David Park (March 17, 1911 – September 20, 1960) was an American painter and a pioneer of the

Bay Area Figurative Movement The Bay Area Figurative Movement (also known as the Bay Area Figurative School, Bay Area Figurative Art, Bay Area Figuration, and similar variations) was a mid-20th Century art movement made up of a group of artists in the San Francisco Bay Area w ...

in painting during the 1950s.

Biography

David Park was born in Boston, the son of Mary Turner and Charles Edward Park. His father was a Unitarian minister.Boas, Nancy. “David Park and George Staempfli: A Painter and His Dealer.” ''Archives of American Art Journal'', vol. 54, no. 1, 2015, pp. 46–62. ''JSTOR'', www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/683150. He attended the Loomis Chaffee school in Windsor Connecticut and was recognized for his early talent by the sculptor Evelyn Longman Batchelder, the headmaster's wife. He moved to Los Angeles at the age of 17, staying with his aunt Edith Park Truesdell who was an artist, so he could study at

Otis Art Institute Otis College of Art and Design is a private art and design school in Los Angeles, California. Established in 1918, it was the city's first independent professional school of art. The main campus is located in the former IBM Aerospace headquarte ...

in 1928. A year later, he moved to Berkeley where he married Lydia Newell in 1930 and with whom he had two daughters, Natalie and Helen. His first solo show was in 1933 at the Oakland Art Gallery. In 1943, he began teaching at California School of Fine Arts (CSFA), now known as San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI). During the economic depression, Park returned to Boston to teach art at the Winsor School for girls. David Park was one of the

post-World War II The aftermath of World War II was the beginning of a new era started in late 1945 (when World War II ended) for all countries involved, defined by the decline of all colonial empires and simultaneous rise of two superpowers; the Soviet Union (US ...

alumni of the

San Francisco Art Institute San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) was a private college of contemporary art in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1871, SFAI was one of the oldest art schools in the United States and the oldest west of the Mississippi River. Approximately ...

which was called the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA) at the time. He revived an interest in figurative art, at first experimenting with still-abstracted forms that relied on color for their impact, dynamics and warmth. Park, along with

Richard Diebenkorn Richard Diebenkorn (April 22, 1922 – March 30, 1993) was an American painter and printmaker. His early work is associated with abstract expressionism and the Bay Area Figurative Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In the late 1960s he bega ...

and

Elmer Bischoff Elmer Nelson Bischoff (July 9, 1916 – March 2, 1991) was a visual artist in the San Francisco Bay Area. Bischoff, along with Richard Diebenkorn and David Park, was part of the post- World War II generation of artists who started as abstract p ...

, broke away from the philosophy of painting promoted by

Clyfford Still Clyfford Still (November 30, 1904 – June 23, 1980) was an American painter, and one of the leading figures in the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, who developed a new, powerful approach to painting in the years immediately follow ...

, who taught at the Institute, forming what would later be called the

. Their influence may be seen in the work of later Bay Area Figurative School artists such as Paul John Wonner,

Nathan Oliveira Nathan Oliveira (December 19, 1928 – November 13, 2010) was an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor, born in Oakland, California to immigrant Portuguese parents. Since the late 1950s, Oliveira has been the subject of nearly one hundred ...

, Manuel Neri, Henry Villierme, Henrietta Berk and Joan Brown. Although these painters started out painting in what was called an objective style, deploying abstract shapes in large space, they soon migrated to using the physical world and representative subjects to experiment with shape, color, texture and temperature in their painting. Park realized that concentrating on principle and abstraction drew attention to the painter rather than the painting. He felt that it was important to focus on the present, to develop responses to nature. "I believe that we are living at a time that overemphasizes the need of newness, of furthering concepts". Park worked with figurative painting from about 1950 until about 1959 when he became ill with cancer. Usually working from memory, he initially painted what he saw: kids playing in the street, musicians, his friends, people in their houses. Toward the end of the decade he painted classical studio nudes and bathers in a monumental style. After he became too ill to work with oils, he continued working with watercolors which he produced until his early death in 1960, at the age of 49, of cancer. Park was working at the

University of California The University of California (UC) is a public land-grant research university system in the U.S. state of California. The system is composed of the campuses at Berkeley, Davis, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, University of Califor ...

as an Associate Professor of Art up until he died. He was painting his best works in the final years of his life and career.

Legacy

In 1988, Park received a retrospective at the

Whitney Museum of American Art The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–194 ...

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

. Another Park retrospective was held from 2020–2021 at the

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a modern and contemporary art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art, and was ...

. Park's ''Standing Male Nude in the Shower'', painted between 1955 and 1957, sold for $1,160,000 at

Sotheby's Sotheby's () is a British-founded American multinational corporation with headquarters in New York City. It is one of the world's largest brokers of fine and decorative art, jewellery, and collectibles. It has 80 locations in 40 countries, an ...

New York on May 15, 2007.

Notes

References

*Armstrong, Richard (1989). ''David Park''.

University of California Press The University of California Press, otherwise known as UC Press, is a publishing house associated with the University of California that engages in academic publishing. It was founded in 1893 to publish scholarly and scientific works by facul ...

. , {{DEFAULTSORT:Park, David American abstract artists Abstract expressionist artists American Expressionist painters American Figurative Expressionism Modern painters 1911 births 1960 deaths Artists from the San Francisco Bay Area Artists from Boston Deaths from cancer in California Painters from California Painters from Massachusetts San Francisco Art Institute alumni 20th-century American painters American male painters Loomis Chaffee School alumni 20th-century American male artists