Zoe Longfield

B. 1924
D. 2013

Zoe Longfield was an American abstract expressionist painter in the San Francisco Bay Area. During her brief active years, Longfield produced a significant body of paintings, prints, and drawings that showcase both a deft handling of media and a unique visual vocabulary that she employed, in her words, to “solve those inherent problems peculiar to painting.”

Longfield studied painting at University of California, Berkeley, from 1941–1944. Her teachers there included Margaret Peterson, John Haley, and Erle Loran, who helped found the “Berkeley School” of abstract expressionism. All were deeply influenced by the seminal German painter Hans Hofmann, and Longfield left the school inspired by Hofmann’s revolutionary principles of structure, shape, and placement in painting and the dynamic, “push/pull” possibilities of bold colors to create spatial illusions. After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1944, Zoe trained for several years in pursuit of a career as a professional ice skater. She changed course in 1946 and recommitted to her artistic studies, attending the California Labor School from 1946–1948 and then the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA), the predecessor of today’s San Francisco Art Institute, from 1947–1949, where the faculty included Clyfford Still, Richard Diebenkorn, Edward Corbett, and Mark Rothko.

In 1949 Longfield and eleven other students collaborated to open the landmark Metart Gallery, established as a cooperative in which each member, for a small monthly fee, had use of the entire space for one month per year in order to exhibit his or her works. Occupying a former laundry on Bush Street in downtown San Francisco, the gallery was a the first of a series of such cooperative art galleries in San Francisco during the 1950s.

During her years as a painter, Longfield wished, above all, to find independent expression through her artwork. She once wrote: “My intention with respect to the coming year is simply to continue the activity of painting. And by reason of more immediate need there is the task to establish a stronger independent attitude in the direction of becoming a more mature painter—simultaneous with the shaking away of vestigial compulsive or obligatory feelings such as might yet remain from previous formal schooling. . . the desire is to paint, and by painting, to solve those inherent problems peculiar to painting.”