Charles Surendorf (1906-1979) American, Wood Engraving. Signed in pencil bottom right. Titled in pencil bottom left: "State Street - Columbia." Numbered in pencil "2ed/100" bottom middle. 

Overall: 17 1/2 X 21 in. 

Sight: 12 1/4 X 16 5/8 in. 

#2782 . 

Charles Frederick Surendorf was born on November 9th, 1906 in Richmond, Indiana. By the time he graduated from high school he was creating cartoons regularly, but quickly realized he did not want to be working long hours in a studio under Fleischer or Disney. He studied art at Ohio State University, then at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1929 he moved to New York to take further studies at the Art Students League, by which time he was painting in oils and watercolors. In 1935 he moved to San Francisco and began taking courses at Mills College, where he started to focus primarily on wood and linoleum engraving. He quickly became active in the local art scene, and organized the first San Francisco Art Festival in 1946. That same year he divorced his first wife and settled in the town of Columbia in the Sierra foothills, which became his base of operations for the rest of his life. He married his second wife, Barbara, in 1949, who helped him to stop excessively drinking and find his drive, and together they had three children that he was able to support (along with a daughter from his first marriage) completely from the sales of his work. His paintings and prints depicted the rough-and-tumble life of the old mining country in a regionalist style similar to that of Thomas Hart Benton, and his stark images of the mostly vacant Columbia, turned practically into a ghost town when the gold mines dried up, captivated audiences around the world. As the state of California bought most of the land and turned the town into a historical park, he was eventually evicted from his studio gallery in 1967 for refusing to wear period clothing, a requirement of all the retailers, and the publicity from his defiance gained him international attention and exponentially increased sales. In his remaining years his work was shown in most of the leading museums and galleries in New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., New Orleans, San Francisco, and New Zealand, which he traveled to frequently. Surendorf additionally lectured and demonstrated before numerous art leagues and societies right up until his death from cancer on May 28th, 1979. His daughter Cindy created the Charles Surendorf II Art Foundation, a non-profit organization that continues to support arts education in public and private schools using the art fortune and empire he amassed.