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signed, titled and dated 1969 on the reverse

oil on canvas

PROVENANCE

Consolidated Freightways, Inc., Palo Alto
Salander-O'Reilly Galleries Inc., Los Angeles
Acquired by the present owner from the above
EXHIBITED

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Greenville, So. Carolina, Greenville Museum of Art; Washington, D. C., The Phillips Collection; Laguna Beach, Laguna Art Museum, Elmer Bischoff: 1947-1985, December 1985 - January 1987, cat. no. 43, p. 58, illustrated in color
New York, Salander-O'Reilly Galleries, Selections, January 1993
CATALOGUE NOTE

Elmer Bischoff and David Park were catalysts of West Coast Abstract Expressionism, contributing to the local emergence of the New York style in California in the 1940s, who then in turn shifted toward figurative and landscape painting in the mid-1950s. Loosely (and often reluctantly) christened the Bay Area Figurative artists, derived from the title of the groundbreaking show organized by Paul Mills at the Oakland Museum in 1957, these artists, and others including Richard Diebenkorn, startled their contemporaries with their return to representational art - a defiance of the norm as dramatic as the rebellion against European Modernism by the New York Abstract Expressionists of the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Without the presence of a network of dealers as in New York, Park, Bischoff and other artist in this group congregated around educational institutions, particularly the California School of Fine Art in Berkeley where Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko came to teach in the late 1940s. Through group drawing sessions and visits to each other's studios, a community of mutual support and creative exchange evolved, resulting in a breeding ground for the Bay Area Figurative artists. Bischoff started teaching at the California School of Fine Arts in 1946, where he joined his fellow teachers and students in his enthusiastic embrace of non-representational painting emerging from New York. Yet, when he temporarily left the school from 1952-56, Bischoff took up representational painting again, feeling that abstract painting was "playing itself dry." (Exh. Cat., Oakland Museum, Contemporary Bay Area Figurative Painting, 1957, p. 9). Similar to Park and Diebenkorn, Bischoff retained the Modernist concern for flattening the picture plane, creating a shallow space in which to investigate a more realistic return to light, shadow, form and composition. Within this foreshortened picture plane, Bischoff produced objective works that varied from thinly painted and tightly constructed interior scenes reminiscent of Pierre Bonnard's quotidian observation of everyday life to more thickly painted, expressionist paintings of less literal figures in an indeterminate space. Throughout these shifts in style, Bischoff's use of color and his interest in form and content revealed his stated aim "to bring off a fusion of your interest in both the subject and in the painting. My aim has been to have the paint on the canvas play a double role - one as an alive, sensual thing in itself, and the other conveying a response to the subject." (Exh. Cat., Laguna Art Museum, Elmer Bischoff 1947-1985, 1985, p.39).

As Bischoff pursued his representational style throughout the late 1950s and the 1960s, he insisted that the environment was as critical to the composition as the figure. In Two Lamp Posts, the urban landscape and park environment dominates the scene, compressing a long distance view into a more flattened picture plane. The strong verticals of the post hold the viewer's attention to the foreground, while the artist resisted compositional elements that would increase the depth of the picture. The stairs down to the expanse of green are not represented - they are implied by the disappearing figure glimpsed by the head and shoulders.