Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

This exhibition catalog is an attractive record of the traveling exhibition of the same name, and an authoritative history of the San Francisco Bay Area-based style that emerged in the early 1950s as a reaction to Abstract Expressionist painting. With more than 160 illustrations--the most important paintings being reproduced in excellent color--the catalog provides a superb permanent documentation for the exhibition. Beyond serving as a guide for the exhibition, the text, written by Caroline Jones (who is completing her graduate work at Stanford in the history of modern art) is authoritative and accurate. This catalog is complete as a research tool, containing an extensive bibliography of the movement, a chronology of its development, and a complete index, biographies, and footnotes. The essential starting point for any art historian who wants to investigate further the phenomena of figurative painting in the San Francisco Bay Area, this indispensable research tool traces the history of the Bay Area figurative artists, and establishes the movement in the correct historical perspective of recent figurative painting. K. Dills California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Caroline A. Jones is a doctoral candidate in the Art Department of Stanford University with a specialization in modern and contemporary art history. She is the author of several publications, including Modern Art at Harvard (1985).