Arthur Monroe

Untitled heraldic abstraction

Circa 1968-1970

Ink and oil on paper

40 x 32 inches

Very good original condition

Unsigned

Private collection, Northern California

Framed

Domestic shipping $100

Arthur Monroe (1935-2019) was an African American painter associated with the abstract expressionists in New York, and the beats in San Francisco, although that barely covers the trajectory of his life. Monroe traveled throughout Mexico and South America, making work in many places and hanging out with other post-war intellectuals out on the quest. Yet despite an extraordinary body of work that addressed the concerns of white art history and black political consciousness, he remains almost entirely unknown to the contemporary art world.

From the very beginning Monroe was able to find his way to the center of the circle. In the 1950s he lived in Greenwich Village and hung out with the black jazz and poetry avant garde, Charlie Parker and Ted Joans, to name a few. He also knew Franz Kline, painted across the hall from Willem DeKooning, and hung out at the Cedar Tavern. After serving in the Korean War he settled in North Beach in San Francisco, ground zero of the west coast beat movement. He befriended poets Bob Kaufman and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who hosted his first exhibition at City Lights Bookstore. He made periodic visits to Big Sur to hang out with Henry Miller. He spent time in Ajijic, Mexico, a magnet for expatriates like DH Lawrence and Alexander Trocchi. However, despite a run of shows in the early 1970s at the Vorpal Gallery in San Francisco, the University of Santa Clara, the University of Iowa, and the Oakland Museum, Monroe was pushed to the margins as an artist. He took a job as the registrar at the Oakland Museum and withdrew to his studio to paint.

Most of Monroe's early, scrawly de-centered work has hardly been seen in America. It was acquired at the time of its making by Reidar Wennesland, a Norwegian physician and patron of San Francisco beat artists, who took it with him when he returned to Norway. Only recently has a portion of it been published in a Kristiand Kunsthall catalogue. Until a self-made exhibition of Monroe's late work last year in Jack London Square, a decent-sized grouping of it had not been seen since a 2004 exhibition at the Wiegand Gallery, College of Notre Dame. Between those two shows only a few of his canvases even appeared in public. Once at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco in 2012, and again at the Richmond Art Center in 2014.