Sonia Gechtoff (September 25, 1926 – February 1, 2018) was an American abstract expressionist painter. Her primary medium was painting but she also created drawings and prints.
Sonia Gechtoff was born in Philadelphia to Ethel (Etya) and Leonid Gechtoff. Her mother managed art galleries, including her own East and West gallery located at 3108 Fillmore Street in San Francisco. Her father was a highly successful genre artist from Odessa, Ukraine. He introduced his daughter to painting and "had [her] sit beside him at his easel with a brush and paints and beginning at age six he was there to spur [her] on".
Gechtoff's talent was recognized early and she was put in a succession of schools and classes for artistically gifted children. She graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts with a B.F.A. in 1950.
In 1951, Gechtoff relocated to San Francisco, sharing her social and professional life with Bay Area artists such as Hassel Smith, Philip Roeber, Madeline Dimond, Ernest Briggs, Elmer Bischoff, Byron McClintock, and Deborah Remington. She was immersed in the heady culture of the San Francisco Bay Area Beat Generation. According to Gechtoff, female abstract expressionists in San Francisco (such as Jay DeFeo, Joan Brown, Deborah Remington, and Lilly Fenichel) did not face the same discrimination as their New York counterparts. After moving she studied lithography with James Budd Dixon at what is now called the San Francisco Art Institute. She rapidly shifted to work as an Abstract Expressionist.
Some of her most well-known artwork was done in the Bay Area, including the lyrical Etya which is in the Oakland Museum of California.
Gechtoff married James "Jim" Kelly, another noted Bay Area artist, in 1953.
She 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.
Shortly after her mother Ethel died in 1958, Gechtoff and Kelly moved to New York, where they immediately became a part of the New York art world. She was represented by major New York galleries, among which were Poindexter and Gruenebaum, receiving consistently excellent reviews for her work. Teaching appointments and visiting professorships to New York University, Adelphi University, Art Institute of Chicago and the National Academy Museum and School, among others, were part of her professional life.
As a teenager, Gechtoff was heavily influenced by Ben Shahn's style of social realism, an international political and social movement that drew attention to the struggles of the working class and the poor.
Gechtoff cited Clyfford Still's influence on her style (whom she met through her friend Ernie Briggs, but with whom she never studied). She took important lessons about line and shape from Still's work, and is sometimes referred to as a "second-generation Abstract Expressionist".
Her distinctive style emerged in the early 1950s: bright, bold works on "big" canvases. Many of her works, like The Angel (1953–55), are abstracted self-portraits. Gechtoff used vibrant colors and thick, energetic brushstroke to suggest a central figure whose arms stretch across the picture plane. In 1956 she inaugurated her complex "hair" drawings, masses of line that tangled into wispy shapes that float on the paper. Her bold, swirling compositions won her a place in the United States Pavilion at the Brussels World's Fair in 1958.
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