Louis Siegriest Art

This oil on board abstracted landscape painting of cypress trees by Louis Siegriest is in dark, mystical tones of grey, dark blues, greens and black. The tall, bare trees are growing along the bank of a body of water and reach from the bottom to top of the painting surface. Heavy paint application adds texture to the painting. Period wooden frame with new linen liner. Siegriest was a native of Oakland, California born in 1899. He had a long distinguished career including association in the 1920s with a California Bay Area group called the 'Society of Six...

Louie Bassi Siegriest Modernist Oil Painting c.1950s Modernist oil painting titled "Church in Mexico" Original oil on board. Signed lower left. Dim...

Siegriest was a commercial artist and fine-art painter whose styles ranged from Impressionism, Fauvism to Mixed-Media Abstraction, Louis Siegriest had a long, distinguished career including association in the 1920s with a California Bay Area group called the Society of Six. Members rebelled against the prevalent sombre Tonalism of William Keith and the genteel Classicism of Arthur Mathews. He was born to a father who drove the first horse-drawn streetcars in Oakland and then made a fortune in the heating oil business with acetylene gas machines for gaslights. Louis lived his entire life in the family mansion where he was born in north Oakland and later raised his own family including a son, Lundy, who became a well-known artist. His parents encouraged his talents, and at age fifteen, he enrolled at night in the California School of Arts and Crafts while attending high school during the day. His early interest was cartooning, and he won a San Francisco Chronicle comic strip contest. A good friend and classmate at the Arts and Crafts School was Bernard von Eichman, and together they attended the California School of Fine Arts on Nob Hill in San Francisco to study with Frank Van Sloun. The boys later followed Van Sloun to his own school and studied with him until 1919 when he left for New York. Unlike other art teachers in that area, Van Sloun was of the Robert Henri, New York social-realist philosophy that artists had to listen to their own instincts and paint what seemed relevant to their lives, not what was fashionable in Europe. Siegriest was fascinated by billboards and got a job with Foster and Kleiser, the biggest outdoor advertising firm in San Francisco. In his work there he developed a bold, realist, and simple style. But this commercial art venture did not seem to affect his fine art, which from the beginning was modernist with an undercurrent of playfulness and energy and experimentation with perspective and shapes. About 1917, he began his association with the Society of Six led by Selden Gile...

Abstract painting by Louis Siegriest (American, 1899-1989). Signed and titled "East of Tashkent" on verso lower right. Image, 48"L x 60.5"H. A fine art painter whose styles ranged fr...