PHONE: 760-943-8706
 
MAURICE LOGAN
a society of six member
 
Maurice Logan
(1886-1977)

Born: San Francisco, CA
Studied: California College of Arts, California
School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Member: American Water Color Society
Bohemian Club
National Academy of Design
Thirteen Watercolorists Group, California
Society of Six, California
 
Maurice Logan Biography

Born in San Francisco, California (near Calistoga), Maurice Logan was an expert watercolor and oil painter of California scenes which included the downtown and waterfront areas of San Francisco and other small California towns, California and Arizona deserts and countless marine related scenes.

Logan was part of the Society of Six, a highly influential group in the 1920s led by Selden Gile that combined the bright colors of Fauvism with a sense of region in a loose Impressionist style. The Society of Six exhibited together at the Oakland Art Gallery.

From a young age, Maurice Logan aspired to have a career as an artist. Logan took his first lessons (at the age of ten) from a local California artist Miss Clara Cuff. It is rumored that a family friend paid for the lessons because Logan's father disapproved of his son's art interests. Despite this disapproval, young Logan was encouraged in artistic expression by the many artists who came to paint in the Temescal Lake area and also by the Bohemian atmosphere of writers he met there including Jack London and Ambrose Bierce.

Maurice Logan enrolled in the Partington Art School in San Francisco, and after the school was destroyed by the earthquake, Maurice worked with Richard Partington at the Piedmont Art Gallery. Logan later became the first student to enroll in the post-earthquake San Francisco Institute of Art. From 1907 to 1913, Logan studied with the likes of Theodore Wores, John Stanton, Christian Nahl, and Frank Van Sloun. Maurice Logan's first exhibited painting was in the San Francisco Art Association's 1914 Annual Spring Exhibition.
 
Maurice Logan continued his studies at the Chicago Art Institute and then returned to California where he studied and then taught for eight years at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, CA. Maurice Logan and his wife lived on Chabot Road and became neighbors of Selden Gile, with whom he and others formed the Society of Six.

By the mid 1930s, Logan had become active in the California School of watercolor painting, which took a bold and direct approach to the regional subject matter that he was already accustomed to painting. Maurice Logan began exhibiting his transparent watercolor paintings and helped form another influential group called the Thirteen Watercolorists. This group which included fellow bay area watercolorists Nat Levy, Rene Weaver, and Harold Gretzner.

For many years, Maurice was an influential art instructor at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. Logan was also on the board of directors of the Society of Western Artists, the West Coast Watercolor Society, and other local art clubs. Maurice Logan also juried art exhibitions at the Oakland Art Museum and was a member of the Bohemian Club, where he showed his paintings on a regular basis.

Maurice Logan died in Orinda, California on March 22, 1977. Maurice Logan's paintings are in many collections including the Frye Museum of Fine Art in Seattle and the Oakland Museum.

Maurice Logan Biographical information: Edan Hughes and Gordon McClelland.

Additional biography information on Maurice Logan and other important California Scene painters can be found in “California Watercolors 1850-1970” by Gordon T. McClelland and Jay T. Last. Book available at CalART.com
 
MauriceLogan.net is interested in purchasing all watercolors and oil paintings by Maurice Logan. If you have a painting by Maurice Logan and are considering selling it or just wish to obtain an estimated value, please contact us and we'll provide a free art evaluation.
 
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