Nathan Oliveira whose family had immigrated from Portugal, had ambivalence about being lumped solely in with Bay Area Figurative artists. He had also been influenced by Bacon and Munch and the European tradition of Max Beckmann who was teaching at nearby Mills College. He also came to admire the work and the person of De Kooning.
He was included in the famous group drawing sessions. but he was not included in the important 1957 exhibition as the others were (see previous posts this week)-and wrote that his 'objectives were quite different'. Oliviera's art was described by Caroline Jones as "hot and personal" whereas Park, Diebenkorn and Bischoff, Gen 1, had been "cool and universal"
So he was something of a renegade, yet shared many of the main concerns of this 'bridge' generation. He had a foot in both worlds...and this painting, Spring Nude, 1962, from the Oakland Museum shows that synthesis. There is a feeling of mythology and of everywoman. (Oliviera began painting both sexes, but ended up concentrating on the female nude) The red spectrum is other worldly, the scale is large, and the woman drifts in and out of view, like an apparition. It is as if Park's figures had eventually dissolved into the canvas.
Soon after this was painted, Oliviera also moved to Los Angeles to teach at UCLA but then bounced back north to Stanford. By then the different strands of the Bay Area Figurative Movement had overtaken the original group. If you go to Stanford today, you can see where Oliviera's work ended, in a meditation center designed around his late paintings capturing bird flight.
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!
Diebenkorn: A Foot in Both Worlds
Of all the Bay Area painters who took part in that seminal 1957 exhibition at the Oakland Museum, it is Richard Diebenkorn who has remained at the forefront of American painting history. Why is this?
Diebenkorn had one foot in both worlds. He had spent the previous years in Berkeley playing with abstraction in his landscapes and these geometries carried over into the work of 57. The figures are solid but the faces are not--he was not yet willing to go that far. There are no nudes on beaches. There is Matisse in these works especially in this one, Man and Woman in a Large Room, now at the Hirshhorn.
Here is an artist sketching and a woman standing by, and a similar sense of quiet confrontation between the pair as in the Bischoff image (yesterday's post), but a model with no face is clearly more of an object than a subject. There is an air of stillness as there would be between artist and model, but also, in the darker palette, an air of intensity. What will happen in the next moments after the sketching session is finished?
In the corner on the right, through the crack of a doorway, we see a slice of what was to eventually become the kind of brighter, flat, colorful landscape of the Ocean Park series for which he his so famous but the room itself is already broken down into the geometries that were to eventually take pride of place.
By 1963, Diebenkorn was back at the figureless landscapes in Berkeley which then gave way to the more sun drenched landscapes of southern California.
When I drive through Ocean Park today, I try to imagine him distilling this tract of land which is now bordered by so much commercial activity. But here in this interior, I feel only the pregnant moment of what was to come.
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.