Ideally, one would wish to do away with the tangible facts of things seen—of people, houses, paint on canvas, the rectangle on canvas—and deal directly with the matter of feeling.
Elmer Bischoff, in Susan Landauer, Elmer Bischoff: The Ethics of Paint (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 81.
When Elmer Bischoff returned from World War II, he took a position at the California School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute), where he taught from 1946 to 1952, joining fellow veterans—faculty and students alike—in what the artist described as a “monastic brotherhood composed of members recently liberated from a world of semi-darkness.”1 A radical turn was underway at the school led by director Douglas MacAgy, who introduced an experimental curriculum that encouraged individual expression, a way out of the disciplinary rule of the armed forces and of repressed emotions. MacAgy allowed studios to be open twenty-four hours a day and organized raucous parties with live music by the faculty’s Studio 13 Jazz Band. The frenzied energy had not yet formed a style, but fed on a desire to express what Bischoff called “an expanded notion of humanness.”2 As MacAgy assembled a faculty of painters—Bay Area-based Richard Diebenkorn, Frank Lobdell, David Park, Hassel Smith, along with Clyfford Still and his New York colleagues Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt, who came to San Francisco to teach summer sessions—their investigations into gestural, expressive painting catalyzed Abstract Expressionism on the West Coast.
In 1952 Elmer Bischoff introduced figures into his paintings, becoming legendary among fellow painters for his defection from Abstract Expressionism, along with artist David Park, who shocked the local art community in 1951 when he won a prize for a small figurative painting he submitted to a juried exhibition.1 Although the style peaked in New York in the early 1950s, as it came to be considered a national movement San Francisco abstract expressionists were becoming disillusioned. For Bischoff, whose work had never bowed to trends,2 the popularity of Abstract Expressionism culminated in stylistic rigidity and a loss of its original spirit. “As a veteran who had witnessed the hollowness of packaged ideologies first-hand, Bischoff was especially wary of mock-heroics . . . and turned to figuration in part to instill a comparative modesty in his work,” wrote San José Museum of Art curator Susan Landauer.3 For Bischoff, the figure was “humble” and “accessible,”4 an external subject that he responded to “as opposed to inventing a brand new language.”5
Caroline A. Jones, Bay Area Figurative Art, 1950–1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 1. ↩︎
Constance Lewallen, Elmer Bischoff: MATRIX 55 (Berkeley, CA: University Art Museum, 1982). ↩︎
Susan Landauer, Elmer Bischoff: The Ethics of Paint (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 62. ↩︎
Susan Landauer, Elmer Bischoff: The Ethics of Paint (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 63. ↩︎
Elmer Bischoff, in Caroline A. Jones, Bay Area Figurative Art, 1950–1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 23. ↩︎
Elmer Bischoff rendered his figurative paintings from memory rather than painting directly from models. Clusters of gestrual brushwork dissolve forms without defined edges, creating atmospheric—almost dreamlike—compositions. As Bischoff described: “Light and color were paramount as expressive content and also as organizational elements. . . . I guess this could represent some kind of rebellion against my early schooling where ‘organization’ of a painting was always seen as an organization of contours, a continuity and relatedness of edges.”1 Light and color wash over his paintings like a kind of gauzy haze, so as to evoke emotion rather than the formal nature of his subject or, as art critic Donald Kuspit wrote, “dissolv[ing] tangible facts into intangibles of feeling.”2
Often portraying figures in isolation, Elmer Bischoff’s expressions of solitude suggest that being alone is fundamental to being human.1 But throughout his career, Bischoff consistently fostered camaraderie with fellow artists, companionships that supported and challenged his deeply expressive art practice. When he first joined the faculty at the California School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute) in 1946, Bischoff regularly got together with Hassel Smith and Richard Diebenkorn for vigorous drawing sessions he likened to “workouts at the gym.”2 Returning to the faculty for a second time in 1956, he began attending Wednesday evening drawing sessions that Theophilus Brown, Richard Diebenkorn, David Park, and Paul Wonner hosted at the 2571 Shattuck Avenue complex in Berkeley, where several of them and eventually Bischoff himself had studio space. Later, when Bischoff began teaching at the University of California at Berkeley in the late 1960s, he cofounded Friday breakfast meetings, with other artists teaching at Berkeley along with some students, that came to be known as the Berkeley Artists Breakfast Club.
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