David Park2019

"This generously illustrated volume accompanies the first major museum exhibition in more than thirty years devoted to the powerfully expressive work of David Park (1911-1960), best known as the pioneer of Bay Area Figurative Art. A Boston native, Park moved to California at age 17 and spent nearly all of his adult life in the Bay Area. In the immediate postwar years, when Abstract Expressionism was seen as the only relevant style among avant-garde American painters, Park followed suit. In a moment of passion at mid-century, however, he destroyed nearly all of his abstract canvases and began painting pictures, as he called them, in so doing marking the beginning of Bay Area Figurative Art. Park's paintings of the 1950s--featuring both vernacular and classic subjects such as street scenes,...