BAY AREA FIGURATIVE ART 1950-1965 <i> by Caroline A. Jones (University of California Press: $47.50</i> , <i> cloth; $27.50</i> ,<i> paper; 231 pp.; 118 color illustrations) </i>

The collective impact of a group of 10 artists working in the San Francisco Bay Area between 1950 and 1965 was such that they ought to be grouped as a school, argues Carolyn Jones, curator of the traveling Bay Area Figurative Art exhibit. Their unifying impulse, she maintains, was a reaction against the preoccupation with abstraction that dominated the art world at the time. In place of the Abstract Expressionist emphasis on the artist’s inner life as the source of meaning and imagery, the figurative artists returned to more objective ground.

Jones divides the movement into three “generations”: David Park, Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff and James Weeks; Nathan Oliveira, Paul Wonner and Theophilus Brown; and Bruce McGaw, Manuel Neri and Joan Brown, who tied the movement in with Funk and Beat.

Jones’ accessible style is clearly intended to increase a sense of identity and pride in California art appreciators. In Paul Wonner’s “The Kitchen (Breakfast),” pictured on this page, Jones points out the references to the French painters Bonnard and Vuillard: Bonnard favored the pronounced horizontal composition, while the detailing of the intimate scene recalls Vuillard’s interiors.