Lobdell's diverse body of work is linked by its shared sense of humanity. In the 1940s, he was among the pioneers of the San Francisco Bay Area school of abstract expressionism. During the 1950s, he gradually reintroduced the human figure into his work, thus expanding conventional conceptions of both abstraction and figuration. Drawing inspiration from the vision of Francisco Goya, these works presented a dark, existential worldview shaped by the cumulative horrors of World War II, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb, and the Korean War.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Lobdell expanded the scale and scope of his figures, which now actively asserted their humanity in opposition to the threat posed by the war in Vietnam. From the 1980s...