Elmer Nelson Bischoff ( born Elmer Nelson Bischoff ; July 9, 1916 - March 2, 1991) is an American artist, one of the founders of the direction of figurative painting in the Bay Area . Bischoff, along with David Park and Richard Dibenkorn , belonged to a generation of post-war artists who began as representatives of abstract expressionism , and then again turned to figurative art .
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Biography
Elmer Bischoff, the second child of John and Elna (née Nelson) Bischoff, grew up in Berkeley, California . His affairs were of German origin, and his mother was mixed Swedish- Ecuadorian .
In September 1934, Bischoff entered the University of California at Berkeley , from which he graduated in May 1939 with a master's degree in art. He immediately began teaching at Sacramento High School, where he worked until 1941. The most influential during his studies at the university was Bischoff by Margaret Peterson, who had very independent thinking, deep dedication, and perseverance in promoting the ethical values of art. In 1941, during the Second World War , Bischoff was drafted into the army and was promoted to the intelligence service in England with the rank of lieutenant colonel. He was in the vicinity of Oxford until November 1945.
After the war, returning to San Francisco, Bischoff again found himself at the center of the avant-garde art community, communicating with artists such as Mark Rothko and Clifford Still . In January 1946, one of his fellow artist artists, Karl Kasten (a war veteran like Bischoff), nominated him as a painting teacher at the California School of Fine Arts . Bischoff ended up at a faculty where some of the most talented new artists of post-war America had already worked. It was there that he met David Park and Richard Dibenkorn . In 1973, Bischoff was elected an associate member of the National Academy of Design and became a full member of the academy in 1985.
Unlike European expressionism , the figurative painting of the Bay Area demonstrated the directness and warmth inherent in abstract expressionism . Elmer Bischoff was older than Dibenkorn and had personal experience, which turned into the original style of his painting. Bischoff's quiet and lyrical paintings had a different seriousness than those that were considered serious in his time, which was associated with the emergence of abstract expressionism.
A retrospective exhibition of Elmer Bischoff’s works entitled “ Grand Lyricist: The Art of Elmer Bischoff ” was held in 2001-2002 at the Oakland Museum of California . The artist's works are in the Crocker Museum of Art (California), the Museum de Young , the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden ( Washington, DC ), the Honolulu Art Museum , the Kemper Museum of Modern Art ( Kansas City, Missouri ), and the Museum of the National Academy of Design (New York), Houston Museum of Fine Arts , Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Orange County Museum of Art, Phillips Collection (Washington, DC), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Smithsonian Museum of American Art (Washington, DC Columbia Circle).
Elmer Bischoff's son is composer John Bischoff.
Literature
- Elmer Bischoff: the Ethics of Paint (monography), Susan Landauer, 2001, Oakland Museum of California-University of California Press.
- Bay Area Figurative Art 1950-1965 (about the Bay Area art movement: esp. David Park, Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff), Caroline A. Jones, 1990, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art-University of California Press.
- Marika Herskovic, American Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s An Illustrated Survey, (New York School Press, 2003.) ISBN 0-9677994-1-4 . p. 38-41
- Marika Herskovic, American Abstract and Figurative Expressionism: Style Is Timely Art Is Timeless (New York School Press, 2009.) ISBN 978-0-9677994-2-1 . p. 44-47