This generously illustrated volume is the first comprehensive publication devoted to the powerfully expressive work of David Park (1911–60). Best known as the founder of Bay Area Figurative art, Park moved from Boston to California at the age of seventeen and spent most of his adult life in and around San Francisco. In the immediate postwar years, like many avant-garde American artists, he engaged with Abstract Expressionism and painted non-objectively. In a moment of passion in 1949, he made the radical decision to abandon nearly all of his abstract canvases at the Berkeley city dump and return to the human figure, in so doing marking the beginning of the Bay Area Figurative movement. The astonishingly powerful paintings he made in the decade that followed brought together his long-held interest in classic subjects such as portraiture, domestic interiors, musicians, rowers, and bathers with lush, gestural paint handling and an extraordinary sense of color. In 1958–59 Park reached his expressive peak, reveling in the sensuous qualities of paint to create intensely physical, psychologically charged, and deeply felt canvases. This fertile period cut short by illness in 1960, Park transferred his creative energy to other mediums when he could no longer work on canvas. In the last months of his life, bedridden, he produced an extraordinary thirty-foot-long felt-tip-pen scroll and a poignant series of gouaches. Published to accompany the first major museum exhibition of Park’s work in more than thirty years, David Park: A Retrospective traces the full arc of the artist’s career, from his early social realist and cubist-inspired efforts of the 1930s to his mature figurative paintings of the 1950s and his astounding final works on paper. An overview of Park’s full body of work by Janet Bishop, SFMOMA’s Thomas Weisel Family Curator of Painting and Sculpture, will be joined by approximately ninety full-color plates of paintings and works on paper; an essay by Tara McDowell on the figure drawing sessions held by Park, Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, Frank Lobdell, and others in their studios starting in 1953; short essays on Park’s scroll, his gouaches, and the portraits that Imogen Cunningham and Park made of each other; and an illustrated chronology. Published in association with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Exhibition schedule: Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth: June 2–September 8, 2019 Kalamazoo Institute of Arts: December 21, 2019–March 15, 2020 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: April 11–September 7, 2020

In this beautifully illustrated biography, compiled from comprehensive and sweeping interviews, Nancy Boas traces Parks resolute search for a new kind of figuration, one that would penetrate abstract expressionisms thickly layered surfaces and infuse them with human presence.

A mesmerizing, deeply moving portrait of the life and works of one of America's most important twentieth-century painters. A half century after his death, David Park (1911–1960) is recognized as one of America's most important twentieth–century painters. He was the first of the brilliant post–World War II generation of artists to break with Abstract Expressionism's hegemony and return to painting recognizable subjects, most powerfully the human figure. Park's original cohorts of Bay Area Figurative painters were his close friends Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, and Hassel Smith. All outlived him—Smith by nearly fifty years—and enjoyed recognition and fame during their lifetimes. Park's reputation is just now fully coming into its own. In David Park, Painter, Park's younger daughter, writer Helen Park Bigelow, paints a mesmerizing, deeply moving portrait of her father's life and early, difficult death. Park left high school in New England without graduating and came west in order to paint. He married Lydia (Deedie) Newell when he was nineteen and was the father of two by the time he was twenty–two. We are brought into a family rich with moral conviction, ingenuity, smart and gifted friends, music, and art: four complex people guided and inspired by values of integrity. Those same values guided and inspired David Park's painting. Yet this is much more than an artist biography. David Park, Painter is a skillful blend of memoir and observations about life in the Bay Area just before and just after World War II, when some of America's most original, even radical, artists and writers gathered there. This close–up portrayal is unlike other accounts of artists. It is the story of a family built on the love and dedication of one man who held nothing back from his art, and of the spirit of the wife and daughters who supported him. Richard Armstrong, in reflecting on Park's generation of artists in his foreword to this beautiful book, observes that David Park, Painter is "especially valuable as we persist in seeking to make real and human the commanding artistic figures."

Background information on the artist accompanies the scroll in which he depicts his childhood memories of Boston

"Should be the classic, central, definitive work on the emergence of Bay Area Figurative painting."--Paul Mills, author of The New Figurative Painting of David Park