Gehtoff, Sonya

Born September 25, 1926 in Philadelphia with Leonid Gechtoff ( Leonid Gechtoff ) ^[5] and his wife Ethel ( Ethel or Etya ). Her father was a successful artist hailing from the Russian Empire ( Odessa ). Mother managed art galleries, including her own East and West Gallery , located in San Francisco , California . ^[6]

Father began to teach painting to Sonya from the age of six, seating her daughter next to him, working at an easel . Talent in the girl showed up early and she studied at a number of schools for artistically gifted children. She graduated in 1950 from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts with a Bachelor of Fine Arts ( BFA ). ^[7]

In 1951, Sonia Gehtoff moved to San Francisco, where she met artists such as , Philip Roeber ^[8] , Madeline Dimond ^[9] , , Elmer Bischoff , and Deborah Remington . She was immersed in the culture of the hipster generation of the San Francisco Bay Area . According to her, female abstract expressionist artists in San Francisco did not face the discrimination that their New York counterparts felt. ^[10] Here, Gehtoff studied lithography with at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Institute of the Arts ). But her main work was connected with abstract expressionism - some of her most famous artwork was done in the San Francisco Bay Area, including the painting “Etya” , which is in the Auckland Museum of California . In 1953, Sonya married , a famous artist in the same region.

The artist received national recognition in 1954, when her works were presented at the exhibition of young American artists in the Guggenheim Museum along with Willem de Kooning , Franz Klein , Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock . ^[10] Shortly after the death of her mother, in 1958, Sonia and James moved to New York , where they immediately became part of the New York art world. Gehtoff was represented by major New York galleries, including the Poindexter Gallery and the Gruenebaum Gallery , receiving excellent reviews about his work. At the same time, she taught as a visiting professor at New York University , , the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Academy of Design .

Sonia Gehtoff participated in a number of group exhibitions, including the US Pavilion at the 1958 World's Fair in Brussels, as well as solo exhibitions in San Francisco , Los Angeles and New York . Her works are in many museums in the United States, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art , the Solomon Guggenheim Museum , the Baltimore Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art , the New York Museum of Modern Art , the Whitney Museum of American Art and others. In 1993, she was elected to the National Academy of Design , in 2013 she was awarded the Lee Krasner Lifetime Achievement Award ^[11] .

She died on February 1, 2018 at the hospice center in the Bronx, New York. ^{[12] [13]}

Since 1953, she has been married to , also an abstract expressionist artist. They had children - Susannah Leigh Kelly and Miles Tamarind Kelly .

• Albright, Thomas . "Art in the San Francisco Bay Area: 1945-1950: An Illustrated History," University of California Press, 1985, p. 52. ISBN 978-0-520-05518-6 .

• Sonia Gechtoff: Art work
• Sonia Gechtoff (1926-2018)