David Park
1911–1960
David Park employed strategies associated with abstraction in his painting Four Men: 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.
The 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 Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff, Park was a pioneer of the figurative painting movement that burgeoned in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1950s and 1960s.
Introduction
David Park (March 17, 1911 – September 20, 1960) was an American painter and a pioneer of the Bay Area Figurative Movement in painting during the 1950s.
Wikidata identifier
Q3018587
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed December 7, 2024.
Country of birth
United States
Roles
Artist, painter
ULAN identifier
500028164
Names
David Park
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed December 7, 2024.
