chabot Road and became neighbors of Selden Gile, with whom he
and others formed the Society of Six.
He was set apart from
many of his peers by his combining of Bohemian living and business
success and this duality was reflected in his painting garb, which was
a three-piece suit covered by an artist's smock. Of these seemingly
disparate characteristics, it was said that he was an amalgamation of
his own artistic instincts and his father's business-like
respectability.
In the 1930s, he changed from a colorful palette
to a more subdued gray one and traveled for subject matter around
California and into neighboring Arizona and New Mexico including trips
to Taos with Selden Gile in 1931 and 1934. He was able to get through
the Depression easier than other members of The Six because of the
success of his commercial art business including covers for "Sunset"
magazine.
He also became active in the California School of
watercolor painters, who took a bold, direct approach to regional
subject matter.
He died in Orinda, California on March 22, 1977
and his work is in many collections including the Frye Museum in
Seattle and the Oakland Museum.
Source:
Nancy Boas, Society of Six
Edan Hughes, Artists in California, 1786-1940 |
| ** If you discover credit omissions or have additional information to add, please let us know at registrar@AskART.com. |
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Maurice Logan is also mentioned in these AskART essays:
Fauves/Fauvism
Impressionists Pre 1940
Society of Six
Taos Pre 1940
California Painters
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