For the record, in 1946, I had a little money from the government and a little
that Luke had left me. So I went back to school, to the University of
California at Berkeley. "Cal" -- the first of the University of
California campuses -- everywhere else in the country it is Berkeley.
The other center then was across the Bay at CSFA, the California School of
Fine Arts which is now the San Francisco Art Institute.
Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, Richard Deibenkorn,
Elmer Bischoff, Jack Jefferson, Edward Corbett, James Budd Dixon, Frank Lobdell,
Robert Howard, and Jeremy Anderson -- they were all there around that time. Many were
veterans on the GI bill.
David Park, who took his
pure abstract work to the Berkeley City Dump in 1949 and began painting Bay
Area Figurative was also at CFSA, after spending the war doing industry work in the East Bay.
At Cal, there were veterans and, of course, college age students
in the art program. But I was the only woman in my classes who had lost her
husband in the war.