Bay Area Figurative Art: 1950-1965

by Caroline A. Jones

During the 1950s a few painters in the San Francisco Bay Area began to stage personal, dramatic defections from the prevailing style of Abstract Expressionism, creating what would come to be known as Bay Area Figurative Art. In 1949 David Park destroyed many of his nonobjective canvases and began a new style of consciously naive figuration. Soon Elmer Bischoff and Richard Diebenkorn joined Park and other painters such as Nathan Oliveira, Theophilus Brown, James Weeks, and Paul Wonner in the move away from abstraction and toward figurative subject matter. When artists such as Bruce McGaw, Manuel Neri, and Joan Brown emerged as a second generation of figurative artists, the momentum grew for a powerful new development in American painting.

The achievement of Bay Area Figurative painters and sculptors has become directly relevant to current debates regarding abstraction and representation, as well as to discourses on modernism and postmodernism. Indeed, the historical phenomenon of the movement is an important case study in the evolution of modernism in America, serving as an early example of rupture in the formalist "mainstream."

Bay Area Figurative Art 1950-1965 was written to accompany an exhibition of the same name at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Based on extensive archival research and interviews, it is the first study of the movement as a whole and is the broadest and most accurate account of the careers and interactions of ten Bay Area artists who worked in this new style.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction

250 pages, Hardcover

First published November 13, 1989

About the author

Caroline A. Jones is Professor of Art History in the History, Theory, Criticism section of the Department of Architecture at MIT. She is the editor of Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art (MIT Press).

Reviews

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love this book. Clearly describes the ethos of the time. The type font is a pleasure to read. A serif font. (I dislike reading san serif text.) The paper is excellent quality and the paintings are high quality images, both colour and black and white.
The author describes how the artists were as interested in the painting process as much as they were in the subject matter.
I keep this book on hand and often look at the paintings. I especially like Richard Diebenkorn's, Paul Wonner's, David Park's, and Nathan Oliveira's work. The second generation works of Manuel Neri and Joan Brown are inspiring. Beautiful sculptures made from inexpensive materials and bits of wood, cardboard, wire, string and staples, gauze, electrical wire and plaster.
The sensibility of making works of art out of bits and pieces of material describes at that time, the '50's & '60's, how the word 'funky' got inverted from describing something country bumpkin or hokey to being cool and funky.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

BIG big (coffeetable) buk with EQUAL text & color pix! -trying to make the case for a 'regional; provincial' Art Movement that exploded in postwar Western America - & even in some Sculpture. though only 161 pages, but with HUGE index (a THIRD of the buk)!

[Natasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful book with quality paper and reproductions of the work. So much information, presented and organised well. Very inspiring.

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heroes.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great overview of the Bay Area figurative movement. Worth a read if you don't already know these paintings