NOVEMBER 03 - DECEMBER 23, 2006
The 1930s and 40s
Sculptor
PAR-113-OC
Hackett-Freedman Gallery presents an exhibition of early period paintings and drawings by legendary San Francisco figurative artist David Park, November 3–December 23, 2006. The show features over 20 paintings and drawings dating from 1930 to 1945, many of which have not been publicly shown in decades. A full-color catalogue with an essay by poet, critic, and San Francisco Art Institute professor Bill Berkson reassesses these works in light of Park’s later paintings.
This exhibition provides a fascinating look at Park’s early career and highlights many of the enduring motifs and formal concerns evident in his iconic and best-known work of the 1950s. In these earlier paintings and drawings, Park exhibits his engagement and mastery of the lessons imparted by the School of Paris—Léger, Miró, and, most especially, Picasso. In these works, many of which are for sale and have not been offered on the market since they were first exhibited, Park’s explorations of cubist space and abstraction fuse with his personal pictorial values, specifically the role of color, the importance of the figure, and drawing subject matter from daily life.
Interestingly, although Park destroyed a large number of pure abstract paintings from the late 1940s, he retained these earlier works. Indeed, the subjects depicted in these early paintings represent motifs that sustained Park for the remainder of his career: musicians, rowers, children and mothers, and quiet scenes of domestic life.
David Park officially began his San Francisco painting career in the early 1930s when he began an apprenticeship with the sculptor Ralph Stackpole, who was creating stone carvings for the new Pacific Stock Exchange in downtown San Francisco. The famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera was painting frescoes there at that time, and Park’s exposure to Rivera’s social realist style had a strong impact on his early thirties’ paintings.1 Later, while attending classes at UC Berkeley, where Hans Hofmann’s theories were being espoused by teachers such as Glenn Wessels and the Russian modernist Vaclav Vytlacil was lecturing,2 Park became more attuned to European modernist modes of expression. Working in the studio from imagination, Park left the social realist style and began combining synthetic cubism with an almost fauvist palette.
By the second half of the decade, Park had achieved a complex balance of the formal and the narrative as evinced in The Football Game (1937–39)3. In the early forties, he began to explore in-depth the plasticity of paint and the relationship between figure and ground, in a manner that bears relation to paintings by Joan Miró or Jean Arp.4 Ultimately, these concerns set Park’s works apart from all others.
In 1945, Park began painting non-objectively, an experiment that ended three years later with a trip to the Berkeley city dump, where he destroyed the majority of his abstractions. In 1949, Park returned to objective subject matter, fathering the powerful figurative works for which he is best known today and influencing artists such as Elmer Bischoff, Richard Diebenkorn, James Weeks, Paul Wonner, and others to create a free and powerfully expressive style of painting, known as Bay Area Figuration.
David Park’s paintings are featured in major museum collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA; and the di Rosa Preserve, Napa, CA.
1. Richard Armstrong in “David Park: A Pilgrim’s Process,” David Park (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1988), p.16.
2. Hofmann taught at Berkeley in 1930 and 1931.
3. Armstrong, p. 20.
4. Armstrong, p. 23