David Park (American, 1911–1960) was a painter and founding member of the Bay Area Figurative Movement, known for his thickly painted, intensely colored portraits. Born in Boston, Park moved to Los Angeles in 1928 to study at the Otis Art Institute for a year before dropping out. He went on to teach at the San Francisco Art Institute for many years, where he met at befriended fellow painters Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff. "In his conclusion to the catalogue essay for the 1985 David Park exhibition at Salander - O'Reilly, the renowned critic and curator Henry Geldzahler wrote, 'Adolph Gottlieb once wrote that people are always crying for a return to the figure, but no one seems to be interested in going forward to it. I suggest that this was exactly David Park's genius. He remade the human presence for his generation, a generation that was full of despair at man's inhumanity, and full of hope that man's noblest values would prevail.'' ... As Geldzahler elaborated 'Park's special gift as an artist was in the sureness with which he was able to wield a heavily loaded brush to create, with the building blocks of his brushstrokes, convincing equivalences to the ways we see and feel the figure in a natural setting. Richard Diebenkorn has written 'He was ... in love with oil paint ...which he manipulated with frank relish, creating from it his powerful and loving statements affirming the possibilities of a densely loaded and vigorously articulated canvas - plus humanity as he perceived it...'. '' David Park, an influential teacher at the California School of Fine Art in Berkeley from 1943-1952, was a leading member of the West Coast Abstract Expressionists, who were keen observers of the New York school of non-objective painting of the 1940s. Congregated around educational institutions where Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko briefly taught in the 1940s,..." http://www.invaluable.com/auction-lot/david-park-,-1911-1960-bathers-oil-on-canvas-182-c-f64v3cdlfa undefined

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