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Bay Area Figurative Movement

First Generation Artists

David Park

David park was born 17 March 1911 in Boston to Mary Turner and Charles Edward Park. He attended school in Connecticut and moved to Los Angeles in 1928 where he studied at Otis Art Institute. A year later, he moved to Berkeley where he married Lydia Newell in 1930 and with whom he has two daughters. His first solo show was in 1933 at the Oakland Art Gallery. In 1943, he began teaching at California School of Fine Arts (CSFA), now known as San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI).

David Park was a respected Abstract Expressionist painter in San Francisco and one of the first painters to move towards the figurative style of paintings. In the spring of 1951, Park won a prize for a figurative canvas that he submitted to a competitive exhibition. Park’s turn to figurative style baffled some of his colleagues, as at the time, abstract painting was the only way to go for progressive artists. His courageous effort to move away from abstract paintings to figure prompted a rise in figurative art which would go on to be one of the most important postwar developments on the West Coast.

Rather than going through a slow transformation from Abstract paintings to Figures, it is believed that Park’s abstractions disappeared instantly. Although still debatable, it was found in extensive notes of an interview with Park’s Aunt that Park drove his abstract paintings to a dump and released or ritually destroyed them. His colleagues did not even know about this transformation until the following year.

Elmer Bischoff

Elmer Nelson Bischoff, in his late thirties and forties had an extensive phase of what he called "Picassoesque mouthings." He took the Abstract work much more seriously than Park and consequently his Abstract work was much more popular than that of Park's Abstract work. It is because of this that some people had a hard time understanding his abandonments of Abstract art and moving towards Figurative Art.

Bischoff had a newfound outlook on art once he returned from war in 1945. He felt that he had to challenge all the assumptions that he held about art as well as life. When asked about this in an interview, he said, “Until then art had been an external acquisition; [but now it] became more of a quest.” It was around this time that he was hired as a short-term replacement at the school of fine arts.

Just like his Abstract work, Bischoff achieved great success with his early figurative works. Bischoff entered his painting Figure and Red Wall in the Fifth Annual Oil and Sculpture Exhibition at the Richmond Art Center and won the $200 first prize for it. This feat earned him a solo show at the Paul Kantor Gallery in Los Angeles. However, it was a one-person show of paintings and drawings in January 1956 at the California School of Fine Arts gallery that Bischoff believed had the biggest impact on his future.

Richard Diebenkorn

Out of all the First Generation artists, it was Diebenkorn that took the biggest risk by turning to figuration in 1955. Diebenkorn was nationally recognized for his abstract work. His abstract painting Younger American Painters was included in the exhibition at The Soloman R. Guggenheim Museum in 1954 and it was extensively shown by dealers in Los Angeles and Chicago. Thus it was a big step for him to turn his back on abstract work. Along with his national reputation for his abstract work, Diebenkorn also was a beloved abstractionist among the locals in Sausalito.

After that he focused on figurative art but it wasn't for the next two years, until 1956, that he tried to attempt complex figurative paintings. His earliest figurative works seemed to loosely be based on self-portraits.

Bridge Generation Artists

Thiophilus Brown and Paul John Wonner

Brown and Wonner both felt strongly influenced by the more established artists' work. In 1955, both Brown and Wonner rented studio spaces within the same building which was also the building where Diebenkorn worked. Diebenkorn, Bischoff and Park joined Brown and Wonner to hold life-drawing sessions. They were occasionally joined by James Weeks and Nathan Oliviera.

Wonner's figurative works were displayed in an exhibition held at the California School of Fine Arts gallery late in 1956. From the very beginning Wonner was committed to conventions of representation, and identified line as a firm descriptive boundary and edge. His 1956 works have figures cut horizontally which show more aggression than his previous works such as Glider.

Nathan Oliviera

Nathan Oliviera moved a lot since the birth before finally reaching San Francisco after the war. It was in San Francisco that he attended high school. When he was young, he had interest in music which slowly faded away as he grew older. It was his trip to M. H. de Young Memorial Museum that made him decide to become a portrait painter. He later went on to serve in the army where he managed to keep up with his art scene.

Oliviera's early figurative works tend to have more detail and color which can be seen in his Seated Man with Dog. His works completed in the San Leandro studio in 1959, in his own words, "became the very foundation of [his] whole identity as a painter in [his] country"