Beth Van Hoesen:
Small Wonders
April 11 – May 24, 2025
For the first time, the Bates Museum of Art is presenting our collection of artworks by Beth Van Hoesen (1926-2010), a San Francisco-based master draftswoman and printmaker whose eye captures the wonder of beholding and whose subject matter comprises the quotidian.
The artist studied vastly, including at Escuela de Pintura y Escultura de la Escuela Esmeralda in Mexico City, the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, and the Ecole des Beaux Arts de Fontainebleau and the Académie Julian and Académie de la Grand Chaumière in Paris. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in 1948 from Stanford University. In the mid-1940s, Van Hoesen worked alongside the Bay Area Figurative Painters, practicing realism in a time when Abstract Expressionism–with its large canvases, bright colors, and spilled expressive paint forms–was the dominant art form in America. For Van Hoesen, though, realism was not only a rejection of the popular art form of the time; it marked a grounding to the human and the everyday that became the focal point of her creative output.
Throughout her career, Van Hoesen returned to traditional subjects of the Western canon to hone her techniques while representing the everyday contemporary life around her. The works in the Bates collection show an interest in classical figure sketching, Dutch still lifes, and Renaissance portraiture, but the artist was also likely influenced by a rise in feminist art on the West Coast beginning in the 1960s. In drawing our attention to small moments, negative space, and humanizing the female form–including by naming her works after her subjects–her art stands in contrast to the monumental, bold, and masculine abstract art practices of the time. Van Hoesen’s works on view at Bates showcase the importance of savoring, connecting with, and memorializing our fleeting everyday sights by illuminating their wondrousness.
