From her outpost at the foot of Geary Street, gallerist Paule Anglim maintained a magisterial presence in the San Francisco art world. Until her death last week in her 90s, Anglim was an anchor. From her beginnings in North Beach in the 1970s through her 32-year occupancy of 14 Geary Street, Anglim invigorated the Bay Area art world, maintaining contact with its roots in the postwar scene while cultivating new talent and nurturing it with input from New York and Europe. Veteran painter Wayne Thiebaud recalls with admiration the way "she kept that gallery going," while showing "so many interesting artists," remembering her as very smart and no-nonsense.
Anglim's exhibitions reflected her wide-ranging interests and friendships with artists, which led her to follow artistic conversations as they developed. Beginning with those associated with the Beats like Jess (Collins), Joan Brown and Bruce Connor, she followed artists who took their engagement with materials in more conceptual directions like James Melchert and Paul Kos, or developed assemblage into installation like Nayland Blake. Shows of New York artists like Louise Fishman and Milton Resnick emphasized pure painting, but she also represented Robert Bechtle, whose photorealist renderings of suburban streets are quintessentially Californian. Perhaps the best way to characterize her taste is that she relished the rich compost of ideas that sustained Bay Area culture.
Travis Collinson, Pinkie was painted by Thomas Lawrence but what if blue boy was a beat poet (Paule), 2013-14. Acrylic on linen, 64 x 48 inches. Collection of Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive.
The loss of her presence, and of her institutional memory, cuts deeply, at a time when galleries in San Francisco are being displaced by higher rents, and artists lament the financial changes in the art market along with the money-driven culture of the international scene. Anglim represented not just intelligence and cultural breadth, but a rootedness that seems hard to recover.