This untitled abstract expressionist lithograph was drawn directly onto a flexible aluminum or paper plate in 1948 by American artist, John Phillip Hultberg. It was included in the Drawings portfolio of offset-printed lithographs created by San Francisco Bay Area artists Hultberg, Richard Diebenkorn, James Budd Dixon, Walter Kuhlman, Frank Lobdell, and George Stillman. Most of the artists were students at the California School of Fine Arts, some had studios in the ICB building in Sausalito, and all exhibited their work at the Seashore Gallery of Modern Art in Sausalito. Drawings was conceived by the group in an effort to stave off the closure of their gallery as there were limited venues for exhibiting non-representational work.
The artists were given greasy crayons to draw on the "plates" which were then given to Eric T. Ledin of Mill Valley who printed on antique-white Dictationbond paper by Fox River using a Multilith offset press. The impressions were tipped onto a sheet of wove cartridge paper and the artists signed the support sheet or the actual print. Black construction paper folios were created and labeled: Drawings / Dixon / Diebenkorn / Hultberg / Kuhlman / Lobdell / Stillman / Published by Eric T. Ledin Mill Valley Calif.
The Dictationbond sheets measure 11 x 8-1/2 inches and the support sheets measure 12-3/4 x 10-1/8 inches. Drawings is considered the first Abstract Expressionist portfolio created in the United States.
John Phillip Hultberg, painter, printmaker, educator, and poet, was born to Swedish parents in Berkeley, California on 8 February 1922. His formal art education began in 1939 at Fresno State College where he majored in English literature. Upon receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1943, Hultberg enlisted in the United States Navy.
Upon his discharge in 1946, Hultberg enrolled at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute). Using his G.I. benefits, he studied with Mark Rothko, Clay Spohn, and Clyfford Still. Fellow artists at the CSFA included Richard Diebenkorn, Frank Lobdell, Walter Kuhlman, James Budd Dixon, and George Stillman, all of whom would participate with Hultberg in the landmark Abstract Expressionist Drawings portfolio of 1948. They would subsequently become known as the “Sausalito Six” as several had studios in the Industrial Center Building on the waterfront in Sausalito just north of the Golden Gate bridge. The artists met informally in one of the studios and shared models and ideas. They also exhibited at the Contemporary Gallery and the Seashore Gallery of Modern Art in Sausalito. Hultberg’s first solo show took place at the Contemporary Gallery in 1949. This same year, he was awarded an Annual Prize by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, as well as, the Albert Bender Grant which allowed Hultberg to move to New York and enroll in courses at the Art Students League.
In
1952, Hultberg participated in his first New York show at the Museum of Modern
Art’s New Talent Exhibition in the
Penthouse: Goto, Hultberg, Kruger. He moved to Paris in 1954 where he met
the gallerist Martha Jackson who exhibited his work for the next twenty years.
In 1955, he was awarded First Prize for Oil Painting at the Corcoran Biennial
in Washington, D.C. Hultberg was given a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1956 and his
work was featured in a solo exhibition at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New
York that same year. Between 1959 and 1960, he participated in exhibitions in
Paris, Milan, and Brussels, and upon his return his began exhibiting
extensively throughout the U.S.
In 1961 Hultberg met fellow artist Lynne Drexler in Manhattan at a gathering
for Abstract Expressionists. They soon married, traveling for three years
before returning to New York where they lived at the Chelsea Hotel. In 1971, they
purchased a home on Monhegan Island, Maine and divided their time between the
island and New York City. They would continue to work and exhibit from these
two locations until Hultberg, unable to take the harsh island winters, bought a
house in Portland, Maine. By the 1990s the two artists were estranged, though
they never divorced.
Hultberg was awarded a MacDowell fellowship in 1971 and he won the Pollack-Krasner Foundation Fellowship for painting in 1998. He continued to exhibit regularly, with shows in New York, Maine, and Europe. 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.
John Hultberg is represented in the collections of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York; the Bates College Museum of Art, Lewiston, Maine; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Portland Art Museum, Oregon; the Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., and the Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts.
John Phillip Hultberg remained active as an artist and teacher until the week before his death in New York City on 15 April 2005.
