Leon Kossoff met Frank Auerbach at St Martin's. In the early 50's he worked on building exteriors and on portraits of his parents and family. He reworked paintings as he did drawings. These were the two general subjects to preoccupy him for much of his life. Rail stations and swimming pools, where his son was taking lessons, also contributed, and the latter lightened his palette. His impasto rivaled, even exceeded that of our recent subject David Park. The similarities between these two groups continues to impress me.
This painting, Woman Ill in Bed, Surrounded by Family, 1965, which lives at the Tate, appears to me almost as a Russian icon, or oddly as Madeline once appeared with her fellow orphans at a table headed by Miss Clavell. The pathos of the characters, whose faces are anguished, and of the dying woman who is in agony, is Christ-like, with disciples gathered round. However you read it, it is so moving, the window open high above as a place she might eventually ascend to heaven.
A cache of 14 of his paintings that were stolen from a truck en route to Italy tormented Kossoff, and a new retrospective which will travel to LA in 2022, is meant to help possibly jog people's memories about where they might have seen these. The Mafia was suspected. In September a catalogue raisonne will also be published. Kossoff recently died in 2019.
When Theophilius Brown Met Paul Wonner
Theophilius Brown had grown up in an intellectual environment and gone to Yale where he continued to travel in cultural circles.
But when he got to his graduate studio program at Berkeley, everything changed. He almost immediately was in thrall to David Park, Elmer Bischoff and Richard Diebenkorn and was able to sketch with them. And he met the man who was to become his life partner and painting partner: Paul Wonner.
He also went to Europe and was influenced by the Italians like de Chirico and a sense of mystery and allegory began to pervade his work. He painted moons and stars and symbols. Brown joined Wonner in Davis after a year. Both of the artists suggest pre cursors to Eric Fischl with his randy backyards and seasides, per Caroline Jones.
Brown, like Wonner, took figuration a step further and this painting, The Swing, from 1966, still I believe in the collection of the Mardesich Family, loads a dynamism and narrative previously unseen in the more studied, posed works of Gen 1 of Bay Area Figurative.
In The Swing, instead of two men, this is a man pushing a woman, somewhat mysteriously, in the air. It's only after a moment you notice her hanging onto the filament of rope. We are still seaside. The picture plane is bisected at a diagonal cutting across the expanse of blue sky and sand. It is so new and different that it seems almost revolutionary. The man almost looks like a satyr. The woman is bound by rope, even if tenuously. What if she lets go? It's erotic. It's free. It contains movement. And a little thrill.
Alas, very few of Brown's paintings from this period survive.
The couple ended up in Santa Monica and became close with Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, the famous Canyon gay couple, among other luminaries, but Brown ended up back in San Francisco. He died in 2012 at 92. When he fact checked his Wikipedia entry, he found his designation as an AbEx painter, 'horseshit". I love that!
When Three Painters Collide
In 1957, curator Paul Mills of the then Oakland Art Gallery (now the Oakland Museum), was determined to gather the Bay Area Artists and help put his institution on the map. He conceived the idea of an exhibition of figurative painting around the three pivotal artists, David Park, Elmer Bischoff and Richard Diebenkorn. Park and Bischoff weren't against the show but resisted being termed a 'movement'.
But Deibenkorn remembered being livid. He hated being labeled a 'school". "I hit the ceiling and was irrational. I wasn't going to cooperate." Eventually however, after much to and fro about who might be included, the artists agreed.
This painting of Elmer Bischoff's Two Figures at the Seashore also from 1957 (and also now at the Orange County Museum) was part of the exhibition. Landscape had just begun to play a more important role for Bischoff than Park. He also was, according to artist Joan Brown, 'incapable of keeping his heart [out]" of his work. There is something of a confrontation in this brilliant hued seaside. We want to know what is passing between the two figures Bischoff had been deeply influenced by Edvard Munch and was at the time going through strong personal challenges. The work shares some of the red in Park's Bather with the Knee up (see yesterday's post).
The three painters were constantly in and out of each other's studios. There was something very deep between them.
Janet Bishop Takes David Park on the Road
Janet Bishop’s traveling retrospective of the work of David Park from SF MoMA came during pandemic and wasn’t as widely seen as it should have been. This painting from 1957, Bather With Knee Up, is typical of a subject that he often returned to and which looks utterly modern alongside the current return to figuration. Yet there are echoes of German Expressionism which he may have seen from exhibitions in the Bay Area. The solid figure of the man seems as universal as a Michelangelo. Park worked often from memory in his later work but used sketches to refine or adjust. Though Diebenkorn departed from figuration Park did not live long enough for us to know what would have become of his style. This work will presumably eventually be on view in Thom Mayne’s new building for the Orange County Museum. As we head into LA Gallery weekend and Felix Art Fair it will be interesting to see where California artists are today.
Dana Schutz's First Show at Zwirner
There is nothing I anticipate more in contemporary art than seeing a new drop of work by artist Dana Schutz. I have followed her career and written about her. But nothing replaces the explosion of delight, intrigue and emotion that seeing the works in person evokes. This painting is so complex and filled with allusions and references that it is something worth studying up close. Alas I could not extend my stay in NY to see the new works at Frieze New York, but I am happy to be able to share this one with you and get your reactions. Entitled The Arts and rife with collectors with pearls and baseball bats scrambling over each other to get at the works of art, critics, dealers ( this is Dana’s first show with her new mega gallery Zwirner) and a general melee, perhaps this is Dana’s wry take on what the scene at the first art fair to emerge during Covid will be.
Dana Schutz, The Arts, 2021 © Dana Schutz. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner.
Remembering David Park
Yesterday, via @janet_bishop and the @sfmoma, a talk about David Park, the Bay Area figurative painter, gave new insights into his beautiful body of work (cut short by cancer). But: the most amazing part was that his daughter Helen, and Gretchen, the daughter of Richard Diebenkorn, his student, mentee and eventual best friend, also participated with first hand memories.
Like the fact that Helen called her parents by their first names, David and DeeDee (her name was Lydia). And the fact that a head of Lydia once had a self portrait of Park underneath.
The @kalamazooinstituteofarts, one stop on the Park exhibition tour, held a conference showing how much Park had influenced a number of important Black artists.
Because the artist died so young, his career has been in something of an eclipse. But if you ask any figurative painter (like Dana Schutz), often they will extoll his painting. He abandoned abstract expressionism when it was all the rage and went his own way, finding color, lush brushwork, impasto and humans more to his taste.
He painted from memory, not from photographs however. So there is something haunting and so very personal in each rendering.
Park himself was most famously photographed by his friend and renowned San Francisco portraitist Imogen Cunningham, with whom he traded a lovely portrait that captures her whimsical appearance.
The other thrill was that artist Wayne Thiebaud, now 100 years old, appeared live and spoke about how much he admired Park's work. You can perhaps see him up in the corner there as he spoke.