After the war, Lobdell moved to Sausalito, CA, and attended the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco (CSFA, now San Francisco Art Institute) on the G.I. Bill (1947-50), where faculty members included Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, and David Park. At CSFA, Lobdell began a lifelong friendship with fellow painter Richard Diebenkorn.

Lobdell’s war experiences made him a confirmed pacifist. At the onset of the Korean War, he left the U.S. for Paris, where he painted at L’Academie de la Grande Chaumiere (1950-51), until returning to the Bay Area in September 1951. In 1957 he was invited to join the faculty at CSFA, where he taught until 1964.

In 1959 Lobdell began to attend weekly figure drawing sessions with Diebenkorn, Park, and Elmer Bischoff, and he became a member of the group after Park’s death later that year. The artists continued to meet weekly in each other’s studios until 1965, when they accepted new teaching positions. Lobdell was Visiting Artist at Stanford University in 1965, where he was asked to form the graduate art department. He was named Professor of Art at Stanford in 1966 and taught there until retiring in 1991. At Stanford, Lobdell resumed weekly figure drawing sessions with fellow instructors Nathan Oliveira, Keith Boyle, Jim Johnson, and others. In his figure drawings, Lobdell focused on large shapes formed by light and shadow, and these elements later coalesced in the imagery characteristic of his paintings and prints.

Frank Lobdell’s reputation and stature were well established nationally and internationally by the mid-1950s. During the 1950s and 1960s he exhibited regularly in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles, including several exhibitions at Ferus Gallery. Martha Jackson supported Lobdell’s work through her New York gallery, and she and Michel Tapié promoted his work in Europe. Early on, Lobdell’s work was included in international exhibitions, at the Petit Palais, Paris; Third Biennial of São Paulo; Osaka International Festival, Japan; and in London, Turin, and Eindhoven; with solo exhibitions in Geneva (1964) and Paris (1965). His works were shown in exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1960); The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1962); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1964), and numerous other museums and galleries.

Solo museum exhibitions of Frank Lobdell’s work included San Francisco’s M. H. de Young Memorial Museum (1960, 1992); an early retrospective organized by Walter Hopps for the Pasadena Art Museum (1966); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1969, 1983); Stanford University Art Museum (1966, 1988, 1993), and others. In 2003, Lobdell’s work was the subject of a comprehensive retrospective, Frank Lobdell: The Art of Making and Meaning, at the Palace of the Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, organized by curator Timothy Anglin Burgard, and later shown at the Portland Art Museum, OR, and Fresno Art Museum. More recent solo museum exhibitions were at the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, Novato, CA (2008); Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University (2009-10); Christian Petersen Art Museum, Iowa State University, Ames (2010); and San Jose Museum of Art (2012).