
John Saccaro
American
(1913 – 1981)
Biography
Bay Area native John Saccaro was a major contributor to the San Francisco school of Abstract Expressionism. He studied at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco in 1954, which was centered on Abstract Expressionism.
After graduating, he began painting in the abstract style he is most famous for, which he called Sensorism. To Saccaro, Abstract Expressionism was not just about creating a painting through spontaneous actions; to him, he had to create something. He had to deliberately create an abstract image that captured some kind of energy or emotion. ” I never went for the little business of dripping the paint on the floor or jumping up to the canvas and making stripes. No, I always had to come up with some sort of an image… I couldn’t explain what the image was, I couldn’t say even when I gave it a title, I couldn’t make you really see what I saw because everybody sees different. But I had to have something there. And you can see that in every [painting].” Saccaro continued to paint in this Sensorist style with much success.
Saccaro’s utilization of slashing, angular brush work and high contrast color palette made him popular amongst institutions such as the De Young Museum, the Bolles Gallery in New York, the Oakland Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Art.
Selected Solo Exhibitions
1939 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
1946 M.H. de Young Memorial Museum
1958 the Oakland Museum of California
1959 San Francisco Museum of Art
1960 M.H. de Young Memorial Museum
1962 BoDes Gallery
1981 Museo Italo Americano
1990 Carlson Gallery
Selected Group Exhibitions
1939 Art Institute of Chicago
1939-1942 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
1954 The Oakland Museum of California
1955 Carnegie International
1955-1957 Corcoran Gallery of Art
1958 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
1957-1958 Denver Art Museum
1962 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
1962 The Cantor Art Center at Stanford University
1962 California Palace of the Legion of Honor
1973 The Oakland Museum of California
1996 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Selected Collections
The Oakland Museum of California
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Pasadena Art Museum
M.H. de Young Memorial Museum
Elvehjem Museum
Crocker Art Museum
Laguna Art Museum
Triton Museum