David Park | Biography | Hollis Taggart Galleries

David Park (1911-1960)

A leading figure in the San Francisco art scene in the 1940s and 1950s, David Park is considered the founder of the Bay Area Figurative School, which included painters Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff.

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1911, Park moved to Los Angeles in 1928 to attend the Otis Art Institute. The following summer, while auditing classes at the University of California, Berkeley, Park met aspiring sculptor Gordon Newell. The two shared an apartment in San Francisco and worked as studio assistants to American sculptor Ralph Stackpole. Park married Newell’s sister in 1930 and moved back to Berkeley.

Like other artists of his generation, Park found employment with the WPA’s Federal Art Project. Until the mid-1930s Park’s work reflected the dominant trend of American Scene painting, but his style would move between figurative work and abstraction throughout his career.

Park began experimenting with abstraction in the late 1930s, and he painted pure abstract, nonobjective paintings between 1946 and 1949. That year, Park packed his recent abstract works in his car and drove them all to the city dump to destroy them. Shortly thereafter, he returned to the figure as his primary subject. With the figurative work of 1949 and 1950, Park made a decisive break with the then-dominant Abstract Expressionist movement.

Ill health forced Park to abandon oil painting in 1959; instead, he began working with felt-tip markers and gouache. During the summer of 1960, David Park completed almost one hundred paintings in a burst of creative energy before his death from cancer at the age of 49.