David Park at Hackett-Freedman - San Francisco - art exhibition

This well-chosen exhibition of 35 works on canvas and paper from 1953 to 1960 spanned the final years of David Park's life and celebrated the well-known story of his return to figure painting in 1950, a turnaround that helped launch the Bay Area Figurative School (with Elmer Bischoff, Richard Diebenkorn and others). After an unsatisfying struggle with the high-minded version of Abstract Expressionism brought to San Francisco by Clyfford Still, Park (1911-1960) turned his eye to the everyday world. Wedding bravura paint handling to the portrayal of quotidian subjects, he conveyed the specificity of people and places without resorting to descriptive elaboration.

The earlier pieces in the exhibition suggest that Park was responding in part to the art of Max Beckmann, which was the subject of a retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1948 and another show, two years later, at Mills College in Oakland. Beckmann's influence looms particularly large in The Band (1955), which pictures a Dixieland combo. Color is subdued and space compressed, and the figures are firmly positioned with respect to one another in a manner reminiscent of Beckmann's structured figure groups of the late 1940s. In this painting, Park is revealed to be a painter of a "carving proclivity"--to use British critic Adrian Stokes's felicitous phrase--as his vigorous brushwork seems to almost chisel the figures into a kind of insistent presence that equates paint with flesh.

Although Park's palette turned toward an ebullient chromaticism in subsequent years, a carving approach to paint handling remained consistent in his work until health considerations forced him to give up oils in 1959. In works executed after 1955, we see Park's brushwork gaining velocity, giving increased drama and urgency to surfaces that seem to oscillate between intimate visual seduction and flamboyant declaration. This is most clearly evidenced in the large (almost 60 by 50 inches) painting titled Nudes and Ocean (1959), which features two stolid figures against a painterly froth created by the most aggressively reckless brushwork of any of Park's compositions. Although there is some suggestion that Park didn't consider Nudes and Ocean finished (it is unsigned), it remains an outstanding example of breathtaking painterly virtuosity.

The exhibition also offered an ample selection of Park's works on paper, including several figure drawings in ink wash and seven of the gouaches that he executed during the last year of his life, when illness virtually confined him to a chair. While the figure drawings sometimes betray the uninspired competence of routine exercises, the brightly colored gouaches, which typically are studies of the head, are radiantly succinct syntheses of innocent-seeming spontaneity and mature stoicism that bear out the exhibition's subtitle: "A Singular Humanity."

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