David Park (1911-1960), transplanted Bostonian turned ground-breaking West Coast painter, led the way in creating what became known as Bay Area Figurative Art--a daring move during the post-World War II years when abstract expressionism held sway. In this beautifully illustrated biography, compiled from comprehensive and sweeping interviews, Nancy Boas traces Park's resolute search for a new kind of figuration, one that would penetrate abstract expressionism's thickly layered surfaces and infuse them with human presence. Boas changes our understanding of Park as a painter, highlighting his strong influence on Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, and other artists at the California School of Fine Arts and the University of California, Berkeley. She plunges us into the lively 1940s and 1950s Bay Area art scene, pointing to Park's work as a bold alternative to the abstractions of Clyfford Still. As the book deepens our admiration for Park's figurative paintings, it affirms his stature as a major figure in American art, one who spurred the figurative impulse across the United States and abroad.
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"Even insiders who thought they knew this complicated artist will know him far better thanks to Boas."--San Francisco Chronicle
"Just as Park put the humanity back into an era of abstraction, Boas brings David Park the man into the foreground in a literary and historical sense."--Huffington Post
"A welcome volume."--Los Angeles Times
"[Boas's] passion shows in how persuasively she argues for a wider recognition of Park's importance."--Art Critical
"Shows how Park conferred a human presence on the painting of his time, influencing artists such as Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff."--San Jose Mercury News
From the Inside Flap
"At last a reliable and enlightening biography of David Park--one of America's most original artists. Boas fills in the many gaps of Park's life, all of which influenced his art."--Richard Armstrong, Director, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation
"This book makes a very important contribution to the literature on David Park and on Bay Area art from the 1930s through the 1950s more generally. Nancy Boas has done a tremendous amount of research on her subject, presenting totally new information on Park's art and life in polished prose that will attract a wide audience within the art world. There is no question that this will become the standard biography on Park."--Steven Nash, Executive Director, Palm Springs Art Museum
"This is a well-researched, engaging, and informative biography, detailing the life and work of one of California's most important modern artists. Nancy Boas inspires a deep admiration for David Park's late figurative paintings, and anyone with an interest in Park and his milieu will find this a valuable and engrossing book."--David Cateforis, Professor of Art History, University of Kansas
"This book makes a very important contribution to the literature on David Park and on Bay Area art from the 1930s through the 1950s more generally. Nancy Boas has done a tremendous amount of research on her subject, presenting totally new information on Park's art and life in polished prose that will attract a wide audience within the art world. There is no question that this will become the standard biography on Park."--Steven Nash, Executive Director, Palm Springs Art Museum
"This is a well-researched, engaging, and informative biography, detailing the life and work of one of California's most important modern artists. Nancy Boas inspires a deep admiration for David Park's late figurative paintings, and anyone with an interest in Park and his milieu will find this a valuable and engrossing book."--David Cateforis, Professor of Art History, University of Kansas
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
By John Seed
Format:Hardcover
In the prologue of "David Park: A Painter's Life," a newly published biography of the pioneering representational painter, author Nancy Boas describes the scene at Sotheby's New York on May 15, 2007. That evening, a David Park oil, "Standing Male Nude in a Shower," brought the impressive hammer price of $1,160,000. It was the first Park painting to sell for over a million dollars. As Boas notes, the 2007 auction indicated "the rising interest in his (Park's) place among mid-twentieth century artists." Since then four other Parks have cleared the million dollar mark, including Park's broadly brushed 1959 nude in an abstract/edenic setting, "Louise," which brought a bit over $2.7 million in 2008.
In the same prologue Boas posits the notion that Park's development as an artist represented "a formal and ethical critique of Clyfford Still, who taught at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco in Park's era." Boas has more to say about this later on; the polarities and overlaps between the priestly Still and down-to-earth Park form some of the book's most original and interesting observations.
Boas' book is the end result of decades of work; she began her interviews more than 20 years ago, before so many of those who had been close to Park passed on. "David Park: A Painter's Life" is the first full biography of a postwar California artist, a long overdue counterbalance to the biographies of Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, Mark Rothko and Arshile Gorky that have appeared since the late 1980s. Along with Phoebe Hoban's 2010 "Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty," Boas' book also seems to signal an increasing enthusiasm for American postwar representational art. It's about time.
Unlike many artist biographies, many of which seem to have author-driven agendas, this book does a wonderful job of letting the many voices of Park's friends, family and associates tell the story of his life and artistic development directly and accurately. Boas, a disciplined, straight-forward biographer, is just the right person to memorialize an artist who strove to free his work of "arbitrary mannerisms."
"A Painter's Life," offers countless fascinating insights into Park and his development, including revelations about the artists who he was exposed to and influenced by early on. Who knew, for example, that 19 year old Park had been present at a 1930 lunch given for the visiting French artist Henri Matisse? Park must have loved the loved the advice that Matisse offered to the throng of California artists: "Talk less. Work more." In the same year Diego Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo spent over six months in Northern California, and Boas reports that Park soon after began to experiment with encaustic after seeing Rivera's encaustic paintings in the homes of friends and acquaintances.
Boas also reports on Park's rarely discussed experiments with non-objective painting. Although Park's abstractions had their admirers -- the artist Hassel Smith thought they were "great" and "handsome things" -- Park's close friend and colleague Richard Diebenkorn was more equivocal. "You didn't learn things about space or painting in his non-objective work," he commented, "you responded to the character -- to the courageous personality."
Courage -- moral and artistic -- is a theme in Park's life, and Boas gives the first thorough account of the artist's gutsy switch from abstraction back to representation. When Park showed his painting of a jazz band, titled "Rehearsal" in a group exhibition at the De Young Museum in early 1950, its approach was so contrary to the dominant abstract style on display that it was barely noticed. "I thought it was a joke," recalls artist Frank Lobdell. "The idea of somebody making such a drastic switch from one style to another just didn't occur to you."
Boas demonstrates that Park's rise as a painter was gradual and hard won. His artistic ascent was made despite decades of financial hardship and, after a terrible 1942 accident at his night job at the General Cable company, severe back pain. It was only a year or two before his death that Park told his friend Dorothy Baker that "at last he'd found how to paint." Park, who died at 49 of cancer made his best works at the end of his career.
What "David Park: A Painter's Life" accomplishes is to deepen our understanding of an artist who celebrated humanity, friendship and connection. Just as Park put the humanity back into an era of abstraction, Boas brings David Park the man into the foreground in a literary and historical sense. She has given us a detailed, truthful, credible picture of a man who tussled with the lofty claims made for abstract art. Somehow he made peace with abstraction, but he had to do it by putting human presence, in all its beautiful imperfection, into the forefront once again.
In the same prologue Boas posits the notion that Park's development as an artist represented "a formal and ethical critique of Clyfford Still, who taught at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco in Park's era." Boas has more to say about this later on; the polarities and overlaps between the priestly Still and down-to-earth Park form some of the book's most original and interesting observations.
Boas' book is the end result of decades of work; she began her interviews more than 20 years ago, before so many of those who had been close to Park passed on. "David Park: A Painter's Life" is the first full biography of a postwar California artist, a long overdue counterbalance to the biographies of Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, Mark Rothko and Arshile Gorky that have appeared since the late 1980s. Along with Phoebe Hoban's 2010 "Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty," Boas' book also seems to signal an increasing enthusiasm for American postwar representational art. It's about time.
Unlike many artist biographies, many of which seem to have author-driven agendas, this book does a wonderful job of letting the many voices of Park's friends, family and associates tell the story of his life and artistic development directly and accurately. Boas, a disciplined, straight-forward biographer, is just the right person to memorialize an artist who strove to free his work of "arbitrary mannerisms."
"A Painter's Life," offers countless fascinating insights into Park and his development, including revelations about the artists who he was exposed to and influenced by early on. Who knew, for example, that 19 year old Park had been present at a 1930 lunch given for the visiting French artist Henri Matisse? Park must have loved the loved the advice that Matisse offered to the throng of California artists: "Talk less. Work more." In the same year Diego Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo spent over six months in Northern California, and Boas reports that Park soon after began to experiment with encaustic after seeing Rivera's encaustic paintings in the homes of friends and acquaintances.
Boas also reports on Park's rarely discussed experiments with non-objective painting. Although Park's abstractions had their admirers -- the artist Hassel Smith thought they were "great" and "handsome things" -- Park's close friend and colleague Richard Diebenkorn was more equivocal. "You didn't learn things about space or painting in his non-objective work," he commented, "you responded to the character -- to the courageous personality."
Courage -- moral and artistic -- is a theme in Park's life, and Boas gives the first thorough account of the artist's gutsy switch from abstraction back to representation. When Park showed his painting of a jazz band, titled "Rehearsal" in a group exhibition at the De Young Museum in early 1950, its approach was so contrary to the dominant abstract style on display that it was barely noticed. "I thought it was a joke," recalls artist Frank Lobdell. "The idea of somebody making such a drastic switch from one style to another just didn't occur to you."
Boas demonstrates that Park's rise as a painter was gradual and hard won. His artistic ascent was made despite decades of financial hardship and, after a terrible 1942 accident at his night job at the General Cable company, severe back pain. It was only a year or two before his death that Park told his friend Dorothy Baker that "at last he'd found how to paint." Park, who died at 49 of cancer made his best works at the end of his career.
What "David Park: A Painter's Life" accomplishes is to deepen our understanding of an artist who celebrated humanity, friendship and connection. Just as Park put the humanity back into an era of abstraction, Boas brings David Park the man into the foreground in a literary and historical sense. She has given us a detailed, truthful, credible picture of a man who tussled with the lofty claims made for abstract art. Somehow he made peace with abstraction, but he had to do it by putting human presence, in all its beautiful imperfection, into the forefront once again.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
David Park (March 17, 1911 - September 20, 1960) was a painter and a pioneer of the Bay Area Figurative School of painting during the 1950s, a school of artists he helped form that included Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff. His presence was keenly felt in the formation of the careers of Nathan Oliveira, Manuel Neri, Joan Brown, Paul Wonner and Theophilus Brown, and Henry Villiermme. His work was a marriage of abstract style used to create representational paintings: blocks of color became human forms without any pretense of trying to hide the direction he was taking. He loved life and painted his observation of bathers, rowers, people and children in parks and on the street, but most of these impressions he painted from memory while ensconced in his studio.
This is more than an art book, though there are ample superb reproductions of the art of David Park in this beautifully illustrated volume, but instead this is a definitive biography, compiled from comprehensive and sweeping interviews by author Nancy Boas who explores then manner in which Park searched for and discovered a new kind of figuration, one that would penetrate abstract expressionism's thickly layered surfaces and infuse them with human presence. His influence on the other, perhaps more famous Bay Area Artists such as Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, and others was immense. Boas places David Park in the historical perspective better than any other writer to this point. This is a smoothly readable, intensely intelligent book about a fascinating artist. Grady Harp, February 11
This is more than an art book, though there are ample superb reproductions of the art of David Park in this beautifully illustrated volume, but instead this is a definitive biography, compiled from comprehensive and sweeping interviews by author Nancy Boas who explores then manner in which Park searched for and discovered a new kind of figuration, one that would penetrate abstract expressionism's thickly layered surfaces and infuse them with human presence. His influence on the other, perhaps more famous Bay Area Artists such as Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, and others was immense. Boas places David Park in the historical perspective better than any other writer to this point. This is a smoothly readable, intensely intelligent book about a fascinating artist. Grady Harp, February 11
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
By Old Master
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Too bad David Park couldn't have lived to read this marvelous biography. He would have been pleased at the gratitude of his students, the accomplishments of the artists he taught and influenced, and at this review of his life and career.
Following a chronological path, this meticulously researched and documented account intertwines his life experiences, artistic development, and friendships over his lifetime, illuminating his paintings and artistic contributions to the art of others in the context of the art world of his time.
The illustrations could constitute a tabletop art reference work on their own. The text is a cultural history of his time, altogether interesting and satisfying for readers who have never heard of David Park, and fascinating to those who appreciate his paintings.
Following a chronological path, this meticulously researched and documented account intertwines his life experiences, artistic development, and friendships over his lifetime, illuminating his paintings and artistic contributions to the art of others in the context of the art world of his time.
The illustrations could constitute a tabletop art reference work on their own. The text is a cultural history of his time, altogether interesting and satisfying for readers who have never heard of David Park, and fascinating to those who appreciate his paintings.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
Insightful but disappointing.
As revived artist I am finding my way back by researching and absorbing artists who inspire me. I am currently educating myself with the work of the Bay area artists. Read more
Published 2 months ago by LARRYBLUE
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Painter's Life
This book is one of only two about the life and work of David Park. Park was the founder of the California Figurative School of painting, and a major influence on the work of... Read more
Published 3 months ago by 1409clay
5.0 out of 5 stars
A true masterpiece by Nancy Boas
Superlatives would be superfluous in describing Nancy Boas' artful presentation of the life and works of David Park. This is a must for all early California art scene aficionados.
Published 10 months ago by Walt Englert
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