Bay Area Figurative Art

About

In 1949 David Park, a teacher at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, reportedly took most of his abstract canvases to the dump. His next pictures, such as Kids on Bikes (1950), showed recognisable figures in broad, heavy strokes, startling colleagues steeped in the abstraction of Clyfford Still.

Elmer Bischoff followed in the early 1950s and Richard Diebenkorn by 1955. They kept much of what abstraction had taught them: figures are built from slabs of colour, faces are often summary, and light floods across beaches, kitchens and open windows. Look for simplified shapes, visible brushwork and the coastal light of northern California. A second generation, including Nathan Oliveira, Joan Brown and the sculptor Manuel Neri, pushed the approach towards thicker paint and stranger moods. When Diebenkorn went back to abstraction with his Ocean Park series, begun in 1967, its core years closed.