Jerry Opper (1924 - 2014)

Abstraction (Untitled), 1949, oil on canvas, signed and dated verso, 30 x 32 inches, presented in a new wooden strip frame

$4250

Jerry Opper was an American painter, printmaker, and commercial artist whose work reflected postwar trends in Bay Area modernism and Lyrical Abstraction. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, on September 5, 1924, Opper moved with his family to Los Angeles in 1933, where he developed an early interest in art. After graduating from Hollywood High School, Opper worked in the motion picture industry while studying at Los Angeles' Chouinard Art Institute. In 1942, he was drafted into the U.S. Army and while stationed in Colorado, he studied at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, and in Tucson, Arizona, where he served as the Art Editor of Highlights and Shadows, a military publication, before being deployed to Guam. He was honorably discharged in 1945. Following the war, Opper returned briefly to Los Angeles before relocating to San Francisco in 1947. There he enrolled full-time at the California School of Fine Arts, earning his diploma in 1950. He studied during a pivotal period when the school was home to influential artists such as David Park, Elmer Bischoff, and Richard Diebenkorn.

Opper’s oeuvre evolved from figurative compositions to increasingly abstract works, such as the present example. His paintings and lithographs often combined gestural brushwork with geometric structures and simplified forms. Many works reference urban scenes, figures, industrial landscapes, and intimate domestic moments rendered through a modernist vocabulary. Throughout his career, Opper exhibited widely in California including with the San Francisco Art Association at the San Francisco Art Museum (prizes), the California State Fair ($200 prize, 1950), Los Angeles County Fair (prize, 1951), and Richmond Art Center, and nationally and internationally at the Cincinnati Art Museum, Worcester Art Museum, and the Norman MacKenzie Art Gallery in Canada. He was represented commercially by San Francisco's Lucien Labaudt Gallery. Works by Jerry Opper are held in several institutional and public collections, including the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. He is listed in Who Was Who in American Art and other standard references.