Manual Music Machine

Born in Tacoma, Washington, in 1918, Byron Randall was raised in Salem, Oregon, where he worked as a waiter, harvest hand, boxer, and cook for the Marion County jail to finance his art career. When Randall was 21 years old, a solo show at the Whyte Gallery in Washington D.C. brought his work to national critical attention and launched his professional career. That show was followed by others, over the years, in Oregon, New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Chicago, Seattle, Toronto, Montreal, Edinburgh and Inverness, Scotland. Byron Randall had three wives. His first wife was Helen Nelson, a young left-wing Canadian sculptor, whom he met at the Salem Art Center, while attending her classes in sculpture. Her impact on his life was profound: she was responsible for sharpening his commitment to social and trade union activism, and her belief in his talent provided vital support for the fledgling artist. In 1940 they married and moved to Mexico for six months, where they had a child, Gale, and where Randall continued to develop as a painter, inspired by the vibrant landscape and people, and by the work of the Mexican muralists. During the Second World War years, while Randall served in the Merchant Marines, he continued to paint whenever possible. His experiences in the South Pacific influenced his preference for natural forms and bright colours. After the War, Byron and Helen settled in the North Beach area of San Francisco where they had a second child, Jonathan, in 1948. Five years later they left the United States for Canada, driven by the need to escape from the rampant anti-Communism of the time. In 1956 Helen was killed by a car while crossing the road with her young son. Randall and his children returned to San Francisco where he met and married the print-maker and muralist Emmy Lou Packard. Between 1959 and 1968 Randall and Packard ran a Guest House and Art Gallery in Mendocino, California, a small former logging town located on the coast 140 miles north of San Francisco. Randall and Packard were political and environmental activists as well as artists during the 1960s, active in the campaign to protect the area from commercial exploitation and despoliation and in the creation of the Peace and Freedom Party. After the end of their marriage in 1970 Randall established a guesthouse, studio and gallery space in Tomales, California. In 1982 he married Eve Wieland, an Austrian wartime emigre. She was his wife until her death from cancer four years later. For the last nine years of his life Randall's partner was Pele de Lappe, a graphic artist and friend of some 50 years standing. Byron Randall died in August 1999 at the age of 80.

While “expressionist” is used to describe any art that avoids naturalism and instead employs a bold use of flattened forms and intense brushwork, Expressionist art formally describes early-20th-century work from Europe that drew on Symbolism and confronted issues such as urbanization and capitalism. Expressionist artists experimented in paintings and prints with skewed perspectives, abstraction and unconventional, bright colors to portray how isolating and anxious the world felt rather than how it appeared. 

Between 1905 and 1920, Austrian and German artists, in particular, were inspired by Postimpressionists such as Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh in their efforts to strive for a new authenticity in their work. In its geometric patterns and decorative details, Expressionist art was also marked by eclectic sources like German and Russian folk art as well as tribal art from Africa and Oceania, which the movement’s practitioners witnessed at museums and world’s fairs.

Groups of artists came together to share and promote the themes now associated with Expressionism, such as Die Brücke (The Bridge) in Dresden, which included Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and investigated alienation and the dissolution of society in vivid color. In Munich, Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), a group led by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, instilled Expressionism with a search for spiritual truths. In his iconic painting The Scream, prolific Norwegian painter Edvard Munch conveyed emotional turmoil through his depiction of environmental elements, such as the threatening sky.

Expressionism shifted around the outbreak of World War I, with artists using more elements of the grotesque in reaction to the escalation of unrest and violence. Printmaking was especially popular, as it allowed artists to widely disseminate works that grappled with social and political issues amid this time of upheaval. Although the art movement ended with the rise of Nazi Germany, where Expressionist creators were labeled “degenerate,” the radical ideas of these artists would influence Neo-Expressionism that emerged in the late 1970s with painters like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Francesco Clemente.

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