Poems & Drawings

 

Frank Lobdell

  1921 - 2013 (biography)

1949  

looseleaf portfolio with lithographs and typset text 

images: various; book: 12-7/8 x 10-1/4 x 1/8" 

not signed, as published 

unnumbered, from an edition of 500 

typeset text throughout; inked dedication by the publisher on the verso of the titlepage: "Inscribed to James Schevill in return for lots of things. Bern Porter" 

Colby Library Quarterly, Vol. 9, Issue 2 [1970], p. 109 

cream Hamilton Andorra watermarked laid 

published 

Bern Porter, Berkeley, CA 

24678 

$750.00 

A looseleaf portfolio with its original brown paper cover wraps, including five lithographs by Frank Lobdell and seven poems by Kenneth Sawyer. The portfolio was published in the San Francisco Bay Area by artist, writer, poet, and physicist Bern Porter (1911 - 2004), and its cast of contributors reads like a veritable who's-who of post war Bay Area movers and shakers.

Poems and Drawings was published the year after Frank Lobdell contributed his work to the Drawings portfolio, considered the first Abstract Expressionist portfolio ever to be published; additionally, Poems and Drawings, like its forerunner, was printed in the Bay Area. The lithographs and text were printed on long sheets that were then folded in half, and were never bound. Lobdell continues his exploration of line and contrast, eschewing representation in favor of the expression of movement.

Publisher Bern Porter was a noted American writer, poet, artist, performer, and physicist based in Maine and California, who worked on the Manhattan Project and later became an outspoken pacifist. He would go on to publish a variety of chapbooks and other works by San Francisco Bay Area writers and poets, as well as many of the writings of Henry Miller.

Little is found on the poet, Kenneth Sawyer, though he may be the art critic who wrote about the San Francisco Abstract Expressionist scene for various magazines, including Cimaise in France. In it, he stated: "Between the years 1946 and 1949 the San Francisco Bay Area was the most aesthetically advenced region in the United States." (Sawyer, Kenneth. "L'expressionisme abstrait: La phase du Pacifique," Cimaise (Paris), no. 7. June 1954.)

The designer and printer of the portfolio, Ben Kennedy, worked for Gillick Press in Berkeley among other publishers, and printed several collaborative art books with Bay Area artists such as Chiura Obata and Wilder Bentley.

On the inside of the title page, an inked dedication by the publisher reads: "Inscribed to James Schevill, in return for lots of things." James Schevill was an American poet, author, playwright, and professor at San Francisco State University, among other schools. Schevill and Porter became close friends, and Schevill would later write Porter's biography, Where to Go, What to Do, When You are Bern Porter.