The Society of Six California Colorists

Six plein-air painters in California joined together in 1917 to form an association - the Society of Six - that lasted for nearly 15 years.

This text chronicles how the Society of Six - Selden Connor Gile, Maurice Logan, William H.

Clapp, August F. Gay, Bernard von Eichman and Louis Siegriest - created a colourist-centred modernist idiom that shocked establishment tastes of the time.

Combining biography and critical analysis, the author explains that although the Depression hardship ended the group's ascendancy, their painterliness, use of colour, and deep alliance with the land and the light became a beacon for postwar Northern Californian painters such as Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud.