40 YEARS OF BISCHOFF’S ‘BEST SHOTS’

“I don’t want to make allowances for my paintings, like a mother. What I look for is a persuasive power, a sort of conclusiveness,” said artist Elmer Bischoff.

At 70 years of age and 11 months into a traveling retrospective that recently opened at the Laguna Art Museum, the Bay Area painter has had a lot of time to reflect on his life in art and on the 40 years of his work assembled in the exhibition.

“At first it was startling to encounter things that I hadn’t see for years. In a few cases, I had almost no recollection of them,” Bischoff said during an interview at the museum. “But now the show is familiar and it feels good. I gave every painting my best shot. I don’t want to repaint any of them.”

Bischoff attributes his satisfaction with the exhibition to being “pretty careful” about what he has released from his studio. If he is uncertain about a new painting, he puts it away and trusts his first response after a period of storage.

“Elmer Bischoff: 1947-1985” was organized by guest curator Robert M. Frash for the Laguna Art Museum and would have begun its national tour there if the museum’s expansion hadn’t forced a change of schedule. Instead, the show opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, traveled across the country and returned to Laguna, where it closes Jan. 18.

Two small Abstract Expressionist oils from the late ‘40s lead into subsequent figurative works and finally to new abstractions that teem with odd shapes and painterly gestures. The show’s chronology reveals an artist who paints figures when abstraction is in vogue and switches back to abstraction when figures return to fashion.

But Bischoff doesn’t present himself as a rebel. To hear him tell it, he is simply a hard-working, thoroughly committed painter who had the astonishing good luck to land a teaching job at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) during a watershed period.

“I had been in the service for 4 1/2 years, so my development was very delayed,” he said. “When I arrived there (in 1946) everyone was very open, very available. There was so much in the air. It was just ideal.” Working with fellow instructors Richard Diebenkorn, David Park, Frank Lobdell and Hassel Smith, Bischoff dived into the West Coast’s wellspring of Abstract Expressionism.

The group spawned its own energy, veered away from the reigning style and became known as the Bay Area Figurative School. While their independence led the artists to be branded mavericks, Bischoff refutes that characterization.

“We didn’t see our own work in that light,” he said. “We couldn’t have written a manifesto or paraded with banners. We thought we were pretty normal.” But they were aware of “departing from rules and regulations” set forth by Eastern taste makers and of “running a risk of being considered reactionary nostalgia lovers,” he said.

“I didn’t get good reviews. I was not looked upon with favor, though collectors I never knew bought my work through Staempfli Gallery in New York,” he recalled.

Bischoff now sees his own Abstract Expressionist work as “a bit transitional” and derivative. “I had been painting in the manner of Picasso and Braque with no voice of my own. Beginning with my figurative painting in 1952, I came into my own way of seeing.”

He resigned from the California School of Fine Arts in late 1951 to accept a post at Yuba College in Marysville but returned in 1956, serving as chairman of the graduate department until 1963. Bischoff moved on to teach at UC Berkeley (his alma mater) from 1963 to 1985, and is now emeritus professor of art there.

A congenial man of no pretense, Bischoff is no part of a contemporary scene that promotes artists as if they were rock stars and presents retrospectives of 22-year-olds. “I grew up with the idea that painting was an end in itself and that I could end up with a studio full of paintings. I have never come to trust sales. The money is all a bonus,” he said.

Art world approval is an equally sticky business. “Suddenly it seems that because there has been a great outcry against the emptiness of Neo-Expressionism (and the venality of the art scene), we (older painters) have become moral and exemplary. I don’t trust any of this,” he said.

Asked about his continuing fascination with painting, Bischoff said, “Anything you stick to has multiple attractions.” Though his youthful “big moment” was being concertmaster of his junior high school orchestra, he found that music “shut down” for him in high school. His enthusiastic involvement with a faculty-student jazz band at the California School of Fine Arts was “limited” also.

“Painting is just the reverse,” he said. “It always promises more, always opens up. You don’t think you are barking up the wrong tree; that’s part of the attraction. Painting always gave me the feeling that it was terribly worthwhile to do, that you were exercising the best in yourself.”

Like his former colleague Richard Diebenkorn, Bischoff has long since turned from figurative painting to abstraction. But there the similarity ends. “I’m too much of a romantic to paint like Diebenkorn,” Bischoff said. “I could never work with that lean a world.”

Instead, he wrestles with action-packed canvases that counter painterly explosions with contained passages. “I go back and forth, working to keep the paintings from being too rambunctious or too controlled. I work for coherence but not so tight that I lose the vigor,” he said.

“My only requirement is that the work be potent. It must have a presence and present something not seen or known before.”