Up from Goopiness

The taste of fame and the energizing sense of being the cause of controversy came to David Park only in the five years before his death in 1960. He was one of a number of painters who plunged into abstractionism and then returned to the figure--and his defection helped inspire a full-scale rebellion among painters around San Francisco. Dying of cancer at 49, he never fulfilled his own promise as an artist-yet his achievement was sufficient to make him one of the most significaf.; U.S. painters of the 1950s.

Last week a Park retrospective opened at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D C having originated at Manhattan's Staempfli Gallery and traveled to Boston and Nashville. Still ahead on its schedule --and new stops may be added--are the Oakland (Calif.) Art Museum, the University of Minnesota Gallery and the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois. The show samples Park's early figurative works, his Picasso period, and finally the later paintings that have become his hallmark (see color}. It is no fault of the organizers that, save for one, the abstractions are absent: Park destroyed all that he could get his hands on.

"Whats" Determine "Hows." In 1929 Boston-bred David Park turned up in Berkeley Calif., and except for a five-year teaching stint at Boston's Winsor School he remained there for the rest of his life For a while he was a stonecutter for a sculptor; he got through the Depression with the help of the WPA, worked as a factory hand during World War II, eventually landed a job at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. It was there that Park experimented with abstract expressionism.

The arrival at the school of Clyttord Still and later Mark Rothko were the catalysts in this conversion, but Park himself was already concerned with "big abstract ideals like vitality, energy, profundity warmth." His own abstractions, as his 'friend, Painter Elmer Bischoff, describes them, were "goopy, sensuous arrangements of forms," but ironically, Park never found in goopiness the freedom that other artists did. Instead of losing himself in his work, he became overly concerned with style and technique. "I was artificially putting together forms," he said. And so in 1950, Park painted a figurative picture called Kids on Bikes. "In immersing myself in subject matter," he said, have found that I paint with more intensity and that the 'hows' of painting are more inevitably determined by the 'whats.' I believe that my work has become freer of arbitrary mannerisms."

People of Potential. His subject matter was never more complex than that first picture: it was always the human figure swimming, boating, napping, walking. His people were rarely recognizable I faces that are ambiguous"), and they often seemed blurred into their environment. In both Bather and Ocean and Green Canoe, flesh takes on the color of earth; the forest melts into water, and sky blends into sea. To some degree, a figure by Park mute and thickly sculpted, can b seen simply as one more of nature's forms.

But it is also the one form that is unpredictable and hence imbued with mystery. As Park put it, "I like to paint people who could do Anything but don't --people of potential." Soon after Park exhibited his Kids on Bikes other painters followed his lead until there was a full-fledged San Francisco school of figurative artists. Since its members were refugees from abstraction, the school has too often been hailed tor its negative side. Park did not wish to abolish abstraction; his only message was that it was not for everyone. "I believe, he said, "that we are living at a time that overemphasizes the need of newness.

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