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David Park
Two Bathers, 1958

Artwork Info

Artwork title
Two Bathers
Artist name
David Park
Date created
1958
Classification
painting
Medium
oil on canvas
Dimensions
58 in. × 50 in. (147.32 cm × 127 cm)
Date acquired
2008
Credit
Collection SFMOMA
Purchase through gifts of Mrs. Wellington S. Henderson, Helen Crocker Russell, and the Crocker Family, by exchange, and the Mary Heath Keesling Fund
Copyright
© Estate of David Park
Permanent URL
https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/2008.22
Artwork status
Not on view at this time.

Audio Stories

Hear how Park launched a Bay Area art movement

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NARRATOR:  

In the years after World War II, many American artists turned to abstract painting as the path of the future. David Park was one of the few to turn back. In fact, in 1949, he piled his abstract canvases in the back of his station wagon and dropped them at the Berkeley city dump. But he didnt leave the gestural freedom of abstract painting behind — not by a long shot. Curator Janet Bishop: 

 

BISHOP: 

For Park, really, the greatest painterly challenge and subject of interest to him was the human figure. In this painting, which shows two female figures in their bathing suits, one holding up a towel and the other with her back to us, her elbows jutted provocatively out toward us or into our space as viewers, we see Park with incredible command of his brush. Its almost as though Park is fusing a total control and an almost recklessness in this painting. 

 

But hes very aware of what hes doing. And theres an incredible sort of juiciness to the paint, an Abstract Expressionist-like paint handling, but to define, with an incredible economy of means, the forms of these figures.  

 

David Park was the first painter of note in the Bay Area to start painting figuratively in the 1950s, thus launching what became known as the Bay Area Figurative art movement. There was a San Francisco–based critic who said that Park essentially made the best abstract paintings of his life when he started using the figure. 

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