{"data":{"id":"991","type":"artist","attributes":{"id":991,"topgoose_id":1010,"tms_id":991,"display_name":"David Park","sort_name":"Park David","display_date":"1911–1960","begin_date":"1911","end_date":"1960","biography":"\u003cp\u003eDavid Park employed strategies associated with abstraction in his painting \u003ca href=\"/collection/works/3167\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eFour Men\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e: broad, rough brushstrokes; passages of built-up paint juxtaposed with less worked areas; and a strikingly frontal composition in which everything feels pressed up against the surface of the picture plane. Indeed, the upper-right and lower-left corners of this grandly scaled canvas verge on total abstraction. The four men’s physiques are slablike and their facial features rendered in simplified slashes. While the scene is representational, its meaning is inscrutable; the three men on the beach do not appear to be interacting, and a fourth rows away from the shore, his back turned. If the emotional tenor of the painting is elusive, however, Park’s animated brushwork and saturated, jewel-toned palette endow it with a moody lyricism, perhaps even undertones of psychological drama.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe painting’s integration of figuration and abstraction was a signal element of Park’s important contribution to the history of American art. His earliest work was nonrepresentational, but by 1949 he had abandoned Abstract Expressionism— then the dominant mode of painting in the United States—as overly elitist. His rejection was not complete, however; he imparted action painting’s emphasis on spontaneity and unconstrained gestures to depictions of recognizable subject matter, usually figures but also still lifes and interiors. Together with his contemporaries \u003ca href=\"/artists/356\"\u003eRichard Diebenkorn\u003c/a\u003e and \u003ca href=\"/artists/121\"\u003eElmer Bischoff\u003c/a\u003e, Park was a pioneer\nof the figurative painting movement\nthat burgeoned in the San Francisco Bay\nArea in the 1950s and 1960s.\u003c/p\u003e","on_view":false,"artport":false,"biennial":true,"collection":true,"ulan_id":"500028164","wikidata_id":"Q3018587","created_at":"2017-08-30T16:02:47.000-04:00","updated_at":"2026-04-10T07:04:01.074-04:00","links":{"artworks":"/api/artists/991/artworks","exhibitions":"/api/artists/991/exhibitions"}}}}