Hurricane is a lithograph from January 1963 by American artist John Hultberg. The reference for this work is Tamarind 726. It is pencil signed and editioned 13/20 in the lower right corner of the image. It was printed at Tamarind by master printer John Rock on ivory Rives BFK watermarked paper. The image and paper measure 18 x 25 inches.
In his dynamic gestural lithograph Hurricane, Hultberg expresses the powerful destruction of hurricane force winds and rain which have leveled buildings, flipped semi-trailer trucks, and rendered utility poles useless and at diagonals. The blackness of the sky warns of further peril while the landscape appears lit by a luminous aerial phenomenon often experienced after earthquakes. The 1962 Atlantic hurricane season featured Hurricanes Daisy and Ella. Hurricane Daisy was the costliest of the season and the storm dropped the highest rainfall total on record in Maine.
Impressions of Hurricane are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo, New York; and UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.
John Hultberg, painter, printmaker, educator, playwright, was born in Berkeley, California on 8 February 1922. He studied art at Fresno State College between 1939 and 1943 and, after graduation, he joined the U.S. Navy where he achieved the rank of lieutenant in World War II. Upon his discharge, Hultberg enrolled at the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA) under the GI Bill, studying under Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still.
Hultberg's cohorts at the CSFA included Richard Diebenkorn, Frank Lobdell, Walter Kuhlman, James Budd Dixon, and George Stillman, all of whom would participate in the landmark Abstract Expressionist Drawings portfolio of 1948. They would subsequently become known as the “Sausalito Six” due to the artists’ residences in the now-famous fishing village just north of the Golden Gate bridge. Hultberg is included in the “Bridge Generation” of artists in the Bay Area Figurative Movement having studied with the First Generation artists.
In 1948, Hultberg was awarded an Annual Prize by the San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art, as well as the Albert Bender Fellowship. This allowed Hultberg
to move to New York the following year, where he enrolled in courses at the Art
Students League. In 1952, he was included in New Talent Exhibition in the Penthouse: Goto, Hultberg, Kruger at
the Museum of Modern Art, which was followed by a group show at the Korman
Gallery. Hultberg spent a year in Paris (1954-1955), finding critical success
at the Nina Dausset Gallery and Galerie Rive Droite.
After his return to the States, Hultberg won First Prize in oil painting at the 1955 Corcoran Biennial in Washington, D.C. The following year, he was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship and was given a solo show at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York. From 1959 to 1960 he expanded his international reach with exhibitions in Paris, Milan, and Brussels.
In 1961, Hultberg met the artist Lynne Drexler and they soon married. After traveling for three years they settled at the Chelsea Hotel in New York. In 1971, they purchased a home on Monhegan Island, Maine, and divided their time between Maine and New York City. They would continue to work and exhibit from these two locations until Hultberg, purchased a home in Portland, Maine. By the 1990s the two artists were estranged.
In 1998 Hultberg won the Pollack-Krasner Foundation Fellowship for painting. In 2005 his book Sole Witness (W.W.P. Press, 2005) was published as a compilation of essays and poems he wrote in Paris and New York in the 1950s. In addition to his teaching career at the Art Students League (1991 - 2005) he also taught in Hawaii and California. Hultberg remained active as an artist and teacher until the week before his death in New York City on April 15, 2005.
John Hulberg’s is represented in the collections of Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, Altoona, Pennsylvania; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; the Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Champaign; the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine; the University of Arizona, Tucson; and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
