Carmel’s Gallery North looks to an exciting past for inspiration.

American abstract expressionist art in the 1950s didn’t look like it came from our conventional ideas of the 1950s of sock hops, flannel suits, suburbs, television and highways. But the country had just come out of World War II and was entering the atomic age, while swathes of people were denied the American Dream. So there it was, chaotic, cathartic and defiant, like bebop, another American invention.

“It was a reaction to clear their minds of the horrors of war,” says gallery owner and painter Barbara Kreitman.

Artists like Richard Diebenkorn, Wayne Thiebaud, James Budd Dixon, Frank Lobdell, Clyfford Still and others fomented the San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism, based out of the California School of Fine Arts.

In those days, KAZU radio host Lisa Ledin’s father had a printing press and produced prints and lithographs for a group of artists of that scene called the Sausalito Six; all have passed on. Ledin visited Lobdell before his death last year, and got a commitment from him to show a never-before-exhibited 1949 painting.

Shortly afterward, she met Kreitman.

“I was closing the door to the gallery and she stopped and asked directions,” Kreitman says. “Then we got to talking.”

That was the precipitating moment of the show that opens this Saturday, West Coast Abstract: Classic and Contemporary. It’s to be made up of work by original abstractionists like John Saccaro, Irene Pattison, Walter Kuhlman and James McCray (Lobdell’s 1949 work is featured), alongside living artists who have been influenced by the school, including Kreitman, Barbara Johnson, Dal Henderson, Peter K. Brooks and Ursula O’Farrell. In that way, the gallery will show how the legacy survives in currently working artists.

WEST COAST ABSTRACT opens Saturday, followed by a talk 3-5pm Sunday, at Gallery North, Dolores and Sixth, Carmel. 620-1987, www.GalleryNorthCarmel.com