Emerson Woelffer was born in Chicago in 1914 and trained in academic realism as a student at the Art Institute of Chicago, 1935–37. There, Woelffer was exposed to the work of Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Wassily Kandinsky and Roberto Matta. Arriving in Los Angeles in 1959, Woelffer brought the ideas and influences of European modernism to an art scene that was disconnected from avant-garde movements in New York and San Francisco. Like many modernists, his aesthetic vocabulary was inspired by surrealist automatism and primitivism which he encountered in the early part of his career. Woelffer said, “the part that I took from surrealism is not the look of the painting but the approach to it—which is entirely automatic. I paint first and think afterwards.” He articulated these influences in his work through a recognized vocabulary of forms and symbols that continued to inform his mature paintings. Woelffer was also an important arts educator and is credited with bringing modernism to Los Angeles through his teaching at Chouinard Art Institute, where he was a friend and key mentor to Mary Corse among others.
