Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University presents “Frank Lobdell Figure Drawings,” Now – February 21, 2010, an exhibition of approximately 60 figure drawings in ink, pencil, crayon, and wash from the 1960s and 1970s. Works are on loan from the artist and private collections and from the Cantor Arts Center’s own collection. Admission is free to the museum and the exhibition.

“From the late 1950s to the mid 1960s, Frank Lobdell participated in weekly evening figure-drawing sessions with his friends Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, and David Park,” said Hilarie Faberman, the Center’s curator of modern and contemporary art. “After moving to Stanford University in 1966, where he taught art until 1991, Lobdell continued the practice, drawing with fellow instructors Nathan Oliveira, Keith Boyle, and others. Essentially a nonfigurative artist, Lobdell used these weekly drawing sessions as a springboard to develop a vocabulary of abstraction that was informed by a study of the human body and grounded in the formal issues of expressionist gesture and line.”

A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the show, with essays by Robert Flynn Johnson, curator emeritus of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF), and Bruce Guenther, chief curator and curator of modern and contemporary art at the Portland Art Museum, plus a foreword by Faberman. The catalogue and drawings are based on a more comprehensive exhibition of Lobdell’s paintings and works on paper organized by FAMSF in 2003. This exhibition and catalogue, however, focus on the drawings exclusively. Unlike the previous exhibition, this show includes several figure drawings by Lobdell’s former sketching partners Diebenkorn and Bischoff, illustrating how each artist approached the figure in a unique way.

“Frank Lobdell Figure Drawings” is organized by Anne Kohs & Associates, who worked closely with Lobdell and the FAMSF in the earlier project. “Frank Lobdell Figure Drawings” opens in Cantor Arts Center’s Ruth Levison Halperin Gallery while the exhibition “From Their Studios,” presenting works by current Stanford faculty artists, is on view in the Center’s Pigott Family Gallery. These two exhibitions underscore the history and ongoing creativity of the Stanford art department.