CSFA 1950 is a mixed technique color intaglio, a mezzotint, roulette, and drypoint, created in 2003 by American artist Byron McClintock. It is pencil signed, dated, and editioned 3/20. CSFA 1950 was printed by the artist on wove BFK Rives Heavyweight paper and the image measures 10-1/2 x 9-3/8 inches.
The title refers to McClintock’s years studying at the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA) in San Francisco. The school opened 1871 and was named the San Francisco Institute of Art in 1907 and renamed in 1916 as the California School of Fine Arts. In 1945, Douglas McAgy became the director of the CSFA and hired Clyfford Still, Hassel Smith, David Park, Elmer Bischoff, and Richard Diebenkorn. He also invited New York artists Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt to teach summer sessions, making the school a hub for Abstract Expressionism.
Byron McClintock was born in Klamath Falls, Oregon in 1930. In 1946, he joined the Merchant Marines, sailing throughout the Pacific. He moved to San Francisco in 1949 and enrolled in the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA) where he studied under Edward Corbett, Richard Diebenkorn, and James Budd Dixon. During those years he served as class monitor for Dixon’s printmaking class and printed lithographs for many of the students. In the early 1950s, McClintock tended bar at Vesuvio Café, a saloon that was an important hangout for the Beat artists, and he shared a studio in the Mission District with Ernest Briggs.
McClintock served in the U.S. Army between 1953 and 1955. After his discharge, he returned to San Francisco where he co-owned Acme Photoengraving, a photoengraving business specializing in commercial advertising work, until 1980. During the 1960s McClintock exhibited his paintings at the John Boles Gallery in San Francisco and, in the late 1970s, he purchased a large studio on Howard Street and bought a press to return to printmaking.
New York Abstract Expressionist print collector, Charles Dean, rediscovered Byron McClintock in the early 1990s. The Whitney Museum of American Art purchased a few of his prints and included them in a Recent Acquisitions exhibition in 2004. At Dean’s urging, McClintock traveled to New York from the Pacific Northwest to see his work hanging in the Whitney. McClintock’s work is also in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
