Life of Sonia Gechtoff
From Philadelphia to San Francisco to New York
Sonia Gechtoff was born in Philadelphia to prominent art world parents. Her mother, Etel Etya managed art galleries, including her own, East and West Gallery (1956-58), located at 3108 Fillmore Street in San Francisco. Her father, Leonid Gechtoff, was a successful genre artist from Odesa, Ukraine who introduced Sonia to painting at an early age.
After graduating from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1950, Gechtoff moved to San Francisco in 1951 where she immersed herself in the San Francisco Bay Area Beat Generation. Inspired by the works of Clyfford Still, she changed her approach to painting and became friends with other Bay Area artists such as Hassel Smith, Philip Roeber, Madeline Dimond, Ernest Briggs, Elmer Bischoff, Byron McClintock, and Deborah Remington. She studied briefly at what is now called the San Francisco Art Institute.
Gechtoff gained national recognition in 1954, when her work was exhibited in the Guggenheim Museum's, Younger American Painters, show alongside Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, and Jackson Pollock. Her mastery of the palette knife generating forceful, impasto strokes of color garnered Gechtoff a solo exhibition at the De Young Museum in San Francisco in 1957, the first Abstract Expressionist female artist to have a solo museum show on the East or West coast of the US. That same year she was included in the Ferus Gallery inaugural exhibition in Los Angeles alongside Still, Richard Diebenkorn, and Jay DeFeo, among others, and later that year had the first solo artist exhibition at Ferus followed by her second solo in 1959.
In 1958, Gechtoff moved to New York, where she immediately became a part of the New York art world. She began drawing inspiration from the Brooklyn Bridge, classical architecture, literature, and the sea, whose forms are recognizable in her later series of collage-like paintings. Gechtoff continued to experiment with her work throughout her career. She started incorporating graphite when she made a switch from oil to acrylics, and also developed an interest in creating a series of work on a theme as well as sets, multiple elements comprising a single complete work.
