Elmer Bischoff American, 1916-1991

Elmer Bischoff (1916 – 1991) is perhaps best known as a founder, along with Richard Diebenkorn and David Park, of Bay Area Figuration, the painting style that emerged in San Francisco in the early 1950s, which combined the gestural immediacy of abstract expressionism, with a narrative subject matter. Bischoff grew up in Berkeley, California the second-generation Californian son of a father of German descent and a mother of  Swedish-Ecuadoran origin. He entered the University of California, Berkeley in September 1934, completing his master's degree in May 1939, and immediately started teaching art at a Sacramento High School (1939 – 1941). During his years at university, one teacher influenced him most: the highly independent-minded Margaret Peterson, whose total dedication to her teaching, and insistence on the ethical value of art, had a great impact on the artist Elmer Bischoff would be.

In 1941, Bischoff served as a lieutenant colonel in intelligence services in England during World War II and was stationed near Oxford. He returned to the US in November 1945. After the War, back in San Francisco, Bischoff found himself in the midst of the avant-garde amongst artists such as Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still. In January 1946 Karl Kasten, suggested Bischoff as art teacher for a position still available, at San Francisco's California School of Fine Arts. It was then that Bischoff entered a faculty which already included some of the most talented new artists of post-war America, including David Park and Richard Diebenkorn. 

Their camaraderie and democratic approach to painting is evident in the similarities and shared vocabularies of the paintings they made. Stylistically the paint became thicker, freer, more gestural and less structured than it had been before, completely eschewing the figurative aspect in favor of blocks of color and calligraphic lines. In Bischoff’s case, he had reached what could be described as a synthesis of the automatism of surrealism, the heavy, ugly paintwork of Still with the new lyrical gesture he was developing along with his contemporaries. Bischoff exhibited widely throughout his career and was recognized by inclusion in seminal museum exhibitions during his lifetime.