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!
Paul Wonner and the Bridge Movement
With David Park's too early demise, Deibenkorn should have become the Bay Area Figurative group's leader. But like Groucho Marx, he did not want to be a member of any group that would have him even if it was a counter movement to the AbEx painters in ascendance on the East Coast.
So James Weeks (yesterday's post) and those that followed were not as visible nationally but they still were important locally. Paul Wonner was one of these so called 'bridge movement' painters.
Wonner was looser, and more free. In fact he left the Bay Area and moved to Davis, to teach. This painting from 1960 Two Men at the Shore, part of the Lobell Family Collection, depicts Paul Wonner and Theophilus Brown(another member of the 'bridge' group) who were in a committed relationship--but maybe this was the reason for the Davis move. It still was not easy to come out as gay in 1960.
I love the acid yellow of this painting. The men have faces, but they are not recognizable, perhaps due to the need for discretion. There are both Parkian and Diebenkornian echoes.
The "narrative richness, psychological nuance and sheer ambiguity of Wonner's figurative works were unmatched" * When Wonner moved to LA, his break with Bay Area Figurative was complete. By then Diebenkorn was in Santa Monica and the Bay Area movement's thrust has dissipated.
*In all posts this week I have been helped by Caroline Jones’s 1989 tome on the group for the SF MoMA exhibition that then traveled east to DC and Philadelphia. Taken with Janet Bishop's excellent catalog for her 2020 David Park show, any reader who wants more info than my scant posts need only see these two volumes. Upcoming: Bishop's show on Joan Brown (a peek into her work tomorrow).
James Weeks Paints Out of His World
James Weeks is not a name that will immediately bring an image to mind for most people. Yet his painting, though quite different, and more formal than Park, Bischoff and Diebenkorn has a very contemporary look. His role in Bay Area Figuration is less known.
Weeks had been a billboard sign painter. He became a colleague of theirs teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute. He had destroyed all his figurative work in 1957 and begun over.
Weeks frequented jazz clubs and boxing rings. He was not just painting his own world and I was surprised that more has not been written about this white man, who, like Alice Neel, was unafraid of depicting people of color--though they were more part of her immediate world.
There are geometries and brighter, even harsher colors than the others in the group utilized , but the focus is on the posed, almost stilted, photographic, Fighter and Manager, from 1960. Weeks is often singled out from the others for his 'plain style'. He did paint landscapes—as noted by his granddaughter. He had been strongly influenced by the Mexican muralists and imparted a layer of social concern to the movement, which to my eye, seems to bring us right up to the present.
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.
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.
Paulina Peavy's Spiritual Connections
Seance for a Sunday morning. An absolutely riveting exhibition of the work of Paulina Peavy, at Beyond Baroque in Venice is a must for anyone in the region. No catalog is available, alas, so drawing from dense wall texts, I have distilled a few salient points.
Peavy grew up out west, but had significant stays in New York. She went to Oregon State and Chouinard (precursor to Cal Arts) as well as the Art Students League. She cycled through a number of different disciplines but ultimately became an adherent of Spiritualism and Theosophy via Agnes Pelton and others in San Pedro, and in particular channeled an entity called Lacamo who identified as an interplanetary and interdimensional visitor. Like Hilma af Klint, she sought to give form to her spiritual connections. She painted, wrote poetry, and began to centralize her thinking around astro culture and UFOs. Also influenced by Orozco, the Surrealists, and the Bible she seemed to have absorbed so many artistic cultures that her talent spilled over in multiple directions.
She made and wore elaborate masks and costumes when she channeled Lacamo. She worked in textiles, architecture, graphic and product design, string Art and with enchanting wood marionettes, but the films featuring translucent biomorphic forms showing alongside her work are worth the visit alone. With sound tracks straight out of Hollywood and the Twilight Zone, and voice over narration describing the female God they are mesmerizing. She believed females were the highest level of reincarnation (natch!)
I am being reductive here, and she deserves like Pelton and Af Klint a catalog and another larger show. Yet in the space at Beyond Baroque with its esoteric library and Persian carpets and unfettered access to the works, one feels she might appear at any moment to take us to a higher realm. Next weekend, during Felix and Gallery Weekend LA, there is a reception and performance on Saturday. Do not let our new mask rules keep you away from this out of time delight.
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Combines Impressionism and Degas
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff was the fourth founder of Die Brucke, the German expressionist painting group of renegade young architects who were not interested in figuring out the load of a building.
Instead, if you look at the images I've posted this week, the thing that comes to mind is Impressionism. No, it's not because they look impressionistic. But the dancer, the model at her curtain, these remind of Degas, especially here, In Girl at Her Toilette from 1912. The palette of bright yellow-orange, the angular black lines, the flatness, these are pure expressionist. But the intimacy and the subject matter is pure Degas.
The Most Famous--And Complicated--Die Brucke Member
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner is probably the best known of the Die Brucke but he may have had the most difficult end. This painting, Female Nude by Patterned Curtain, is also from 1910 (see this week's posts). The group met chez Kirchner, and as I've written in the past, its boho setting allowed for the freeing of artistic libido.
It also alas allowed for many under age young women who hung around with the guys--all former architecture students--and served as both models and lovers. The groups manifesto allowed for this "freedom" but in retrospect of course we raise an eyebrow.
Kirchner's WWI wartime service did not sit well with him and he had a breakdown and he became addicted to drugs, drink and cigarettes. Though he continued to be productive, and much recognized and collected, he was in and out of sanitoria. Still he soldiered on and was quite prolific. As the Nazis came to power, he was part of the Degenerate Art show they organized, and his spirits increasingly waned. He shot himself in 1938.
Max Pechstein Was Once Called a Degenerate
Max Pechstein's Dance from 1910 is an example of the work of this artist who was invited to join Die Brucke by Erich Heckel and was the only one among them who actually had art training from the Royal Academy in Dresden. Also in 1910, he helped found the New Secession in Berlin after his art was rejected by the Berlin Secession exhibition. He eventually was deemed too conservative by his colleagues as his work was selling. Along with many others he left Berlin during the Nazi regime because his work was characterized as degenerate. Which of course, is the furthest thing we might think upon seeing this lyrical painting of a dancer in her arabesque penchee.
LA Is Back At Return of the Dragons
On the very eve of mask rules being implemented again in LA, the Blossom Market Gallery with guest impresario, famed artist and teacher, Roger Herman, invited 107 artists to show their work in Chinatown in a Return of The Dragons, a once storied gallery nearby.
The opening was replete with strong attendance by a cross section of Angelenos, Aperol spritzers and even protestors!
It was a case of dynamism and heart in the face of so much angst. Spirits were high.
Three examples of the work by Martin Schnapf, Erin Terfry and Victor Henderson which caught my eye.
In two weeks it's Felix Art Fair and the first LA Gallery Weekend. LA soldiers on.
Bilbao Relies On Architectural Interaction
The Mexican architect Tatiana Bilbao doesn’t have a signature building style that’s instantly recognizable. She’s not a top-down diva who designs grand sculptural statements by computer. Instead, Bilbao is singularly engaged with how the world is made and how people interact with her projects. Thriving on input, she prioritizes listening, documenting, and collaborating, a process that begins with her handmade, collaged drawings, which are, she says, “the first sentence in a conversation about architecture.” Bilbao’s egalitarian approach—a change in the traditional paradigm—is winning notice. “Architecture from Outside In,” an exhibition on Bilbao opening today at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, features her expansive concept for a Hunters Point master plan.
In schemes with her Tatiana Bilbao Estudio—a botanical garden, government housing, a pilgrimage route, a church, a monastery, a skyscraper “village,” an aquarium, even something as simple but urgent as a safe passage through a dangerous urban park—Bilbao has imported her ideology of inclusion, privileging local elements in novel ways and making the projects themselves agents of change and community.
Bilbao prefers to have a seat at a table, where she actually wants to be challenged. In the SFMoMA gallery, visitors will be encouraged to pause, discuss, and question what they’re seeing. “It’s the moment we’re living in. If we don’t open our voices to other channels, we will get nowhere,” she says. In her work, Bilbao has come up against crime, tornadoes, apathy, and corruption. But she is patient, routinely visiting the inhabitants of her housing projects to get feedback, and wishing every project could emulate her botanical garden, where she has been able to return—to tinker. “I don’t have the answers,” she has said. “I just have the questions.”
What Did Jill Mulleady Hear?
Jill Mulleady "listened" to the space at the Huntington Gallery, one she didn't know well though she lives in Los Angeles. (She's originally from Uruguay and also studied theater).
She made a copy of a painting, The Three Witches by Henry Fuseli under the spell of Shakespeare and Macbeth--even citing Roman Polanski post Sharon Tate-as an influence. Medusa and her sisters are said to turn men into stone.
Made in LA, the much delayed exhibition, is open only until August 1 at both its venues, the Hammer Museum and The Huntington Library. Try not to miss.
A Fleetwood Mac Anniversary
Rumors by Fleetwood Mac was released on July 11, 1975. Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks were already on the outs-she had left him-and Christine and John McVie were also split but the band rented two houses in Sausalito to work on the album anyway and the rest is history. Sometimes in dissonance there is assonance. For a very cool insider view of the track “Go Your Own Way” listen to Song Exploder podcast episode 150 in which Lindsey Buckingham recounts the genesis of this song and album. For my money “Landslide” is still the track with the most poignancy. But then I’m a sucker for break-ups and lost loves.
Frieda Hughes' Memories Go Up For Sale
Frieda Hughes, Sylvia Plath's and Ted Hughes’s sole surviving child, has decided to sell some of the most intimate letters, photographs and memorabilia from a very tender time in the life of her parents next week via Sotheby's (the auction is online). First, there are passionate love letters, wedding bands, photos of the the couple, and then eventually of her parents with her and her brother Nicholas, (also a suicide.)
Of course she may need money, totally legitimate. Or she may feel she has finally had enough experiencing the ephemera of a union that has been under a microscope and she no longer needs the aide-memoirs which have probably been etched and sometimes gouged into her heart. Either way, it is a remarkable, heartbreaking sale.
In cross checking this photograph with her journals, from Lot 49, a family photo album, it appears to be Easter Sunday, April 22, 1962. "Ted had sat Frieda and the baby and me in the daffodils to take pictures. " They were living in Court Green. She had begun Falcon Yard, an autobiographical novel. The marriage was already deeply strained.
A month after this photograph was taken, the Hughes had the alluring Assia Wevill and her husband to dinner. Not long after that, Plath discovered they were having an affair. It was the beginning of the very end.
Hughes wrote the poem "Perfect Light" years later, which begins. 'It was to be your only April on earth/Among your daffodils. In your arms/like a teddy bear, your new son...." She had written contemporaneously, in The Rabbit Catcher, "And we too had a relationship-/tight wires between us, Pegs too deep to uproot, and a mind like a ring/sliding shut on some quick thing,/The constriction killing me also."
After Janet Malcolm died, I re-read her "Silent Woman" account of her own research into the many Plath biographies, leading ultimately to her own first hand research. It's a good place to begin.
Photograph courtesy of Sotheby’s
Cezanne's Drawing Takes Life
Cezanne’s Coat on a Chair, 1890 is like a living, animated thing, a drawn sculpture. The traces of the person who set this coat on this chair—likely Cezanne himself—are still there. It seems hurriedly tossed off, not draped quietly and neatly over the back, as if he was in a rush, perhaps returning from a walk, eager to get back to work.
"Time and contemplation gradually modify our vision,” Cezanne said, “and at last we reach understanding." I have not seen the MoMA Cezanne drawing show in person, but of all the images that I was able to see, this one stood out among the still lifes and figures. It is utterly contemporary and breathtakingly beautiful. Time, in this case, has only rendered it more extraordinary.
No, This Is Not from Prague
Do not confuse this Hans Hoffman, German painter from the 16th century, attached to the royal retinue of Emperor Rudolf II of Prague, with the proto AbEx one.
This Hoffman revered Durer's Hare of 1502 and though the original is very special, I feel he actually surpassed his idol in A Hare in the Forest, 1585, at the Getty. Rudolf eventually bought the Durer bunny and hung them together in his kunstkammer of treasures (now at the Albertina).
Look at this bunny munching on some tasty greens! In a small clearing on the edge of the forest surrounded by ferns and other fauna, this bunny has found his bliss.
The bunnies in the mountains near me are more forlorn, looking for bits of green amidst the parched land and carefully watching their backs as they cross the trail as the rattlers and coyotes are hungry too.
Happy Birthday, Artemisia Gentileschi
Though this new acquisition of the Getty has been widely reported, I wanted to stress how shocking the painting of Lucretia by Artemisia Gentileschi is in the context of the rest of the Old Master galleries at the museum. It's in a sculpture gallery--almost hidden away, though more accessible on the ground floor.
The purity of her alabaster skin is what is most striking, along with the dagger aimed at her chest, as well as her imploring, desperate glance upward. She's alone, no servants or attendants.
To remind: Lucretia, though married and noble, had been raped by the son of the King of Rome. She called for vengeance, 'refusing to live as an unchaste woman'.
I will leave it to the scholars to put it in context of Gentileschi's other works, but I can say that the painting stands out in the galleries for the rebellious nature of this woman, the only heroine I could find who was not portrayed as submissive.
Unlike the images of Bathsheba (yesterday) and Europa (the day before), which came from Holland, in Venice, at this same time (1627), there was a reaction from female artists and writers to the routine depiction of women from history as compliant--by men. Lucretia was one to whom they could point as being strong and virtuous.
Clearly, the artist's own personal experience of sexual violence had deeply influenced her rendering as was her willingness to paint truth to power. Today is her birthday.
Jan Steen Interprets Biblical Tales
Jan Steen, a Dutch Golden Age painter and contemporary of Rembrandt was apparently known for his sense of humor as well as his technique and mastery of color, on full display here in this painting from the Getty of Bathsheba after the Bath, from around 1665, or as I call it, Bathsheba getting a pedicure before her big night with King David.
Curators tell us that the scene comes from the biblical story of David summoning Bathsheba. As in yesterday's image from Rembrandt, an alluring woman is selected by the powerful ruler to do his sexual bidding. In this case, Steen opted to show Bathsheba as a willing temptress rather than an innocent victim as she was normally depicted, again aligning with Rembrandt's version of the Europa tale. She has come hither eyes and her dress is already falling off her. Is her maidservant trying one last time to tell her that this is a bad idea?
I'm not sure whether this was considered 'funny' in the Dutch Golden Age. Steen had married the boss's daughter Margriet (he was assistant to the painter Jan van Goyen) and they had eight children. It was during this time, his most productive also artistically, that he painted this work.
Rembrandt Interprets Europa's Abduction
I went up to the Getty in part to catch up with their new Artemesia (the yin, woman with dagger to kill herself after being raped) and anticipate their new Labille-Guiard (the yang, woman with nursing babe) and took a detour through the very busy Gods of Painting galleries where I don't often have time to linger.
I had forgotten how many Old Master paintings deal with the subjects of rape, violation, abduction, lust and subjugation of seemingly compliant women from antique and biblical times.
The detail from this Rembrandt of 1632, The Abduction of Europa tells of the story of Jupiter being captivated by Europa and transforming himself into a bull to seduce her (huh?). Europa falls for it: she climbs on his back and "is spirited across the sea to the continent that would bear her name." The curators say that this distressing subject was considered suitable for a 'city house' in Amsterdam presumably to mirror the interests of the patron. Here, an attendant’s reaction to the unfolding events is more in keeping with my own take.
The Artemesia is tucked away for some reason in a sculpture gallery and was not surrounded by anyone while I was there. More tomorrow on Lucretia, Bathsheba and Europa and the depiction of powerful men confronted by desirable women in the early part of the 17th century.