David Park

"This generously illustrated volume accompanies the first major museum exhibition in more than thirty years devoted to the powerfully expressive work of David Park (1911-1960), best known as the pioneer of Bay Area Figurative Art. A Boston native, Park moved to California at age 17 and spent nearly all of his adult life in the Bay Area. In the immediate postwar years, when Abstract Expressionism was seen as the only relevant style among avant-garde American painters, Park followed suit. In a moment of passion at mid-century, however, he destroyed nearly all of his abstract canvases and began painting pictures, as he called them, in so doing marking the beginning of Bay Area Figurative Art. Park's paintings of the 1950s--featuring both vernacular and classic subjects such as street scenes, musicians, portraits, interiors, and bathers--reveal how the artist harnessed the lessons of Abstract Expressionism to his own ends, with increasingly lush, bold, gestural paint handling and an ext

raordinary sense of color. In 1958-59 he reached his expressive peak, reveling in the sensuous qualities of paint to create intensely physical, psychologically charged, and deeply felt canvases. This fertile period cut short by illness in 1960, Park transferred his creative energy to other mediums.