Bentley Schaad

Robert Bentley Schaad was born in Los Angeles, California in 1925. As an art student he attended Jepson Art Institute, the Art Center in Pasadena, as well as the Claremont Colleges. As a pupil, and later a colleague of Henry Lee McFee, Schaad learned the principles of line, color, and form. His proficiency as an artist and his technical aesthetic innovations enabled him to begin teaching art at Otis Art Institute. Bentley Schaad was hired at the Los Angeles County Art Institute in around 1954, where he served as Dean under the direction of Millard Sheets. 

Schaad spent the majority of his career as an instructor at Otis and eventually becoming the Dean of Fine Arts at Otis. Committed to his role as a teacher, Schaad wrote the book, The Realm of Contemporary Still Life Painting (New York: Reinhold Pub., 1962). An important instructional text, the book highlights the necessity of formal training, techniques of line/form, and color theory. Schaad was shy and almost reclusive in his private life -- but he was admired deeply by his students. He rarely discussed his work 

Bentley Schaad was fascinated by the spatial breakdown of line and form to an almost geometric ecercise. "Drapery may at times become an intricate and labyrinthine structure that in its involvement enhances other more starkly simple sections and forms. Or functioning in a comparatively quiet area in rich, broad forms and planes of color it may serve as a foil or a change of pace for the more complex areas or forms..." 

Schaad is considered a principal figure in the Los Angeles modern art school of the mid-century. From his early still life paintings to his later, modernist work, all of Schaad’s compositions maintained a unique aesthetic sensibility and complex precision.

In many ways Schaad was working during the golden era of California art schools. During the Great Depression the New Deal program subsidized artists and art schools in a way never seen before in American history. Art schools like Chouinard Art Institute, Jepson, Otis, and the Art Center had started in the 1920s but attracted an array of artist from around the world during the Depression era. During WWII and after, the multi-cultural hubs enabled artist to share ideas in an explosively creative way.

Schaad worked and shared artistic ideas almongst some of the most important artists of the period including Lorser Feitelson, Helen Lundeberg, Francis DeEreely, Rico Lebrun, and Stanton McDonald-Wright. Their explorations of representational painting but done from a modern standpoint — were a stark contract the Abstract Expressionism on the East Coast.