Elmer Bischoff
is generally regarded as one of the leaders among
the artists in the San Francisco Bay Area who, after
contributing to the local emergence of Abstract Expressionism
during the 1940s and 50s, shifted the terms of their
spectacularly sensuous brushwork to recognizable
imagery. Bill Berkson, a contributing writer for
Art News and Art Forum magazines, writes that if "David
Park was the classicist of the founding triad of
the Bay Area Figurative painters, and Richard Diebenkorn
the modernist, Bischoff was the romantic."
Native to the Bay Area, Bischoff studied at the University
of California under the "Berkeley School" modernists
Worth Ryder, Erle Loran, and Margaret Peterson. His
experience during World War II profoundly affected
his view of the world and his place in it. In 1946,
Bischoff joined the faculty of the California School
of Fine Arts where--with colleagues Edward Corbett,
Richard Diebenkorn, Claire Falkenstein, David Park,
Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Hassel Smith, and Clyfford
Still--he found himself at the hub of avant-garde expression
in the Bay Area. Throughout his career, Bischoff applied
his visual intelligence and unusual personal integrity
in creating a uniquely varied body of work that invites
investigation.
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Figurative Movements
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