Title#35
Artist
Elmer Bischoff
(American, 1916 - 1991)
Date1978
MediumAcrylic on canvas
DimensionsUnframed: 85 × 80 1/8 in.
Framed: 85 3/4 × 80 1/2 × 2 in.
SignedSigned on verso: "Elmer Bischoff 1978 #35 85 x 80"
SubmissionNA diploma presentation, October 1, 1986
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY
Object number1986.210
Label TextBest known as one of the three Bay Area figurative artists of the 1950s (along with David Park and Richard Diebenkorn, NA), Elmer Bischoff studied in the progressive art department of University of California, Berkeley in the 1930s. Following his service in the Air Force during World War II, Bischoff was appointed as a faculty member at the California School of Fine Arts (renamed in 1961 the San Francisco Art Institute), where he taught until 1952. Under the guidance of the recently appointed director of the school, Douglas MacAgy, the CSFA became a crucible of progressive ideas and experimental work. Other faculty members at the school included Richard Diebenkorn, Claire Falkenstein, David Park, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Hassel Smith, and Clyfford Still. It was in this environment that Bischoff participated in developing Abstract Expressionism in San Francisco, becoming one of its most prominent early proponents.In 1952, however, Bischoff made a decisive break from abstraction, along with Park (who had "defected" in 1950) and later Diebenkorn, who would join the other figurative dissenters in 1955. After an era in which abstraction had become an overwhelmingly pervasive force, figuration offered a new set of challenges. For Bischoff, this shift toward representation and the figure was purely a personal decision of "keeping alive in the studio." By the late 1950s Bischoff and his fellow representational painters had begun to receive national attention, and many artists and critics saw them as a viable alternative to Abstract Expressionism. This critical momentum carried Bischoff through the 1960s and into the summer of 1972, when he produced several small experimental abstract canvases over the course of a few months. He would eventually renounce figurative work for good in 1974, and began to number, instead of title, his canvases.
Bischoff's "#35" belongs to this group of numbered series done during the 1970s. At this time the artist also switched from painting in oil to painting in acrylics and incorporating other media such as chalk and charcoal. In many ways, the late abstractions are a return to some of the methods and concepts that Bischoff had employed in the 1940s and 1950s. The spirited feeling imbued in "#35" is underscored by the bright colors on a white ground and seemingly improvisational configurations of shapes. Bischoff's late paintings are stylistically reminiscent of Wassily Kandinsky's "improvisations"-colorful abstractions from the first decade of the twentieth century. They also reflect the artist's interest in astrophysical studies and Jewish mysticism of the Kabbalah. While Bischoff was committed to painting intuitively and these works were not necessarily meant to illustrate a specific concept, they were informed by the kabbalistic notion that creation began with a cataclysmic blast sending particles ever-expanding outward. He described the works from the period as "happy disasters."
