ART REVIEW : Park--Trying to Meld Two Different Worlds

Maybe, after all, life is just one big pun. David Park’s last work was a scroll depicting a park. It is a celebratory affair full of strolling sailors, lounging girl-watchers, rowers rowing and young mothers pushing prams. Park walks us through the whole park, smiling at the joys of the commonplace, until we come out the other side on a city street blocked by a “Dead End” sign. Park affixed a mordantly humorous skull-and-bones image to the traffic signal. He made the scroll--really a long colored drawing--in 1960 while convalescing from a back operation. A few months later he died of cancer at age 49.

An important retrospective of Park’s paintings and drawings is on display at the Laguna Art Museum to May 7. Coupled with a lovely survey of Richard Diebenkorn’s drawings at the County Museum of Art, it adds up to a rare in-depth look at two of the artists who launched the influential Bay Area Figurative school in the ‘50s. Anyone vaguely interested in the subject will want to see both shows.

Park’s career as brushy figurative painter lasted barely 10 years and the show--accomplished as it is--gives you the feeling he ran out of time before resolving the problem he had set himself. Maybe we all do.

The problem for Park and his mates--Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff and James Weeks--lay in trying to put together two worlds that are essentially incompatible. One was the heroic arena of the Abstract Expressionists with its grandiose flourishes of pure paint, the other was the world of observed things existing in space--the traditional sphere of realistic painting.

Park came by the problem honestly. Early in his career he’d been a Social Realist who incorporated some of the stylizations of Regionalism. One early painting of violinists is on hand to make the point. The artist abandoned realism for years of pure abstraction but was so dissatisfied with the results that he destroyed all that he’d made. There must have been something, however, that continued to fascinate him about abstraction because he tried to come to grips with it in his new quasi-representational paintings. Maybe it was the musical qualities of abstract art he liked. He was a musician who played piano in a little jazz band. The improvisatory qualities of ‘50s jazz have long been equated with the inventiveness of Abstract Expressionism.

But he was also a regular guy who liked the everyday laid-back life style implied by a public park. In this show, his first attempts at putting the two together come as something of a surprise. In previous exhibitions Park has looked like a quintessential Bay Area artist, helping to invent a style that became the very trademark of someone who left his art in San Francisco.

But this exhibition was organized by Richard Armstrong for New York’s Whitney Museum and through some alchemy of curatorial wizardry, Park’s art is linked to Europe and the East Coast. We are conscious as never before that Park grew up in Boston. Look at “Kids on Bikes” and you catch Park thinking fleetingly of Ben Shahn. Look at a WASPy “Portrait of PGD” and Milton Avery, Fairfield Porter and Alex Katz waft to mind.

Park’s pictures of people lounging at bus stops, in cocktail lounges or tea dances resemble nothing so much as an updated, emigrated version of the urban intimacy Bonnard and Vuillard found in turn-of-the-century Paris.

This early phase is resolved and likable, combining gently detached observation, artistic integrity and probing wit. A fondness for a warm, browned middle-tone palette lends everything a touch of wry melancholy. It is both stylized and accurate. The girl dancing in a red-and-green striped blouse in “Sophomore Society” is reduced to almost pure pattern but we are sure we know her from the old days. Danced the Lindy with that chick. Yup.

These pictures are comfortable with themselves in a way later work is not. Canvases grow in scale and ambition until they take on proportions that remind one of Willem de Kooning. They are full of slam-bang brushwork and combed textures. Because they cling to the figure they inevitably recall German Expressionism without expressing its Sturm und Drang.

Some of Park’s best paintings come from these scenes of canoeists, skinny-dippers and posed female models but they exist in a kind of state of unresolved agitation, never quite angry enough to be German, never quite stylish enough to be French, never quite stoic enough to be American.

Big figure paintings like the red-eared “Man in a T-Shirt” grab onto big boulder scale and impressive simplification of drawing. Carve out an arm with five big strokes. But you have to admire such paintings while constantly brushing away questions about what they are saying. Because they are not ferociously emotional, sometimes the arbitrary treatment of a significant detail like a face just looks silly.

In the end, the experience has to be that of watching Park struggle to make these impossible pictures that try to play jazz and give you the weather report at the same time. A lot of wise people will tell you it’s not doable, so you admire Park for his tenacity and the degree of success he manages. “Four Women” is full of mistakes and discontinuities but it manages to hold together a quartet of models each from a different perceptual world.

It would have been safer for Park to stick with his smaller pictures, but if he hadn’t taken the risk we’d never have seen the energy he captured in a couple of leaping basketball players or the mystery he found in the simple act of paddling a canoe across the lagoon.