Roland Petersen
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Roland Petersen | |
|---|---|
| Born | March 31, 1926 Endelave, Denmark |
| Education | California School of Fine Arts, Hans Hoffman School of Fine Arts, California College of Arts and Crafts, Atelier 17 |
| Alma mater | University of California at Berkeley |
| Occupations | painter, printmaker, professor |
| Employer(s) | University of California, Davis, Washington State University |
| Movement | Bay Area Figurative Movement |
Roland Conrad Petersen[1] (born March 31, 1926) is a Danish-born American painter, printmaker, and professor.[2] His career spans over 50 years, primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area and is perhaps best-known for his "Picnic series" (a yearly event at UC Davis) beginning in 1959 to today. He is part of the Bay Area Figurative Movement.[3][4]
Petersen was born 1926 in Endelave, Denmark.[3][5] He received a B.A. in 1949 and M.A. degree in 1950 from the University of California at Berkeley (UC Berkeley), where he studied under Chiura Obata, John Haley, and Glen Wessels.[3][6] He continued his studies at California School of Fine Arts (now known as San Francisco Art Institute),[3] the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts in Provincetown (from 1950 to 1951), California College of Arts and Crafts (1952 to 1954), and Atelier 17 with Stanley Hayter (from 1963, and 1970 to 1971).[7][4]
After graduation college in 1950, Petersen made his way east to study with Hans Hoffman School of Fine Arts in Provincetown. Roland would return again the following summer of 1951 after a sojourn in Europe studying for six months with the printmaker Stanley William Hayter. Vestiges of Hofmann's approach, including his conviction that "every deep artistic expression is a product of a conscious feeling for reality," are present in Petersen's works of the early 1950s. It was Hoffman's teaching that showed Petersen how to incorporate "recognizable, everyday objects into this theory of opposition push/pull" a theory, which stresses the applying and combining of opposing forces in art.
Teaching and career
He taught painting at Washington State University from 1956 to 1992; and painting and printmaking at University of California, Davis from 1956 to 1991.[8][9]
He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1963;[10] and a Fulbright Fellowship to France in 1970.[11]
In March 2010, Petersen's work was the subject of a major retrospective ("Roland Petersen: 50 Years of Painting") held at the Monterey Museum of Art in Monterey, California. Petersen, his daughter, and his wife, the photographer Caryl Ritter, were present. In 2016 a one man show In Perspective was held at his current gallery The Studio Shop Gallery in Burlingame, California, and again on September 22 – October 15, 2017—the show is called Six Decades of Painting—resulting in a bound book of Petersen's work under the same title.
Roland Petersen was a part of the Bay Area Figurative Movement—a mid-20th Century art movement made up of a group of artists in the San Francisco Bay Area who abandoned working in the prevailing style of Abstract Expressionism in favor of a return to figuration in painting during the 1950s and onward into the 1960s.[3] The "Bridge Generation" (the second of three generations) included the artists Roland Petersen, Nathan Oliveira, Theophilus Brown, Paul Wonner, John Hultberg, and Frank Lobdell.
Collections
- Davis Arts Center, Davis, California[12]
- Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, Davis, California[13]
- Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.[14]
- Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, (Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts), San Francisco, California[15]
- Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia
- Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California[6][9]
- University of Nevada, Reno, Nevada
- Wesleyan University School of Art, Bloomington, Illinois
- Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, California
- Sacramento City College, Sacramento, California
- Fine Arts Gallery of San Diego, San Diego, California
- Monterey Museum of Art, Monterey, California[16]
- Musée Municipal, Brest, France
- Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, California
- Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, California
- Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania[1]
- Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, Arizona
- San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA), San Francisco, California[17][18]
- De Young Museum, San Francisco, California
- Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California
- Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York City, New York[17][9]
- Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, New York[17]
