John Saccaro (1913–1981) was a key figure in the San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism, celebrated for his high-energy, emotionally charged painting style, which he called “Sensorism.” Born in San Francisco to Venetian-Italian parents, Saccaro demonstrated a fascination with drawing from an early age. Though he never completed high school, his early talent led him to enroll in adult education classes and eventually submit a portfolio to the Public Works Art Project (PWAP), where he thrived in the mural section, contributing to several public art installations.

Saccaro’s trajectory was interrupted by World War II, during which he was drafted into the U.S. Army. There, he served as a kind of resident artist—painting camouflage patterns, red crosses, and even cartoon characters on military vehicles. After the war, determined to deepen his artistic practice, he enrolled at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute), where he studied under leading Bay Area figures including Elmer Bischoff, David Park, and Clyfford Still. Immersed in the vibrant West Coast Abstract Expressionist movement, Saccaro abandoned his earlier regional realism and embraced abstraction with fervor.

By the early 1950s, Saccaro had developed a bold new approach he called “Sensorism”—an intuitive, physical process of painting that transformed the chaos of raw emotion into compositional structure. His method involved aggressively loading canvases with paint, layering slashing brushstrokes and angular forms, then refining the visual field to create visceral, sensory impact. “Sensorism,” he explained, was “the scrape, slash and violence of the sensory.” These works sought not to depict but to evoke—to ignite an emotional and bodily response in the viewer.

Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, Saccaro exhibited widely across California and nationally, with solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Art, de Young Museum, Oakland Museum, and Bolles Gallery in New York. His vibrant palette and dynamic brushwork set him apart in the Bay Area art scene, where he was seen as both rebellious and uncompromising. From 1963 to 1964, he also taught at UCLA, further shaping the postwar art dialogue on the West Coast.

In the mid-1960s, Saccaro abruptly stepped away from painting, declaring that Abstract Expressionism had run its course. “I had said my say,” he remarked, underscoring his belief that his work had reached its fullest expression. Though he stopped exhibiting, his paintings continued to resonate, and his work is now housed in major public collections including SFMOMA, the Oakland Museum, the Crocker Art Museum, and the San Jose Museum of Art.

Saccaro remains a compelling voice in the history of American abstraction—a painter who approached the canvas as a battlefield of feeling, gesture, and transformation. His Sensorist paintings endure as powerful records of intensity, movement, and the search for meaning within chaos.

Solo Exhibitions

• San Francisco Museum of Art, 1939, 1959–1960

• de Young Museum, 1946, 1956, 1960

• Oakland Museum, 1958

• Bolles Gallery, New York, 1962

• Museo Italo Americano, 1981

• Carlson Gallery, San Francisco, 1990

Selected Group Exhibitions

• 1953 – Annual Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions of the San Francisco Art Association; San Francisco Museum of Art

• 1955 – Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, PA

• 1955 – Art in the Twentieth Century, San Francisco Museum of Art

• 1955 – IIIrd Biennial of São Paulo, Brazil – Pacific Coast Art

• 1956 – 40 California Painters, Municipal Art Center, Long Beach

• 1956 – Contemporary American Painters, 1950–1955, Stanford Art Gallery

• 1957 – 25th Biennial Exhibition, Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C.

• 1957 – 63rd Annual, Denver Art Museum

• 1958 – The Art Bank of the San Francisco Art Association

• 1959 – The Art Bank of the San Francisco Art Association

• 1960 – The Art Bank of the San Francisco Art Association

• 1960 – Denver Art Museum Summer Quarterly, Denver Art Museum

• 1961 – 27th Biennial, Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C.

• 1962 – The Art Bank of the San Francisco Art Association

• 1962 – Winter Invitational, California Palace of The Legion of Honor, San Francisco

• 1962–63 – The Artist’s Environment: West Coast; Amon Carter Museum, UCLA Art Galleries & The Oakland Museum

• 1963 – Winter Invitational, California Palace of The Legion of Honor, San Francisco

• 1963 – The Art Bank of the San Francisco Art Association

• 1964 – The Art Bank of the San Francisco Art Association

• 1966 – The Art Bank of the San Francisco Art Association

• 1973 – Painting and Sculpture in California: The Modern Era; San Francisco Museum of Art

• 1976 – A Period of Exploration: San Francisco 1945–1950; The Oakland Museum

• 1996 – The San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism; Laguna Art Museum & San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Public Collections

• The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

• The M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco

• The Oakland Museum

• Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento

• Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach

• San Jose Museum of Art

• Palm Springs Desert Museum

• Triton Museum, Santa Clara

• The Pasadena Art Museum

• Elvehjem Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin at Madison

Literature

• Susan Landauer, The San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism

• Marika Herskovic, American Abstract Expression of the 1950s: An Illustrated Survey

• Thomas Albright, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–1980

• Edan Hughes, Artists in California, 1786–1940

• Mary Fuller McChesney, A Period of Exploration, San Francisco, 1945–1950

• Frederick S. Wight, The Artist’s Environment: West Coast

• Henry Hopkins, Painting and Sculpture in California: The Modern Era

• Gibbons J. Cooney, John Saccaro, Catalog #5, Carlson Gallery