Works by Manuel Neri (left) and Nathan Oliveira (right) on view in "Concentric Circles"
Concentric Circles: Tracing the Radiance of Bay Area Figuration, on view at Pamela Walsh Gallery through June 22nd, takes a pragmatically broad view of a historical style. Paul Mills, who organized the 1957 Oakland Museum exhibition Contemporary Art Bay Area Figurative Painting, felt that Bay Area Figuration, which he initially called New Realism, was best defined as figurative painting made by artists who had engaged with and then rejected Abstract Expressionism. Despite that conviction, Mills included James Weeks—who never painted abstractly—in that first groundbreaking first show, modeling the kind of curatorial flexibility that permissions the notion of circles suggested by this show’s title.
Major paintings by early Bay Area Figurative artists, especially the holy trinity of David Park, Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff, rarely come to market. This scarcity of material makes curating a show challenging, but by expanding the perimeters of Bay Area Figuration to include artists loosely associated with it, and by including smaller oils, sculptures, and works on paper, Pamela Walsh has assembled a stimulating exhibition that opens up fresh conversations. The effort and passion that went into this show are more than evident.
The overlapping “circles” defining the exhibition are broadly drawn. Bay Area Figuration, in its first generation, flourished between 1950 and 1965: Concentric Circles includes work from as late as 2009: a drawing by Manuel Neri. It also includes works by Wayne Thiebaud, whose art grew out of his career in commercial illustration, and Raimonds Staprans—still painting at 98—who will tell you he is an abstract artist whose work just happens to resemble recognizable forms. Nathan Oliveira, who related best to European modernism—especially Bacon and Giacometti—and tended to roll his eyes when his work was referred to as Bay Area Figurative, is represented by a diverse group of works including a small sculpture and two late paintings. Frank Lobdell, an abstract painter who thought David Park’s first figurative experiments of the early 1950s were a joke, made some magnificently quirky life drawings in the 1960s, and three examples are on view in Concentric Circles.
At a discussion held on May 10th, three panelists—Ted Barrow, Matt Gonzalez and Emilio Vilalba—were asked to choose and speak about a work that stood out for them. Their choices and comments helped spotlight the range and variety of Walsh’s selections. Bay Area Figuration, in the broadest sense, was about Post-Abex figurative art that was in some way problematic and the pieces the panelists chose fit that description quite nicely.
Paul Wonner, Boy with a Flower, 1961,Oil on canvas, 46 in. x 46 in.
Matt Gonzalez, an artist, collector and art writer, chose Paul Wonner’s 1961 Boy with a Flower. Sitting directly in front of the painting, which he praised as "beautiful," Gonzalez smiled when Ted Barrow mentioned what the painter/critic Fairfield Porter had once observed about Wonner: “His paintings are a luminous iceberg-lettuce green.” That witty observation came alive in the presence of “Boy with a Flower,” in which a grey and pink boy haunts the foreground of an creamy green landscape. Since Wonner was one of the 12 painters included in the 1957 exhibition, he could be said to be part of the original circle of Bay Area Figuration, and his broad, responsive Park-style brushwork and semi-abstract figuration mark his connection to the early style.
Ted Barrow, an artist historian who is also an avid skateboarder, spoke about Bruce McGaw’s 1960 Portrait of Monterey Market, Berkeley. McGaw, who at 22 was the youngest artist in the 1957 exhibition, and who just recently passed away, was a multifaceted and complex artist. By 1960 he had already moved away from the mainstream style. McGaw's depiction of the Monterey Market, which Barrow praised for its sense of locale and familiarity. includes a rear view of a parked car with a low hanging rear axle. Barrow, looking for an analogy, cited a Paris street scene by Childe Hassam, and commented that the car’s rear end was not unlike the carriage horse’s asses parked on the left of the Hassam painting. With that remark, another circle was created.
Roland Petersen, Jet Trail with Garden, 1960,Gouache on paper, 30 in. x 22 in.
Emilio Vilalba, an artist whose first solo show recently opened at Dolby Chadwick Gallery, chose a strange one-off double landscape from 1960 by Roland Petersen, who is still painting at 99. Titled Jet Trail with Garden the image, which is made from two sheets and signed twice, has an eccentric foreground “garden” that is full of dashes, globs and splatters: it is part Seurat and part Pollock. There are hints of Petersen’s characteristic Cartesian landscape setting—stripes indicating jet trails, a horizon and furrows—that sketch perspectival structure, but Jet Trail with Garden is a wild painting by any standard. Vilalba, whose own paintings pulse with the energy of pure pigment lavishly applied, was clearly jazzed by seeing what a Danish sailor taught by Hans Hofmann could do when he cut loose.
Henrietta Berk, Excavators, 1959-62,Oil on canvas, 30 in. x 30 in.
In a 1962 ARTFORUM review of paintings by Henrietta Berk—who has two paintings in Concentric Circles—the artist/critic James Monte argued that Berk’s paintings, and Bay Area Figuration had already become academic:
Her works reflect the now academic approach to figure and landscape painting found throughout the West Coast. This approach to painting has become a method in the hands of virtually every art department in every art school, university, and college in the state of California.
Seen from 2025 Monte’s judgement seems harsh. Bay Area Figuration did indeed spread out and generate shared approaches and epigones. But it also promulgated David Park’s notion that “Painting should be a troublesome thing,” stimulating a great deal of experimentation and originality. Concentric Circles, for that reason, is a show that feels both historic and fresh at the same time.
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Concentric Circles includes work by Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, Nathan Oliveira, Joan Brown, Theophilus Brown, Paul Wonner, James Weeks, Manuel Neri, Frank Lobdell, Bruce McGaw, Henrietta Berk, Wayne Thiebaud, Raimonds Staprans, and Kim Frohsin.