(Portrait)

Julius Wasserstein

Julius Wasserstein was given a solo show titled "Drawings" at Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco, California, from April 18 through May 16, 1984. Among the works was a series titled Portraits of Non-Celebrities featuring charcoal portraits with seemingly random lines drawn through the faces. This piece may have been included in the show, and appears to be a continuation of the theme he explored in 1980 and 1981, with a series of drawings titled False Documents and another titled Midnight Express Series in which he depicted torsos in various poses with handwritten correspondance or sharp lines overlaid on the images' surfaces. Some of these can be found in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Wasserstein would pass away just over one year after completing this drawing. After building a reputation as one of the leading Abstract Expressionists of the San Francisco Bay Area, his late-life charcoal drawings exhibit a refined minimalism that echoes the work of WPA muralists and sculptors, but without losing the physicality of his action painting; what John Coplans would call his "elegant flourishes, deadly slashes".