Elmer Bischoff is best known as a prominent member of the Bay Area Figuratives. Along with David Park and Richard Diebenkorn, Bischoff completed what Susan Landaur calls “the founding triad of the group” of vividly expressive painters who at mid-century formed a distinctive figurative style to compete with New York’s Abstract Expressionism [Susan Landauer, Elmer Bischoff: The Ethics of Paint (2001), p. 3] While all three would flirt with pure abstraction at various points in their careers, the Bay Area school is properly credited with maintaining the lineage of observational painting during a period of radical modernism. Bischoff described his attraction both to expressionism and to figuration in the 1960s: “My aim has been to have the paint on the canvas play a double role – one as an alive, sensual thing in itself, and the other conveying a response to the subject. Between the two is the tightrope.” [Ibid., pp. 3-4] Bischoff traversed this tightrope several times in his career, at some moments finding a cubist idiom, at times working in a de Kooning-like vein; in others his work evokes Kandinsky and even Kirchner. As may perhaps be said of the other Bay Area Figuratives, Bischoff’s path through this thicket of influences was uniquely his own, stamped always by his bold palette and painterly approach.
Bischoff was born in 1916 in Berkeley, California, to conservative parents, themselves second-generation Californians. Intending to follow his father’s wishes that he study architecture, Bischoff enrolled at the Unveristy of California Berkeley in 1934. Then as now, Berkeley was highly regarded academically, but in particularly its fine art department was lauded for its progressive program. Bischoff could not have arrived at a better time: one of Hans Hofmann’s favored lieutenants, Vaclav Vytlacil, began lecturing there in 1928. Vytlacil added to the university slide collection a vast trove of images of German Expressionism The same progressive visionary that appointed Vytalcil—Worth Ryder, appointed in 1927—also invited Hofmann to visit in 1930. It was Hofmann’s first visit to the United States, and certainly among the factors that motivated the great teacher and painter to move permanently to the United States, as he did in 1933, subsequently influencing a generation of American painters.
Hofmann is among the short list of painters who are better known for their influence as teachers than as artists – along with Robert Henri and perhaps a few others—but his work itself is instructive in examining the genesis of the Bay Area School. In addition to Hofmann’s famous “push-pull” method, his deference to intense, even abrasive colors is more rightly the lineage of Bischoff, Park, and Diebenkorn than the New York School. Despite all the power of scale and gesture, the mature work of de Kooning and Pollack is relatively muted in value compared to their west coast contemporaries.
When Alfred Barr’s expansive Picasso retrospective visited San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art in 1940, Bischoff was an eager visitor – nonetheless, he was already a capable practitioner of his own adapted cubism. The museum would also give major solo shows to Arshile Gorky, Hofmann, Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still in the 1940s – as Landauer points out, a full decade before any New York museum so recognized them [Ibid., p. 28] While New York may have considered Northern California remote, in the 1930s and 40s it was in fact a hotbed of vanguard modernism.
In this crucible, Elmer Bischoff’s mature style began to form. After a few tepid attempts at architecture, he moved fully and decisively into painting, and almost immediately into full-blown modernism. “When Elmer went ‘modern’ in college, [he and his parents] became completely estranged,” Bischoff’s brother said later. “My father never forgave him, even on his deathbed.” [Ibid., p. 14] That modernism, however, ranged considerably, from painterly still lifes to radically flattened cubist arrangements. Very quickly, however, the young artist found his footing with color – rich, tube-fresh and generously applied. In 1939, he emerged from Berkeley with a Master’s degree, a young bride, a teaching job in Sacramento, and a full berth of modernist modes and approaches. The next few years would form an interruption in his career—his intense encounter with Picasso in 1940 was certainly eclipsed by the profoundly affecting years in the military. But for Bischoff, these many influences and approaches did not demand resolution, but instead played out through a career on that vast tightrope of high modernism.