James Weeks was the same age as Richard Diebenkorn, and was closer in many ways to Diebenkorn, Bischoff and Park than he was to the more youthful members of the “6” Gallery. He was at California School of Fine Arts as early as 1940, and he had begun teaching there part-time in 1948. He was as consistently committed to figuration as any artist in the Bay Area during those years. Many of his figurative works in the mid-’50s are marked by a great energy of application, a singing sense of color and a feeling for the monumentality of the human form.

Weeks was influenced by European art—by Matisse, Munch, Beckman and early Picasso, rather than the Dadaists and Surrealists. By the time he put his work into the “6” in 1955, he had already shown at San Francisco’s Lucien Labaudt Gallery in 1951, and had been given a show at the Legion of Honor in 1953. Like Park, he entered the “6” during the ongoing debate over figuration. In 1967, Weeks left the Bay Area to teach in Los Angeles, and subsequently relocated to Boston.

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