Fred Hocks, Artist (1886-1981)

 Born in Aachen, Germany in October 1886, Fred Hocks immigrated to the US in 1902 and resided in San Francisco where his older brother had already established himself as a successful businessman. Despite his brother’s objections, Hocks chose to study art at the Hopkins Institute, later known as the California School of Fine Art. Only 16, he was deemed too young to attend the nude drawing classes. His study in San Francisco abruptly ended when the great earthquake hit in 1906 and flattened the art institute. As a refugee, Hocks was sent, at no cost, to New York to study at the Art Students League. There, he supported himself usually working in hotel kitchens. Fred Hocks left NYC before the great Armory Show of 1913, famous for the controversy caused by Cubist and other avant-garde works, but he was able to see some of the paintings at the 1915 Exposition in San Francisco. While his early works reflected more classical training, Hocks was seized by the new movement and became know for his modern abstractions in paint and in printmaking, particularly in the latter years of his art career.

Always committed to art, Hocks returned to Europe for periods of time, but centered his activities around the artist community in La Jolla and San Diego, California, when he took a position teaching at the school of the Los Angeles Country Art Museum in the 1920s. During W.W.II, he was one of the artists who actually lived and painted in studios on the grounds of Balboa Park, home of the Pan American exposition in 1915. He continued to teach and exhibit in the area until his death at age 95 in 1981. The San Diego Museum of Fine Arts held a retrospective of his works in 1976.

In 1952, in Ensenada, Mexico, Fred Hocks wed Paula Rohrer, 30 years younger, a La Jolla art critic and sculptress who had come to California in the late 1940s from Denver, Colorado. Though the marriage lasted only one decade, through periods of living in Europe and Mexico, the couple always returned to the San Diego area. Paula retained the surname of Hocks professionally for the rest of her life. A studio fire in the 1940s on a ranch outside of San Diego claimed 300 of Fred Hocks’ paintings, so not many of the earliest of his art remain.

The largest gathering of his works on paper were part of the Paula Hocks archive, held in New Mexico, until a major gallery sale in San Diego in 2010 returned many works to California, where Fred Hocks is known as a regional artist. It included charcoal drawings, abstract watercolors and oil paint on heavy paper; as well as brayer prints and monoprints. Vibrant in color, they rare still vital today.

A few works remain in New Mexico, still available for purchase. Upon request, a PDF of the remaining work can be sent to you.

 Photo of the artist by Stephen Wells, from a brochure of Hocks’ retrospective show at the Fine Arts Gallery of San Diego, October 2-31, 1976.