Richard J. McDonald: San Francisco Abstract Expressionist Artist

Richard J. McDonald is the last living artist of the “Post WWII School of Abstract Expressionism.” This movement, noted for its fierce rejection of conventional art, consisted of artists who served in WWII. Their motivation, says McDonald, who served in that war as a Navy medic and illustrator of surgical manuals in Pearl Harbor,  was “to express their inner-spirit through oil painting without being confined to any conventions (probably the result of what we saw in war)." His contemporaries, Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, described this view in a letter they wrote to the NY Times in 1943: "To us, art is an adventure into an unknown world of the imagination which is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense." 

In 1946 he attended the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute). His teachers includedClyfford Still and William Gaw who both praised his paintings for their dimension and bold colors.McDonald took first place in oil painting at the school’s first Student Body Art Exhibit in 1949, which included the paintings of Frank Lobdell, David Park and John Hultberg.

After graduating in 1949, he lived in Paris and painted at the Academie De La Grande Chaumere. In 1951 he had a one-man exhibition for two months at the Galerie Raymond Duncan at 31 Rue de Seine. His exhibit attracted much attention and received the following review from Homme de letters, Francois Ribadeau Dumas, Director of the La ce Monde de Parie (Oct. 15,1951):

“First prize recipient for painting McDonald came to Paris several months ago to paint in Montarnasse. His painting non-objectively is surreal by his refusal to even mention the object… and a rejection of idealized dream to tackle the problem. It puts in it the minimum of control and the maximum of attention. Of this useful net aspect is a positive deliberation for intangible concepts. And, it distinguishes himself from its predecessors.  Confusion is not possible. Here is the enemy of fuzziness.

We discover with him the new world, trimmed with colors and music that have a subtle lasciviousness, --a frenzy of the sensibilities. This art of this young American of Scottish and Slavic lineage, delights us by his art at the California School of Fine Art , delicateness of its finds, its shimmering of a young person like a Persian Prince with a profound enlightened life."

In the same year McDonald had a one-man exhibition in London that received a comment by San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen in his “Baghdad by the Bay” column:

“Speaking of things international, Richard McDonald, who ran an elevator at the Canterbury Hotel here while studying art, is now a big man in London; his paintings are being shown in a leading gallery there—under the sponsorship of no less a somebody than Dame Sybil Thorndike, great lady of the British stage…”

In 1961 McDonald and Viola Frey had an exhibition of their paintings at the Frame Craft Studio in San Francisco. In the same year McDonald showed his art at the Lucien Labaudt Gallery.  Alfred Frankenstein, then art critic for the “San Francisco Chronicle.” wrote the following review:

"Richard McDonald’s titles, appearing under his paintings at the Lucien Labaudt Gallery, are not mere identifying conveniences, but clues to an emotional expressiveness that serves to tie the whole experience together.His method is largely abstract, but his pictures are full of the feeling of things, and things sensed with more nerves than those of the eye, although all these varied impressions have been successfully transposed into visual terms, “Rhine Journey,” “Ancient Harbor,” “West Wind” and “Spring Wood” are some of the themes, and they have been set forth with exceptional sensitivity, strength in design, and poetic insight. McDonald is, in fact, one of the best of the many finds the Labaudt Gallery has to its credit."

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