Biography

A noted Bay Area Figurative painter, Paul Wonner helped to revitalize the still-life genre during the second half of the 20th century. He began painting in the 1950s, and was affliliated with the Bay Area Figurative group including Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, and David Park. Since then, he has become best known for his whimsical still lifes featuring meticulously painted objects placed in neatly stacked piles. Like 17th-century Dutch still lifes, which celebrated nature’s bounty, Wonner’s overflowing canvases offer contemporary viewers a detailed inventory of idiosynchratic and highly personal objects.

Wonner was born in Tucson, Arizona, in 1920 and studied painting and drawing with a private tutor before moving to San Francisco. In 1937, he enrolled at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, where he received formal academic art training. After a brief stint in the United States Army, Wonner moved to New York City in 1946, but then returned to the San Francisco Bay Area four years later to continue his studies at the University of California, Berkeley. A New York-style of gestural abstract expressionism held sway at Berkeley, but while Wonner was influenced early on by the expressive brushwork of his teachers, he preferred to focus his attention on objects and figures. In 1957 curator Paul Mill included one of his paintings in the seminal exhibition at the Oakland Museum, Contemporary Bay Area Figurative Painting. By the mid-1960s, Wonner’s expressive representational paintings were primarily still lifes composed of dramatically lit, isolated objects. During the late 1970s, however, Wonner abandoned his earlier painterly approach and began rendering his still lifes with meticulous clarity. In 1979, his Dutch Still Life with Cats and Love Letters was included in the exhibition The Big Still Life at the Allan Frumkin Gallery in New York, which helped to revive what for decades had been perceived as a languishing genre.1

During the early 1980s, Wonner embarked on a series of “Dutch” still-life paintings, which were often inspired by historical artworks and filled with a panoply of stacked and scattered objects and exotic flowers. In A Peaceable Kingdom (1988), carnations, lilies, orchids, and violas are strewn about the floor of Wonner’s Victorian San Francisco home along with his well-mannered pets. His contemporary menagerie is an ode to early American folk artist Edward Hicks, who painted nearly one hundred variations of the Peaceable Kingdom based on the biblical passage from the Book of Isaiah. Wonner, who has rarely strayed from the still-life genre, most certainly identified with Hicks’s obsessive attention to a single theme, and he venerated his predecessor by reproducing the artist’s work in the lower right corner of the canvas. But while Hicks portrayed a static grouping of wild animals gathering in a peaceful outdoor landscape, Wonner’s friendly felines, songbirds, and a playful Great Dane appear lively. Indeed, motion is implied in Wonner’s “still life,”—an orange tabby cat nestles against the dog, whose dangling tongue conveys a mutual camaraderie; a gray rabbit appears ready to spring from its watchful position; and a yellow-billed toucan could easily burst into song.

In Wonner’s paintings, viewers quickly realize that they should expect the unexpected. Certainly, they must look carefully or risk missing details such as the tiny field mouse scurrying along the branch of a tree or the fragile robin’s nest hidden in a desk drawer. For in captivating details such as these, one discovers the whimsical surprises of Wonner’s peaceable kingdom. —A.W.

1. For a thorough discussion of the other events leading to the revitalization of the still-life genre, see Susan Landauer, The Not-So-Still Life: A Century of California Painting and Sculpture (San Jose: San Jose Museum of Art, 2002), 142.
2. Wonner, quoted in Karen Haber “Paul Wonner,” American Artist, August 1992, 26–31, 78–79.

(SJMA Selections publication, 2004)

Wonner was born in Tucson, Arizona in 1920, and studied painting and drawing with a private tutor before moving to San Francisco in 1937. Upon his West Coast arrival, he enrolled at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, where he received formal academic art training. After a brief stint in the United States Army, Wonner moved to New York City in 1946, but then returned to the San Francisco Bay Area four years later to continue his studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where a New York-style of gestural Abstract Expressionism held sway. But while Wonner was influenced early on by the expressive brushwork of his teachers, he preferred to focus his attention on objects and figures, and in 1957 curator Paul Mill included one of his paintings in the seminal exhibition, Contemporary Bay Area Figurative Painting, at The Oakland Museum. By the mid-1960s, Wonner’s expressive representational paintings were primarily still lifes composed of dramatically lit, isolated objects. During the late 1970s, however, Wonner abandoned his earlier painterly approach and began rendering his still lifes with meticulous clarity. In 1979, his painting Dutch Still Life with Cats and Love Letters was included in the “The Big Still Life” exhibition at the Allan Frumkin Gallery in New York, which helped to revive what for decades had been perceived as a languishing genre. (SJMA Collections Committee, 2004)

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