Paul Beattie 1924-1988

Biography

Paul Beattie

1924 – 1988

Paul Beattie was born in Bay City, Michigan in 1924. At the age of 20, after a brief stint in the Navy, he started taking art courses at the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts. There he studied with Sarkis Sarkisian, honing the painting and drawing skills he had demonstrated as a youth. Immersed in the works of the Impressionists, the Fauves, and the German Expressionists, he found himself inspired to pursue a serious career as an artist.

Paul Beattie, San Franciso, 1961

Paul Beattie art studio, New York

In Detroit Paul married his first wife, Elaine, and in 1947 they moved to a flat in the Lower East Side of New York City. He continued his schooling under the GI Bill at the Brooklyn Museum, studying with Rufino Tamayo and John Ferren, and also took classes at the New School, studying with Adja Yunkers. He and Elaine became friends with other young like-minded people around the Baruch place neighborhood. As striving artists they often gathered to critique their art, and network about finding jobs and recognition for their work. He began to show his paintings, and received an award in an international art competition sponsored by the Philip Rosenthal-Brooklyn Museum Art School/Roko Gallery. Paul, along with Gene Powell, Harry Jackson, Bill Clerk, Al Newbill, Charles Nowles, Ann Wienholt and Bob Moir were a group of artists that became known as the Baruch group because so many of them lived in and around the neighborhood. In 1947 they all participated in a group show at the Carl Ashby Gallery, and in a show titled Lower East Side Artists at the Norlyst Gallery.

As part of this exciting and vibrant post-war art world, Paul immersed himself in the NY Abstract Expressionist art scene, and was exposed to the works of Hans Hoffmann, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock. He exhibited at the Jacques Seligmann Galleries in 1949, and in 1950 he participated in an important group show: Fourteen Under Thirty-six: An Exhibition of Paintings at the Studio 35 Gallery. There he showed with Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Harry Jackson, Al Leslie, Robert Richenburg and others.

“Baruch group”, left to right: Bob Moir, Paul Beattie, Charles Nowels, Al Newbill, Harry Jackson, Gene Powell, Anne Wienholt, Bill Clerk

After several years Paul and Elaine divorced and he stayed in New York to pursue his artistic career. In 1952 he married his second wife, Dee and they found a cold-water flat in the Bowery of Greenwich Village and started a family. He worked odd jobs so he could continue to paint, draw and show his work. Paul’s New York art career culminated with a solo show at one of the highly reputed ’10th street galleries’, the Hansa Gallery, in 1954. Finally tiring of the rat-race pressures of the NY art scene, and having some friends in California, Paul and Dee moved to San Francisco with their two children. After earning his journeyman’s license Paul was soon supporting his young family as a carpenter. They rented an apartment at 2322 Fillmore Street (aka “Painterland”), which was later made famous by Bruce Conner’s documentary film, “The White Rose”. They quickly became immersed in the West Coast art scene.

Paul Beattie with alto saxophone, San Francisco, 1956

Both Paul and Dee were musical; she played clarinet and piano and he played the alto saxophone. They enjoyed jamming with friends at each others’ homes, and sometimes Paul would play his sax in North Beach nightclubs. There is an anecdotal story of him loaning his sax to (a broke and horn-less) Charlie Parker during one nightclub playset. Although Paul was not a professional player, he would meet with and discuss the jazz scene with musicians Brew Moore and Lenny Tristano.
In the highly experimental environment of these times, Paul met many artists, including Jay De Feo, Wally Hedrick, Hayward King, Hassel Smith, and James Weeks. Paul got involved with light shows and filmmaking, and the latter saw fruition in a number of black and white films that featured Wallace Berman, George Herms, and Arthur Richer. A dozen of these films were distributed by the Canyon Cinema Cooperative and the New York Filmmakers Cooperative and screened throughout the United States and Europe. He exhibited his art in many innovative San Francisco galleries of the Beat era: The Six Gallery in 1954 and 1955, the East and West in 1955, the Semina Gallery in 1960-61, the New Mission in 1962, and the Batman Gallery in 1963 and 1964.
In 1963 the Beattie family moved from San Francisco to the redwoods of Sonoma County. Here Paul created a multitude of pieces on his small 6×9-inch hand press, published as “M-C Press”. He produced the announcement for the Arthur Richer Benefit, which was a true Beat era “happening”. The long list of artists who donated to the event included Manuel Neri, Joan Brown, and Allen Ginsberg who performed his poem “Howl”. He also collaborated with George Herms, using the M-C Press, to make a deck of cards called “Game for Angels”. Fifty sets were created, with 32 cards in each deck, and each set came with a handmade, drawstring bag.

During the next two decades Paul continued drawing and painting, while exhibiting in San Francisco and Los Angeles and working on his Masters of Art at UC Berkeley. From 1974 through 1978 he taught landscape composition and watercolor painting at Santa Rosa Junior College. In 1975 was invited to be part of the exhibition, Collage and Assemblage in Southern California at the L.A. Institute of Contemporary Art (LAICA). Paul also had three shows at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: Painting and Sculpture in California: The Modern Era in 1976; a large solo show, Paul Beattie: Paintings and Drawings in 1980; and was included in the museum’s The 50th Anniversary exhibition in 1984-85.

Paul Beattie, 1980s

Paul was profoundly influenced by quantum physics and the workings of the cosmos. Together he and Dee pursued their intellectual interests by studying astronomy, cosmology, and physics. Paul wrote a manuscript titled “Art, Aesthetics and Astrophysics”(unpublished). In it he points out many similarities between art, physics, and the cosmos. He presented this paper to the Modern Language Association in San Francisco in 1979. 
By the 1980s, Paul began to see himself more as an “abstract realist” than an abstract expressionist. His search for a fresh, original genre led him to the use of cloud and sky-oriented subjects in his artwork. This source of imagery leant itself to his preference for open brushwork, sketch-like qualities in drawing, and creating structure through color. Paul wrote, “This artistic form gradually evolved from landscapes and horizon lines into atmospheric ‘decks’, helping to satisfy my interest in bringing together the qualities of a completely abstract painting experience and of a literal (bordering on photographic) verisimilitude”.

Paul Beattie’s paintings, “… explore cosmological phenomena, but they simultaneously focus more intently on the various points at which these phenomena intersect with art historical elements. Thus there are stains and patches of irregularly daubed and dappled color that suggest not only clouds and nebulas but the amorphous Impressionist surfaces of late Monet – there are lines and rods of color that imply not only the kinetic movement of magnetic fields, but the fractured geometry of early Mondrian”.

Thomas Albright

Critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, 1980

Artist, self portrait, 1981, acrylic on paper, 9 x 11 3/4, OD-46.1

Large Graphite Planet #292, 1988, graphite on paper. 15 x 15 inches, LGP-122.292

During the last few years of his life, Paul was working on what he considered to be a very special body of work – a series of 340 large graphite drawings of individual terraformed planets. This series was specifically designed to be exhibited in an ordered progression up the Rotunda staircase of the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Inspired by a visit to the museum in 1985, Paul did a great deal of research, scaling the size and spacing of the drawings to fill the stairwell from bottom to top. This large graphite planet series manifests his lifelong interest in both realism and abstraction, and is a tribute to Paul’s outstanding artistic vision.