Anne Bremer

Sentinels, 1917, SFMOMA

Imagine the thrill of being called “the most advanced artist in San Francisco,” “a crusader for the modern movement,” and a “masterly” and “virile” painter—all while being a woman! That’s Anne Bremer—socialist, feminist, friend of Jack London, and one of NorCal’s foremost painters at the dawn of the twentieth century. Her travels to New York and Europe inspired her to lead San Francisco out of its Tonalist reverie and into a modern style of landscape, where color, shape, and mark all shout paint rather than place. That distinction is usually given to Oakland’s Society of Six painters—but Anne Bremer got there first.

Bremer was born in San Francisco in 1868. The family was comfortable enough for European travel, and in 1881, they brought home a cousin, Albert Bender, from Dublin, Ireland. Bender’s role in San Francisco’s art story is just as significant as his cousin’s—he was an early and generous benefactor to the San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA) but is best known as the man who brought Frida and Diego to San Francisco.

Bremer studied art at the Mark Hopkins Institute (the first incarnation of SFAI) under Arthur Mathews. Her first works share the foggy tones and symbolist softness of her influential teacher. But she travelled between San Francisco and Paris, Italy, and New York frequently in the first decade of the century. Bremer was one of the few to see the three works of Henri Matisse that early collectors Sara and Michael Stein brought to the Bay Area when they returned after the 1906 quake. Bremer later said that seeing a Matisse and a Cezanne in the home of “a friend” opened her mind to an entire new world of painting. (Richard Diebenkorn had the same reaction when he saw them as an undergrad at Stanford).

In Sentinels, from 1917, Bremer has managed to infuse a startling modernity of approach with a hint of her Tonalist training. The flatness, the rough brush strokes, and close-up presentation of the stately trees are new but her command of decorative two-dimensional design and the overall grey tonality are traces of NorCal Tonalism. Bremer shows us  modernity, California style.

Beginning in 1921, coping with leukemia, she gave up painting and turned to writing poetry. After her death in 1923, Bender memorialized his cousin by establishing the Anne Bremer Memorial Library at the California

of Fine Arts, and a marble chair in the Greek Theatre at the UC Berkeley.