Ferdinand 'Fred' Hocks

Perhaps no painter embodies San Diego’s early avant-garde more than Fred (Ferdinand) Hocks, a German-born painter who began visiting San Diego in the late 1920s after studies at the California School of Fine Art in San Francisco and the Art Students League in New York. Fellow painter Dan Dickey credited Hocks in 1947 with “opening up pathways for future, more enlightened generations (of artists),” and predicted that Fred Hocks would be “esteemed a master.”

Born in Aachen, Germany in October 1886, Fred Hocks immigrated to the United States in 1902 and lived 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 New York 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 known for his modern abstractions in paint and in printmaking.

During the post-war years Hocks was assistant director of the San Diego School of Arts and Crafts, a private art school in La Jolla, and was instrumental in keeping affordable artist’s studios in Spanish Village. Along with modern architect Lloyd Ruocco, Fred Hocks co-founded the dynamic Allied Artists Council with Belle Baranceanu, Everett Gee Jackson, Dan Dickey and John Olson.

Hocks returned to Europe for extended periods, but centered his activities around the artist community in La Jolla and San Diego. For a brief time 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. Hocks worked alongside Belle Baranceanu (during her 1946 to 1951 tenure) and Ben Messick at the San Diego School of Arts and Crafts.

The well-travelled Hocks exhibited in San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, Long Beach, Pasadena, Paris, Mallorca and Guadalajara, had several one-person shows at the Art Center La Jolla/La Jolla Museum of Art and at the Fine Arts Gallery. The San Diego Museum of Art held a major retrospective of his painting in 1976, just a few years before his death. He brought a continental element to the local art scene and is described in Bruce Kamerling’s 100 Years of Art in San Diego as “one of the most adventurous local artists…an intelligent and articulate defender of modern tendencies in art.” Local arts and architecture writer James Britton called Fred Hocks “the dean of the San Diego moderns.”

A studio fire in a 1940s on a ranch outside of San Diego claimed 300 of Fred Hocks’ paintings, so not many of the earliest works of his remain.

In 1952, in Ensenada, Mexico, Fred Hocks wed Paula Rohrer, 30 years younger, a La Jolla art critic and sculptor 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. Today, probably the largest gathering of his works on paper are part of the Paula Hocks archive, currently held in Texas. They include charcoal drawings, abstract watercolors and oil paint on heavy paper; as well as brayer prints and monoprints.

The San Diego Museum of Fine Arts held a retrospective of his works in 1976.