A Romantic With a Passion for Color

Elmer Bischoff wasn’t the most famous of 20th century San Francisco Bay Area painters, but in his own idealistic and individualistic way, he loomed bright.

At least that is the message of Susan Landauer, chief curator at the San Jose Museum of Art and guest curator of “Grand Lyricist: The Art of Elmer Bischoff,” an exhibition on view at the Orange County Museum of Art through May 19.

“Bischoff’s brushwork was so dreamy and melting that the term I’ve conceived for his work is ‘liquid light,’” Landauer said. “He was truly a colorist. He’d create these passages of color that move across his canvas in an ever-shifting interplay--perhaps 20 hues in a small radius of a few inches.”

Bischoff, who was born in Berkeley in 1916, studied, taught and painted in the Bay Area for most of his life. He died in 1991. He was a founder of the Bay Area Figurative group of the 1950s, along with his better-known colleagues Richard Diebenkorn and David Park.

The exhibition, which was organized by the Oakland Museum of California, features nearly 70 canvases that trace the history of Bischoff’s work, from its Abstract Expressionist bent of the ‘40s to the hotly colored figurative scenes of the ‘50s and Bischoff’s return to abstraction of a more complex and frenetic sort in the ‘70s. Landauer’s book, “Elmer Bischoff: The Ethics of Paint,” serves as the exhibition catalog.

Included in the exhibition, “Woman With Dark Blue Sky” (1959), “Figure and Red Wall” (1955) and “Blue Clouds” (1963) typify Bischoff’s blend of figuration and abstraction, his signature synthesis of the human form with expanses of luxuriant, thickly smeared paint.

Indeed, it was Bischoff’s fluid sensuality that set him apart from Diebenkorn and Park.

“As Bill Berkson writes in the introduction to my book, if Park was the classicist and Diebenkorn the modernist, Bischoff was the romantic,” Landauer said. “Bischoff believed an artist could transmit his own feeling into paint. His method of handling paint was spontaneous, unpremeditated.”

If pigment stirred his soul, the Bay Area owned Bischoff’s heart. Berkeley was his lifelong muse.

In the ‘30s, Bischoff studied art at UC Berkeley, a rare outpost of European-leaning modernism during the Depression, when American popular taste embraced realism and homespun regional art. He ended up teaching at UC Berkeley too, for 22 years. He refused to leave the Bay Area for New York, going against common career wisdom.

“Bischoff was underappreciated in his lifetime,” Landauer said. “He said he could only paint in the Bay Area. I certainly would like to see him transcend the regional tag of a ‘California painter’--but he was attached to a sense of place. He had a feel for the hills and the expanse of the bay.”

Music also informed his art, according to Landauer. Bischoff was a jazz trumpeter. His loose, highly gestural style smacks of jazz improvisation, even in simple compositions of a figure in a room or a garden or on the shore.

“He could make hopelessly mundane subjects feel fresh,” Landauer said. “It was like Charlie Parker or Miles Davis doing improvisations on a familiar tune like ‘Over the Rainbow.’”

In 1957, Bischoff, Diebenkorn and Park gained national attention when the Oakland Museum mounted “Contemporary Bay Area Figurative Painting.” Seventeen years later, Bischoff made an abrupt decision to abandon the figurative work with which he was most identified, returning to abstraction.

“It was a matter of survival in the studio, as was his move from abstraction to figurative painting in 1952,” Landauer said. “Bischoff simply felt he had run dry. At the time, his figurative work was selling well. His New York gallery, Staempfli, dropped him after he made the change.

“That’s why I used the word ‘ethics’ in the title of my book,” Landauer said. “Bischoff would not merely crank work out. He believed in being true to himself and his integrity of vision. He never did falter in his convictions through the many art trends that have come and gone. In that sense he was absolutely a risk-taker.”

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“Grand Lyricist: The Art of Elmer Bischoff” at Orange County Museum of Art, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. (949) 759-1122. Tuesdays-Sundays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. $5, adults; $4, seniors and students; children younger than 16, free. Through May 19.