An Artist’s Best Work, Figuratively Speaking

Two dates separated by 20 years loom large in Bay Area painter Elmer Bischoff’s career, which is currently being surveyed at the Orange County Museum of Art. One signaled a fresh beginning, the other was more equivocal.

The first date is 1952. Bischoff (1916-1991), following the lead of his friend and colleague David Park, quit teaching at the California School of Fine Arts that year and, more importantly, quit making abstract paintings. He began to turn intuitive principles of Abstract Expressionist painting toward figurative ends. Specific, recognizable imagery now shared the pictorial stage with the vigorous, independent life of an intensely painted surface. Hans Hofmann merged with Edvard Munch in this surprising new work; Mark Rothko met Pierre Bonnard.

The second turning point came in 1972--although turning point may be too narrow a term. Crisis of confidence is more like it. After two decades, Bischoff was stuck.

He, Park, Richard Diebenkorn and a few others had developed what came to be called Bay Area Figurative painting in the 1950s. Promoted as a spirited regional alternative to the lethargic second generation of New York School abstraction, Bay Area Figurative painting had put San Francisco briefly on the national art map. But the Pop, Minimal and Conceptual art revolutions of the 1960s, which were centered in New York and Los Angeles, yawned like a chasm that Bischoff could neither ignore nor cross. After nearly 18 months of dire indecision, he made an unexpected choice: He returned to abstract painting.

In the Orange County show, organized by the Oakland Museum of California, where it was seen last fall, those late abstractions provide an uneasy coda to Bischoff’s estimable career. Just eight paintings sum up the 1970s and 1980s--half as many as chronicle the extraordinary two-year period of 1957 and 1958, when Bischoff was working at his peak. It isn’t that the abstractions are bad; he was too technically gifted a painter, especially with color, for that. They just seem diffident and withdrawn.

The exhibition is strongest in laying out Bischoff’s strongest work. Twenty-five of its 52 paintings date from the 1950s. They include some of his finest pictures of bathers by the sea and women in gardens, images whose subject matter merges seamlessly with his lyrically improvisational paint handling and sensuous color.

The subject matter is straightforward. The men and women who populate Bischoff’s figurative paintings are never individualized. Typical are the “Two Figures at the Seashore” (1957), whose faces are obscured by the harsh shadow of a sunlit afternoon on the Pacific. These are not genre paintings, meant to realistically record social activities at the beach or in the garden. Instead, recreation is exactly that: an opportunity for re-creation.

The subject of these paintings is Eden before the Fall, a lost Golden Age, a mythic world of peace and harmony remote from (but tethered to) the trauma of the everyday, which can only live in the imaginative realm of art. It’s the same subject that proved so attractive to French painters at the turn of the 20th century, from adventurous Modernists like Cezanne and Matisse to more conservative painters like Puvis de Chavannes. Bischoff made paintings as a kind of refuge. The anguished knowledge of loss finds reparation in an inspired immersion in chromatic poetry.

The exhibition opens with three confident abstract paintings dating from 1949 to 1952. They’re helpful in showing Bischoff’s assimilation of Hofmann-style principles, in which the canvas is a contested field of abstract pictorial forces that are intuitively wrestled into dynamic repose. The first gallery also includes early figurative works, where the influence of Munch and Toulouse-Lautrec is plain. Bischoff had admired their paintings in 1951 retrospectives at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco.

What the show leaves out, though, is the generative impulse found in Surrealist-inspired paintings like Rothko’s pivotal “Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea” (1944), which the San Francisco Museum of Art acquired in 1946 after Rothko’s solo exhibition there. The famous picture, whose fragile abstract personages emerging from an ethereal miasma suggested a mystically inclined ache for rebirth, was a touchstone for many Bay Area artists. As the world shuddered through the collective nervous breakdown of war and holocaust that made hash of Enlightenment rationalism, they were scratching around in the ashes of primal myth, searching for a new start.

The Bischoff exhibition catalog, which includes excellent essays by critic Bill Berkson and curator Susan Landauer, reproduces several Bischoff paintings from 1947 whose affinity to the apocalyptic Rothko canvas is clear. Abstract painting seemed the necessary avenue to follow, and for several years he did. The sudden 1952 U-turn, led by Park, coincided with a larger questioning of the primacy of abstract art. (For a celebrated example, see the terrific show of Willem de Kooning’s Expressionist drawings of women, which rose to a crescendo that year, currently at L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art.) That it would take the form Bischoff’s paintings did still seems unexpected: The slow swirl by the edge of his sea gave birth to bathers.

Bischoff’s figures are never merely described by paint; instead, they exist as the physical stuff of his paint-loaded brush strokes, just as the interlocking forms in his abstractions do. When a shadow falls across a woman’s shoulder, it’s a slather of magenta-blue-brown paint colliding with a rising wave of red-ochre color. The highlight on a cheek wells up from beneath dense surrounding layers of blue, gray, green and violet. A yellow sky carves out the vivid blue silhouettes of trees in a landscape.

The technique, which was pushed to an extreme by Bischoff’s most celebrated student, Joan Brown, is like sculpting with paint in two dimensions. Most of the classic works in the show also share a loosely cruciform composition on a square (or almost square) canvas. Stability is embodied. Color has physical weight and presence. The result is an optical gravity.

In the 1970s, when Bischoff returned to abstraction, he still approached paint (now acrylic, rather than oil) and color and canvas in this material way. The late abstractions seem less like improvisations than intuitive constructions. Broken fields of choppy color have been worked and reworked, fussed over and goaded. Generalized cosmology replaces the Golden Age iconography of his figurative work--but the form feels stale.

Art, of course, had undergone its own collective nervous breakdown in the tumultuous 1960s, when possibilities for the future seemed bleak. Painting took the brunt, because it was the archetype of what art had been before. Artists turned to plastic, lead, felt, rubber--every material under the sun except paint and canvas in search of a way forward.

No wonder Bischoff’s late abstractions seem hermit-like and detached. In a real sense they were. Even now, at a time when painting has ceased to be a controversial issue for new art, they gesture in our direction from a faraway place.

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“Grand Lyricist: The Art of Elmer Bischoff,” Orange County Museum of Art, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach, (949) 759-1122, through May 19. Closed Monday.