California dreaming: The Bay Area artists

Associated media

West Coast artists finally get due recognition in Thomas Williams new book, says Janet Stiles Tyson

The Bay Area School: Californian Artists from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960sby Thomas Williams

Since at least the 1970s, museums, curators, artists and critics in the San Francisco Bay area have argued that works of the so-called Bay Area School of artists should be appreciated on a level with works produced by New York artists of the same period. The importance of the New York School has been internationally recognized since the 1950s.

Yet that argument hasn’t reached much beyond the geography of the Bay Area itself, even though individual artists, such as Richard Diebenkorn  and Clyfford Still,  have achieved considerable status. But a new book, by an author with an admittedly vested interest in the reputation of the Bay Area School, may achieve  – finally – that consideration so long sought. Thomas Williams, owner of an eponymous London gallery, has produced a well-illustrated volume geared towards mainstream readers on both sides of the Atlantic. And it’s well worth acquiring and reading by anyone interested in the history of 20th-century painting.

I make that claim based on my own exposure, during some 10 years spent in Northern California, to works by the artists this book addresses. The group that Williams defines comprises not only Diebenkorn and Still, but also Frank Lobdell and David Park in its first generation, and Joan Brown, Jay deFeo, Manuel Neri and Nathan Oliveira (the latter two working in sculpture as well as working in two dimensions) in its second. Both generations, I’d note, included many other practitioners—some of whom are given frustratingly short shrift in this book (Elmer Bischoff, for example), whilst others (Paul Wonner) receive arguably undue recognition. Yet, whether or not Williams’ inclusions are related to his role as a dealer, I must applaud the insightful and in-depth attention he gives to Lobdell, an artist who has been seriously underappreciated for decades, yet whose work is on par with Willem de Kooning’s.

What distinguishes these paintings, graphic images and sculptural works are the ferocious working of materials and their focus on the human figure, although Diebenkorn and Still diverged from that latter theme. When I lived near San Francisco during the late 1970s and early 1980s, expressively painted figuration was inching its way back on to the main stage of American art, not from the west but from the east. It was in 1981 that the journal artforum published the artist Thomas Lawson’s ‘Last exit: painting’ essay, which argued that abstraction in painting was now exhausted. It was around then that works by various Italian and German artists, many of whom are all but forgotten, were coming to attention, along with such American ‘neo-expressionists’ and ‘new imagists’ as Julian Schnabel and Susan Rothenberg. 

But for many practitioners in San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, this sudden re-validation of painterly figuration was, at best, the height of irony. Neither had been absent from the region’s art during the supposedly pluralistic, conceptually oriented 1970s. Indeed, Philip Guston, who had been painting in an Abstract Expressionist style since the 1950s, began to exhibit figurative work again in 1970. Decried by some critics, this work first received its due in San Francisco, not New York, but that was not acknowledged elsewhere. If anything, the mutual recognition and cross-fertilization between East and West coasts of the 1940s and 1950s seemed to have been forgotten by New York once the 1970s started winding down.

The hope, then, is that this book will introduce or re-introduce these Northern Californian artists to an international public. If it does not, it won’t be because Williams lacks in passion for his topic. As noted above, it is a worthy historical record, but also a vivid, even exciting, read.

The Bay Area School: Californian Artists from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s by Thomas Williams is published by Lund Humphries, Surrey, 2013. 240 pp., 166 colour and 21 mono illus. ISBN: 978-1-84822-123-9