A TRIBUTE TO BISCHOFF BY THE BAY

I always stay in the same Lombard Street motel up here. The place is just decent and anonymous. It’s in the only neighborhood where the ground is flat enough to stroll comfortably and the building is tall enough to afford a panoramic view of the Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge when they are not shrouded in fog.

Luckily the inn also is situated so that Alcatraz is hidden behind a building. Instead of looking at that grim rock, one has a cheery view of a green-and-white billboard advertising an Irish bar. I rarely go to bars but it is nice to imagine them full of colorful characters invented by William Saroyan.

Anyway, the view is spectacular. Something fictive in the indigenous light and palpable atmosphere lends the scenery a character you don’t find anywhere else. When you scan across the low, flat rooftops they order into solid, dark rectangles in floating perspective. Foliage and clouds mass into soft blobs whose dark and light sides are sharply separated without much tonal gradation between. Everything looks at once dramatically assertive and dreamily distanced.

Almost 30 years ago the art world was brought up short by a group of Bay Area painters introduced in an exhibition organized by Paul Mills for the Oakland Art Museum. In the midst of the triumph of Abstract Expressionist painting, these dozen men--most of whom had been AE devotees--had dared to return to painting recognizable subject matter. One of them was Elmer Bischoff, who is the subject of a traveling retrospective on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through next Sunday.

He and his fellow defectors from the elite and somewhat dictatorial ranks of the abstract camp appeared as a group of shrewd young Turks who had sliced themselves a piece of cake that could be at once eaten and had. Bischoff, along with fellow conspirators David Park, Richard Diebenkorn, James Weeks, Paul Wonner, William Theo Brown and a half-dozen more, blended the aggressive composition and banderillero brushwork of AE with figures, landscapes and interiors.

The radical crowd saw them as part of a figurative rebellion practiced more rigorously back East by Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Larry Rivers and that lot. (Remember when Larry Rivers seemed like a first-rate talent? Well, so did Johnny Rivers.)

Meantime back at the university campus, conservative faculties who garbed academicians’ souls in corduroy and black turtlenecks were absolutely ecstatic. Diebenkorn, Bischoff and Park were the wise men who would lead all tenured professor figurative painters to the land of milk and honey. (I was an art student at UCLA and I had the impression that that Bay Area Fig saved half the faculties’ marriages.)

Looking back, it all seems kind of quaint but the art world still works that way, plotting silly stratagems and style wars when it knows perfectly well that in the end something far more fundamental determines the lasting value of a work of art.

The Bischoff retrospective reminds us that memorable art somehow records a resonant response to a particular time and place. Of all his generation Bischoff (who is pushing 70) most clearly distills that view from the motel window. When you look at a work like his 1969 “Yellow Lampshade,” you are absolutely in The City at dusk. Buildings darken into elephantine gray rectangles. It’s still light but a couple have lit the lamp in anticipation of evening. They casually discuss where to go for a drink before dinner. Melancholy and tension hang in the air like the ghosts of forgotten arguments but there is nothing definite.

Capturing the mood of an American city at twilight is so rare an achievement that only Edward Hopper joins Bischoff in having struck the note. That, however, is not the best thing about these paintings. It is not even an issue that Bischoff pursued. Far more impressive is his capacity to make us appreciate the power of paint to act as a metaphor of the sensuality of all surfaces. Bischoff never attempts to represent fabric, flesh, stone or earth. He slathers on the pigment separating the dark from the light as the Lord does in the San Francisco sky, and lo, we have all of that plus a strong sense of the modern picture with a life of its own.

And there chez Bischoff lies the rub. He captures the muzzy grandiosity of The Bay with an admirable authenticity and a painterly savvy that insures these pictures continued life. Beyond that, however, he displays an odd laconic intensity that is maddeningly noncommittal. He paints a zaftig nude bathing in a pool beneath a roiling red sky with the fervor of a German Expressionist blissed-out on nature, but the figure has no sexual charge and the landscape has no Teutonic idealism.

If Bischoff were cool like, say, the American Luminists, he might get by as a mirror of cosmic detachment and as a matter of fact his landscapes are his least problematical works. But generally he pumps up this huge head of steam and refuses to cop to what it is about.

We do understand that he ruminates on other artists. A couple face off on a beach in the manner of Edvard Munch but Bischoff leaves out the Norwegian’s archetypal neurotic tension. We get Picasso without elegance, Alfred Pinkham Ryder without mysticism, Winslow Homer without heroism and Vuillard without tenderness or intimacy.

Bischoff ruminates about artists without historical allusion or temperamental affiliation. He meditates about art while refusing to come to grips with its grammar. Richard Diebenkorn--the most famous artist to evolve out of this tradition--made abstract-cum-figurative paintings that share in Bischoff’s thoughtfulness but Diebenkorn lets us know what he’s thinking about. You say to Diebenkorn’s art, “Hey, what is Dick thinking about?” and it replies, “Structure,” which is a reasonable response.

Bischoff’s art says it’s thinking and you ask “About what?” and it says, “Nothing.”

That’s not thinking, that’s brooding. That brooding is a typical Bay Area state of mind cannot be denied any more than the fact that brooding is a terrible vehicle for getting anywhere.

For 20 years Bischoff painted wonderful pictures, chopping out great hunks of space amid billowing clouds of atmosphere. They displayed virtually no evolution and staunchly refused to feel anything, rather like a West Coast incarnation of Fairfield Porter.

Then, in the early ‘70s Bischoff did not merely evolve, he metamorphosed. Turning as sharply on his heel as his initial volte-face away from abstraction, he whirled back and has been happily at that for 15 years.

The work is not quite abstract. It looks rather like angled or bird’s-eye views of desk tops littered with the expected stuff--rulers, magnifying glasses, coffee cups and art paraphernalia--except that nothing is defined. Without the anchoring horizon line of his figurative paintings the compositions float in a kind of cosmic swirl like early Kandinskys.

Still no anchoring structure, still an unsatisfactory combination of sensibilities. Plus ca change plus c’est alla same like Cincinnati. Bischoff paints better than ever and undoubtedly that has something to do with being unburdened of a commitment to subject matter.

But we used to be able to share his response to a great and eccentric city. The eccentricity of the new paintings is impenetrably personal.

So much said, no one should be dissuaded from seeing the work of such a gifted and enduring artist. If San Francisco seems far the show will materialize in November at the Laguna Beach Museum of Art, which organized it.