Biography

Born in Berkeley, California in 1916, from an early age Bischoff showed an avid interest in art. At the University of California, Berkeley, Bischoff studied art under the Berkeley school modernists Worth Ryder, Erle Loran, and Margaret Peterson, earning a master’s degree in 1938. Following World War II, Bischoff joined David Park, Richard Diebenkorn, Hassel Smith, and Clyfford Still on the faculty of the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA; now the San Francisco Art Institute). An exhibition at the Oakland Art Museum entitled Contemporary Bay Area Figurative Painting (1957) established him as one of California’s preeminent painters and linked his name with those of Park and Diebenkorn in launching the Bay Area Figurative Movement.  Bischoff died in Berkeley in 1991. [Bio from Juicy Paint Exhibition, input by R. Faust, Collections Intern, 8/11/2010]

Elmer Bischoff was born in 1916 in Berkeley, California.  He studied at the University of California, Berkeley under John Haley, Erle Loran, Margaret Peterson, and Worth Ryder.  After serving as a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force Intelligence in England, he taught at the CSFA in San Francisco with Richard Diebenkorn, David Park, and Clyfford Still.  Bischoff moved to Marysville, California in 1953 and taught at Yuba College.  He returned to Berkeley in 1956 and taught at the San Francisco Art Institute a year later.  In 1963, he returned to the University of California, Berkeley to accept the position of tenured professor. His work is included in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution; the Whitney Museum of American Art; MOMA; and the Art Institute of Chicago. This will be the first work by Bischoff to enter the SJMA permanent collection. (SJMA Collections Committee, 2003)

If ever one could envision the texture and content of a reverie, it would surely resemble a painting by Elmer Bischoff. Bischoff is credited with launching the Bay Area Figurative movement together with fellow artists Richard Diebenkorn and David Park in the 1950s. This movement provided a viable alternative to the hegemony of abstract expressionism, situating the Bay Area on an artistic map previously dominated by New York painters. Bischoff’s style is distinct from that of his colleagues because of the special atmospheric romanticism that pervades his work, particularly his buttery, melting brushwork and subject matter that often depicts solitary figures representing emotional states rather than specific individuals.1

Born in 1916, from an early age Bischoff showed an avid interest in art. At the University of California, Berkeley, Bischoff studied art under the Berkeley school modernists Worth Ryder, Erle Loran, and Margaret Peterson, earning a master’s degree in 1938. Following World War II, Bischoff joined Park, Diebenkorn, Hassel Smith, and Clyfford Still on the faculty of the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA; now the San Francisco Art Institute). His lifelong residency in the Bay Area was interrupted by a three-year stint teaching at Yuba College in Marysville, California, one of the most productive periods of Bischoff’s career. After returning to the Bay Area in 1956, an exhibition at the Oakland Art Museum entitled Contemporary Bay Area Figurative Painting (1957) established him as one of California’s preeminent painters and linked his name with those of Park and Diebenkorn.

The year 1959 was outstanding; Bischoff was awarded a Ford Foundation grant, completed a move to a spacious new studio in Berkeley, and began to exhibit his work at the Staempfli Gallery, effectively introducing his work to a New York audience. By this time, according to art historian Susan Landauer, “a distinctive style had emerged. In general, the painting emphasized broad-brushed areas of saturated color, often laid next to passages of creamy pastel.”2 Painted with confidence and passion, Two Women in Vermillion Light is regarded among the best examples of Bischoff’s talent as a colorist. The figures are generalized female figures, loosely sketched and attired in dresses, completely absorbed in gardening tasks. Although their positions are proximate, they do not appear cognizant of each other, having given themselves over completely to the performance of their work. The vertical forms of the two figures grasping plants and a shelflike horizontal structure on the left side are the only recognizable elements on the canvas, which is otherwise an explosion of hues ranging from sunny yellow to murky forest green, daubed, stroked, and scumbled onto the surface with joyful abandon. Bischoff created a sense of depth in the center of the canvas by blending various shades to the point of murkiness, yet he draws the eye to the surface plane by the addition of fiery vermilion and white accents. Two Women in Vermillion Light is one of the masterpieces of the painter’s oeuvre, and of the Bay Area Figurative movement generally.

Bischoff’s ability to represent emotional states through the manipulation of paint is rooted in his style, wavering on the border between abstraction and figuration. According to critic Donald Kuspit, Bischoff’s painterliness “simultaneously obscures the scene—usually quite simple, ordinary—and makes it peculiarly compelling: blurred into intangibility, almost to the extent that it seems an hallucination, it nonetheless remains undeniably real; at the same time, it becomes impassioned—strongly charged with subliminal emotion.”3 Without question, Bischoff was one of the foremost poets of paint who ever worked in the Bay Area, and his ability to conjure feeling from brushwork and pigment is nothing less than magical. —J.N.

1. Susan Landauer, Elmer Bischoff: The Ethics of Paint (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 99.
2. Ibid., 120.
3. Donald Kuspit, “Elmer Bischoff: California Intimist,” Elmer Bischoff: Paintings from the Figurative Period 1954–1970, exh. cat. (San Francisco: John Berggruen Gallery, 1990), 7. (SJMA Selections publication, 2004)

---

Your current search criteria is: Artist is "Elmer Bischoff".