Zoe Longfield

Embracing Clyfford Still's anti-commercial approach toward creativity, Longfield and eleven other students from his inner circle collaborated to open the landmark Metart Gallery in April 1949. Named from the "metamorphosis" or "metaphysical arts," the Metart Gallery was established as a cooperative in which each member, for a small monthly fee, had use of the entire space for one month per year in order to exhibit his or her works. Occupying a former laundry on Bush Street in downtown San Francisco, the gallery was the first of a series of such cooperative art galleries in San Francisco during the 1950s. Each taking a month to individually show original works were artists Jeremy Anderson, Ernest Briggs, W. Cohantz, Hubert Crehan, Edward Dugmore, Jorge Goya, William Huberich, Jack Jefferson, Kiyo Koizumi, Zoe Longfield, Frann Spencer, and Horst Trave. Although the gallery closed after only a year, it helped to launch the artistic careers of several of its members, including Briggs and Dugmore. Exhibits at the Metart earned acclamatory reviews in the San Francisco Chronicle by the well-known art critics Alfred Frankenstein and R. H. Hagan. Of Longfield's show in December 1949, Hagan wrote, "Of all the numerous artists who have taken up the new credo of arbitrary (or spontaneous) expression in unrestrained colors and unrestrained shapes, Miss Longfield impresses me as one of the most successful." The gallery closed after a final exhibit by Clyfford Still in the spring of 1950. Still's final Metart exhibit was highly anticipated and well received. Soon after, he departed the San Francisco Bay Area for New York City. Within the abstract idiom, Longfield experimented with both thicker and thinner paint applications. At times, she employed techniques borrowed from watercolor painting, applying thin washes of oil over the visible white primer of her canvases. She employed a unique vocabulary of forms, primarily organic but occasionally including more architectural elements. Hagan writes: "One of [Longfield’s paintings], titled No. 9, is a finely arranged creation of blues, blacks, and chalky white in which I, at least, detect something of a skull motif. I also enjoyed her symphonic treatment of bone-like shapes in powder blue and mustard yellow, labeled No. 4. But don’t press me for an explanation, it would be purely ectoplasmic." Longfield painted a number of noteworthy paintings, including Untitled (1949), a large piece currently held in the Blair Collection of Bay Area Abstract Expressionism and promised as a gift to the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento. Her work also appears in the catalog for the Women of Abstract Expressionism exhibit, organized by the Denver Art Museum.