Talk: David Park A Painter’s Life

Nancy Boas will be talking about David Park and the work of the Bay Area School

Tuesday 11th June, 6pm, Thomas Williams Gallery, 22 Old Bond St

David Park (1911-1960): his epiphany and act of apostasy rocked the Abstract Expressionist boat on the West Coast

Because the New York Abstract Expressionist painters effectively monopolised the limelight (and the market), the revolutionary San Francisco school of painters, called ‘The Bay Area School’, is barely known on this side of the Atlantic. The Manhattan Abstract Expressionist painters dominated the art scene in feverish post-war America, because theirs was a metropolitan milieu, full of wealthy collectors, powerful critics and big museums and galleries.

In 1950 David Park put all his abstract work in his family jalopy, drove it to the local dump and waited until it was crushed and beyond redemption. ‘A cold and irreversible moment of truth had dawned.’ Fellow Bay Area painter Elmer Bischoff described it as final: ‘like falling out of love’.

Thomas Williams’ exhibition illuminates the conflict and the interpenetration of abstract and figurative art in the post-WWII era, the West coast counter-revolution, as it were. This is the first show representing the work of the Bay Area School in Britain.

Nancy Boas’s talk will focus on David Park, the daring artist who made a ‘ritual sacrifice’, inspiring, and emboldening the likes of Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, and the others, to throw off convention and follow their intuition. Which they did, producing art that could be called abstract/figurative, and was often expressionist in its view of the human figure.