Sitting for an interview in his gallery the day before its opening of three shows, John Berggruen plays the role of the harried curator with a playful wink. His dedicated staff may be zipping up and down stairwells, unloading crates for Historical Bay Area Painters (which runs through April 24) and the two other exhibitions that open the next day, but Berggruen, a respected stalwart in the Bay Area art scene for over 50 years, seems only mildly perturbed. If that. It’s hard for industry vagaries to ruffle the feathers of a man whose father had an affair with Frida Kahlo.
Comfortable in a light-blue sweater vest whose color matches his alert eyes, the 81 year old is quick with a joke, claiming he plans to “single-handedly revive interest in the Bay Area Figurative School.” Beneath his easy humor burns a fierce dedication to the artists in tomorrow’s show, most of whom he knew personally.
“I had a very good rapport with all those artists,” Berggruen says. “It was somewhat flattering because I was a youngster—many, many years ago—and they were interested in what I offered. I guess I had a certain amount of vitality and vigor and curiosity.” He leans in to emphasize the last point. “It’s very important, curiosity.”
The Bay Area Figurative Movement started with an exhibition at the Oakland Museum of Art in 1957. The movement’s big three—David Park, Richard Diebenkorn, and Elmer Bischoff—often defied the prevailing trend towards abstractionism favored by the New York School of Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock, tending to veer off towards figuration, creating a movement in their wake.
As far as what he hopes visitors get from the show, Berggruen’s sly shrug leaves the matter up to the art and the viewers. But, recalling an encounter decades ago with a “hippie” gallery visitor in “hiking boots, T-shirt, and beret” who ended up purchasing art, he’s clear on one point: “Everybody’s welcome tomorrow—because you never know who’s going to buy something.”
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The following evening, the gallery walls glow with the glory of California. One theory as to why a group of Bay Area artists would veer away from East Coast abstraction towards figuration is clear. If you’re surrounded by forests and coasts and mountains bathed in ethereal sea-light, how can your surroundings not become your explicit subject?
It takes just one walkthrough to understand that the Bay Area Figurative Movement recognized California as an idea as much as a place, situated between abstraction and realism as surely as it is between the Pacific Ocean and the Sierras. Certain gradations of Richard Diebenkorn’s mesmerizing abstract Ocean Park No. 31 are so subtle they demand one’s full concentration to determine if they’re there at all.
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The abstracted figure in Elmer Bischoff’s Man at Seashore wears white California sea light on his shoulder like an epaulet. Only California could transform a hairbrush into a bejeweled crown in David Park’s Brush and Comb. And the adoration of the female figure in Nathan Oliveira’s Woman Undressing captures the group finding inspiration in the world around them.
“If I could somehow connect my work all the way back to the caves,” Oliveira said, “I’d be most happy. Maybe that’s where I belong.”
Michael Finley and Izzy K.A., both 28 years old, are engulfed in conversation about the show, a conversation primed by their previous reading of Rebecca Solnit’s Recollections of My Non Existence. After walking the gallery floor a few times, they are drawn back to Joan Brown’s Golden Gate Bridge, whose bold colors and clear lines steer clear of the abstract nuance of Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park 31.
“The perspective from being right in the water pulls me in,” Finley said. K.A. agreed. “That’s what makes it not-a-usual landscape painting.” They go back and forth, questioning the paintings and dialoguing with the kind of curiosity Berggruen hoped visitors would bring to his gallery. Then they bound upstairs to the third floor for Barry McGee’s Chitty Figures show opening (which runs through April 24) with a giddiness of those half their age, like they were headed towards their first roller coaster ride. (They also recommend the first floor’s Contemporary & Modern Masters show, which also runs through April 24.)
The pair’s inspired, intelligent conversation serves as a reminder that such exhibitions are about chats between friends as much as paintings on the wall. Elmer Bischoff, who taught Joan Brown as well as Jerry Garcia, was a devoted teacher who believed in art as dialogue. “He was a master at analyzing art and, being a great listener, he also encouraged dialogue,” Bischoff’s friend and colleague Sidney Gordin recalled. “His relationship with students was extraordinary for the rapport that he usually achieved.” Park, Bischoff, and Diebenkorn all met at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) in the mid-1940s and would continue to meet and discuss in breakfast groups in Berkeley for decades. They all made their own art, but they couldn’t do it alone.
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After the show, just a few blocks away, Mayor Lurie judges a “Best Back-Up Dancer from the 1980s” contest on the occasion of First Thursday, a monthly event designed to give downtown San Francisco “a whole new makeover,” according to its website. Thousands wander up and down the closed-off Second Street, and the sheer volume of attendees offers some hope for a cultural resurgence, maybe even a movement or two.
The value of intimacy and connection seems dear in this milieu. Lone individuals stare down at their cellphones instead of up at the live performances. Topped with a moving LED display of fake fog, looking like a gigantic skinny latte with cream, the Salesforce Tower—and the tech money it represents—is impossible to ignore as it lords over the crowd. San Francisco’s revival will depend on equitable employment, housing, and other necessities—but, like the city’s other movements, art will have to form a part. The current show at Berggruen’s red-bricked schoolhouse on Howard Street offers lessons from the past that could help power the city’s forward motion today.
HISTORICAL BAY AREA PAINTERS runs through April 24. Berggruen Gallery, SF. More info here.
