DAVID PARK: A Retrospective
Curatorial Introduction

David Park (American, 1911–1960) had two great loves: paint and people. For the first two thirds of his three-decade-long career, most of which was spent in the San Francisco Bay Area, the self-taught, art historically attuned painter explored multiple styles in his search for a distinctive voice. His most radical shift occurred at midcentury when, in a moment of passion, Park abandoned nearly all of his abstract canvases at a city dump and decided to instead make “pictures,” as he called them, launching the Bay Area Figurative art movement.

Anchored by Park’s paintings of the 1950s, this presentation highlights the ways his bold compositions—featuring both everyday and classic subjects such as street scenes, musicians, domestic interiors, portraits, and bathers—harnessed the lessons of Abstract Expressionism. The works Park completed in 1958–59 represent an expressive peak. Characterized by the artist’s sensuous paint handling and extraordinary instinct for color, they are intensely physical, psychologically charged canvases. As these works attest, Park’s unending fascination with the potential of his medium, combined with his appreciation for the human figure, made for what his friend the artist Richard Diebenkorn described as “a power on canvas that is intense, first rate, and must be reckoned with.”

David Park: A Retrospective traces the full arc of the artist’s career, charting a path from his early realist works of the 1930s to his abstract expressionist canvases of the late 1940s and his Bay Area Figurative paintings of the 1950s. The exhibition concludes with Park’s last works on paper, made in 1960, which constitute the deliberate final statement of a deeply humanist artist.

Janet Bishop
Thomas Weisel Family Chief Curator and Curator of Painting and Sculpture

Assisted by Sara Wessen Chang, Curatorial Assistant, Painting and Sculpture

Major support for David Park: A Retrospective is provided by Doris Fisher, Patricia W. Fitzpatrick in honor of Neal Benezra, Janet and Clint Reilly, and anonymous donors.

Generous support is provided by Jean and James E. Douglas, Jr., Mary J. Elmore, Christine and Pierre Lamond, the Stuart G. Moldaw Public Program and Exhibition Fund, Susan and Bill Oberndorf, the Bernard and Barbro Osher Exhibition Fund, Lynn and Edward Poole, the Thomas Weisel Family, Pat Wilson, and Anita and Ronald Wornick.

Meaningful support is provided by the Wyeth Foundation for American Art.