He mixed and mingled with, among others, artists such as Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still. In returning to San Francisco after the war, Bischoff found himself in the midst of avant-garde Abstract Expressionism as translated from the east coast New York School to what was known then as the "left" coast. In 1941, he served as a lieutenant colonel in intelligence services in England, stationing near Oxford. As it did virtually ever fighting man and woman involved, World War II, changed Bischoff's life. He quickly found a job teaching art at Sacramento High School for the first three years of his career. He was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, where he completed his master's degree in May 1939. The two paintings are self-portraits dating from 1955.īischoff was a second-generation Californian, born in 1916, who lived most of his life in the San Francisco Bay area. One of the major practitioners of this type of art (he hated the term movement) was the California-born painter, Elmer Bischoff.
And quite frankly, even though today I'm pretty familiar with most types of western art, the styles, eras, and movements, down through the ages, I must say, I still don't like the art of the Figurative Movement. I probably didn't know enough about it to be effected one way or another but as I saw up close more and more of the Figurative evolution of such art, I came to the conclusion I didn't much like it. I don't recall being particularly turned off by Abstract Expressionism (above). Even his Figurative work didn't depart more thanĪnd arm's length from the Abstract Expressionism he knew from the beginning of his career.Īs a relatively naïve young student, largely self-taught at the time, and having never been exposed to much art of any kind in museums, Realism was virtually the only art I knew. The abstract, pre-figurative work of Elmer Bischoff spanning about They were not Minimalists, but instead had moved on to a derivative type of Abstract Expressionism referred to today a the "Figurative Movement." It was, in a nutshell, the creeping back of subjective content into Expressionism, perhaps an attempt to revive the distant past-the early decades of the 20th-century. In any case, by the late 1960s and early 1970s, the last vestiges of the Modern Art era, Minimalism, was fading fast. Abstract Expressionism was such a dominant force in the 1950s that's altogether possible. They were not related to the famous New York School when I knew them, though one or both may have been at one time. Both were accomplished painters, one a few years older than the other. Notes from the catalogue of the Laguna Art Museum of November/December 1986Ĭompiled and written by Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher of Laguna Woods, California.Almost fifty years ago now, back in the early 1970s when I was an undergraduate art education major at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, I had two painting instructors who came of age as artists during the 1950s at the height of the Abstract Expressionist era. Mantle Fielding's Dictionary of American Painters, Sculptors and Engravers, 1986-7 He taught at the University of California from 1963 until he died in 1991. In 1956 he had a very successful one-man show at the California School of Fine Arts and from that time he chaired their graduate school and became one of the school's most influential teachers. From 1953 to 1956 he was an art instructor at Yuba College. To earn money, he drove a truck for Railway Express and sketched during his lunch hour. But in 1952 Bischoff resigned when his friend Hassel Smith was dropped from the faculty.Ībout this same time, Bischoff made a transition from pure abstraction to figurative painting.
This group began to revitalize the figurative tradition these artists came to be known as the Bay Area figurative school. The close friendships formed there with painters Richard Diebenkorn, Frank Lobdell, David Park and Hassel Smith greatly influenced him. Following graduation from Berkeley in 1939, Bischoff became a ceramics and jewelry teacher at a high school in Sacramento, California and then served in the military for three years In 1946 he joined the faculty of the California School of Fine Arts, the wellspring of the Abstract Expressionist movement on the West Coast. As an art student he had spent about ten years painting in the style of Picasso.
Bischoff grew up in a home that valued the arts, painting and making music were important to him since childhood. He studied at the University of California at Berkeley. Elmer Bischoff (1916-1991) Elmer Bischoff was born on Jin Berkeley, California.
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