Stories of the collection

VETERAN SAN FRANCISCO gallery owner Jan Holloway tells the stories of the artwork in her collection, focused on artists and images from early 20th century San Francisco. [Click on the cover image above to view a PDF of the catalog.]

 

‘The message was what moved me’

Herman Volz | Picket Line (1938)

FIRST PERSON | JAN HOLLOWAY

I came to an art career at midlife. After raising four children, I took some art history courses and the docent training course at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It was especially fun introducing school children to the museum.

Then, my interest piqued, I set out to be a part of the commercial art world.

In 1980, I was hired by the well-established Maxwell Galleries in the heart of San Francisco’s art scene near Union Square. It was a turning point for me. Maxwell’s afforded an opportunity to become acquainted with a wide range of American and European art from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was also a terrific place to learn the business of running an art gallery from Mark Hoffman, the owner of Maxwell Galleries, who was a genial gentleman and a seasoned pro.

Armed with that valuable experience and my husband Maurice’s support, I went out on my own. At first I worked as a private dealer from our home in San Francisco. Eventually I found a little storefront on Francisco Street in North Beach and opened a gallery there in 1988. Within a year or so, I had become acquainted with artists who had worked on the Coit Tower murals and began showing their work. Then more and more art of the 1930s and early 1940s came into my inventory.

The Jan Holloway Collection

Otis Oldfield | Woman in Bath (1932)

REVIEW | COLETTE TANAKA

For nearly 20 years Jan Holloway worked in the San Francisco gallery community, where she developed a niche exhibiting California artists of the early 20th century. The exhibition history of her gallery would reveal the names of prominent artists, but more important were the many exhibitions that shed light on careers forgotten or overshadowed.

Now she is sharing her personal collection in a book and exhibition called “Good Times – Hard Times,” which consists primarily of the work of the generation of artists active in San Francisco between the two world wars. This group vividly represents two significant changes in the art world, one artistic, the other social and cultural.

Tonalism in the Holloway collection

Tonalism in the back room: Piazzoni, Oldfield, Mathews, Redmond.

Jan Holloway writes, in Good Times, Hard Times: I became very interested in the California Tonalist painters — Arthur Mathews, early Granville Redmond, Charles Rollo Peters. The subdued limited palette and soft light were poetic to me.