"Should be the classic, central, definitive work on the emergence of Bay Area Figurative painting."--Paul Mills, author of The New Figurative Painting of David Park

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1985. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived

"Elmer Bischoff is one of the small handful of truly fine artists at mid-century and beyond working in Northern California. His art is of national importance. In Susan Landauer he has the author who can bring his life and art to us."—Walter Hopps, Twentieth Century Curator, The Menil Collection "This first substantial monograph on Elmer Bischoff offers a warm appraisal of a deacon of West Coast painters, justly celebrated for his lifelong navigation of the "tightrope" between abstract painting's sensual materiality and the ethical implications of a figurative art. Susan Landauer meets her own high standards of nuanced social history, and Bill Berkson's brief introduction is studded with gems."—Caroline Jones, author of Bay Area Figurative Art "Susan Landauer’s new monograph is a welcome addition to Twentieth Century Bay Area art history. She is a specialist, who explores the life and work, attitudes and ideals of this important artist, his European and American influences, in parallel with those of his famous colleagues, Richard Diebenkorn and David Park. She brings historical understanding and esthetic subtlety to the study as she digs into the artist’s esthetic and educational philosophy, the relation between painting and improvised jazz, temporary blocks and personal crises, as well as his complete reinventions of his drawing and painting. All this is set in the context of the life of art in the Bay Area community (1940-1990) and results in a readable work of value to professionals while remaining accessible to more casual readers."—Gerald Nordland, author of Richard Diebenkorn

This generously illustrated volume is the first comprehensive publication devoted to the powerfully expressive work of David Park (1911–60). Best known as the founder of Bay Area Figurative art, Park moved from Boston to California at the age of seventeen and spent most of his adult life in and around San Francisco. In the immediate postwar years, like many avant-garde American artists, he engaged with Abstract Expressionism and painted non-objectively. In a moment of passion in 1949, he made the radical decision to abandon nearly all of his abstract canvases at the Berkeley city dump and return to the human figure, in so doing marking the beginning of the Bay Area Figurative movement. The astonishingly powerful paintings he made in the decade that followed brought together his long-held interest in classic subjects such as portraiture, domestic interiors, musicians, rowers, and bathers with lush, gestural paint handling and an extraordinary sense of color. In 1958–59 Park reached his expressive peak, reveling in the sensuous qualities of paint to create intensely physical, psychologically charged, and deeply felt canvases. This fertile period cut short by illness in 1960, Park transferred his creative energy to other mediums when he could no longer work on canvas. In the last months of his life, bedridden, he produced an extraordinary thirty-foot-long felt-tip-pen scroll and a poignant series of gouaches. Published to accompany the first major museum exhibition of Park’s work in more than thirty years, David Park: A Retrospective traces the full arc of the artist’s career, from his early social realist and cubist-inspired efforts of the 1930s to his mature figurative paintings of the 1950s and his astounding final works on paper. An overview of Park’s full body of work by Janet Bishop, SFMOMA’s Thomas Weisel Family Curator of Painting and Sculpture, will be joined by approximately ninety full-color plates of paintings and works on paper; an essay by Tara McDowell on the figure drawing sessions held by Park, Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, Frank Lobdell, and others in their studios starting in 1953; short essays on Park’s scroll, his gouaches, and the portraits that Imogen Cunningham and Park made of each other; and an illustrated chronology. Published in association with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Exhibition schedule: Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth: June 2–September 8, 2019 Kalamazoo Institute of Arts: December 21, 2019–March 15, 2020 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: April 11–September 7, 2020

In this beautifully illustrated biography, compiled from comprehensive and sweeping interviews, Nancy Boas traces Parks resolute search for a new kind of figuration, one that would penetrate abstract expressionisms thickly layered surfaces and infuse them with human presence.