Louis Siegriest is best known as a landscape painter. He experimented with different forms of abstraction and with mixed media over the course of his career, which began at the age of 15 when he entered the California College of Arts and Crafts. After two years, he transferred to the California School of Fine Arts. Around the same time, about 1917, Siegriest joined a group of avant-garde Bay area artists called “The Society of Six” who painted in bright and bold colors. The Six, as they were called, exhibited together throughout the 1920s before disbanding. At the same time, Siegriest established a career as a commercial painter and printmaker. His style shifted towards a more realistic approach and somber palette in the 1930s during the Great Depression when, he said, “everybody was painting low key.”1 He was also employed as a printmaker by New Deal art programs. During World War II, Siegriest joined the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and created camouflage designs for buildings. After the War, he spent some time in Nevada, where he made mostly drawings.
His return to the California art scene in 1952 caused a stir—two days before its scheduled opening, Siegriest cancelled his e Young Museum exhibit after it pulled his painting titled Miner Going to Church after a prominent socialite wrote to the San Francisco Board of Commissioners objecting to the work as “pornographic” and “sacrilegious.”2 Siegriest describes his work that came after as “semi-abstract”: “the more I did, the more I got into it. But I always had a subject matter in the thing…And the way I would do it was to put a lot of the gypsum with dry color on the [canvas] and take a spatula and move it around. Then I’d look at it and I’d see certain things in there that suggested a desert or whatever it was. And so I’d work to that end, to keep that image in there.”3 Over time, Siegriest’s paintings became increasingly sculptural, as moved from gypsum into materials like asphalt.
Siegriest lived his entire life in the Oakland mansion in which he was raised. Towards the end of his life, he had to give up painting due to his deteriorating eyesight.
