ARTIST OVERVIEW

Elmer Bischoff (1916–1991) was a San Francisco-based painter renowned for his figurative paintings from the 1950s and 1960s. Bischoff is considered part of the first generation of Bay Area Figurative painters, who, along with Richard Diebenkorn, David Park, and James Weeks, deployed the lessons of non-objective, expressionist painting—the importance of gesture and the use of aggressive color—as a means of reengaging with reality-based subject matter.

Bischoff's figurative paintings are prized for their emotional intensity. Bischoff himself placed an emphasis on "feeling" in his work, stating that "a 'unity of feeling' is the principal end. …a condition of form which dissolves all tangible facts into intangibles of feeling."¹  Bischoff's masterful use of color and light to convey psychological states and his integration of figure and landscape contributed to the subliminal meaning and mystery expressed in his paintings. 

Born in Berkeley, Bischoff received his BA (1938) and MA (1939) from the University of California, Berkeley. In the early thirties and forties, he painted abstractly, exploring synthetic cubism and surrealism. After serving in the Air Force during World War II, he returned to the Bay Area and joined the faculty at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco (now the San Francisco Art Institute) in 1946. Bischoff taught alongside fellow teachers Park, Diebenkorn, Hassel Smith, and Clyfford Still at a time when non-objective painting dominated the curriculum. Already an accomplished abstractionist, he embraced abstract expressionism. In 1947, he received his first solo museum exhibition at San Francisco's California Palace of the Legion of Honor.

In 1952, Bischoff resigned from CSFA in protest of Hassel Smith's dismissal. A year later, he moved to Marysville, California, to teach at Yuba College for three years.  It was during this time that Bischoff left abstraction and began painting figuratively, a move that he likened to "the end of a love affair."²  Over the next twenty years, Bischoff created a body of work that married the lessons of action painting to with the emotional and psychological possibilities inherent in figuration. He returned to the Bay Area in 1956, chairing the graduate department at CSFA and later becoming a professor at UC Berkeley. By 1960, he had reached his most mature phase in which daring, inventive colors are combined with dashing, gestural brushwork that calls attention to the medium.  In a 1960 group exhibition of Bay Area art at New York's Staempfli Gallery, Fairfield Porter called Bischoff “the most magnificent performer of all the Californians seen in this city who have given up abstraction in favor of realism.”³

In the 1970s, Bischoff returned to abstraction, painting large acrylic abstractions that are notable for their lyrical arrangement of architectural and organic forms and their sophisticated palette. Bischoff retired from his professorship at UC Berkeley in 1985 and died six years later in 1991. Elmer Bischoff's paintings are held in major public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Oakland Museum of California.

^1.  Caroline A. Jones Bay Area Figurative Art 1950–1965 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), p. 23.
^2.  Ibid. p. 22.
^3.  As quoted by Bill Berkson in an exhibition statement for Berggruen Gallery, 2003.