ARTIST OVERVIEW

Paul Wonner (1928-) is a San Francisco-based painter who is renowned for his figurative paintings from the 1950s and sixties and the elaborate still life works that he has been painting since the seventies. Wonner was an active participant in the Bay Area Figurative group, a loose association of artists, including Richard Diebenkorn, David Park, Elmer Bischoff, William Theophilius Brown, and James Weeks, who 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.

Wonner's painting from this period is distinguished by its use of the figure as a narrative presence, a creamy, impasto paint application, and the emphatic use of white to highlight the brilliance of his palette. According to art historian Caroline Jones, "the narrative richness, psychological nuances, and sheer ambiguity of [Wonner's] figurative works were unmatched by any of the first generation of Bay Area Figurative artists, with the possible exception of [Elmer] Bischoff."¹

Wonner settled in San Francisco after receiving his MA at the University of California, Berkeley. He and his partner, William Theophilius Brown, quickly became integrated into the artistic milieu centered on the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute). Encouraged by Park and Weeks, Wonner began to paint in the loose, figurative style of his contemporaries. The deeply expressed narratives that are characteristic of Wonner's work reveal the dual influences of David Park, who encouraged him to work from nature, and James Weeks, whose return to figuration in the mid-1950s led Wonner to do the same.

In 1956, Wonner began painting a series of male bathers and boys with bouquets. These paintings are prized for their dreamlike and melancholic sensibilities. The following year he began producing paintings with thickly scumbled and encrusted surfaces that reflect the influences of the French Intimist painters Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard. In these densely patterned interiors, the figure and ground are almost indistinguishable from one another. Wonner is also noted for his gouaches done around this time, which have a density and luminosity that is unusual for that particular medium.

In 1962, Wonner left the Bay Area to teach at the University of California, Los Angeles. By the end of the decade, he had abandoned his loose figurative style and began focusing exclusively on still life composition. These paintings are hot-colored and highly detailed and are done in the tradition of 17th-century Dutch super-realist painting.

Paul Wonner continues to live and work in San Francisco. His paintings are held in major public collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C., the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Oakland Museum of California.

^1. Caroline A. Jones, Bay Area Figurative Art 1950-1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 93.