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Soon a more European-influenced "bridge generation" expanded the style by incorporating more autobiographical references and symbolism into its painting. Nathan Oliveira, who admired the work of Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon, gave his lumbering figures an existential thrashing on splattered, paint-encrusted surfaces. Paul Wonner could capture precise facial expressions in nearly transparent washes of color, or just as easily squeeze the pigment out with the goopy thickness of cake frosting. In Football Painting 2, 1956, Theophilus Brown added blurred images of bodies in motion to the mix.
Bay Area figurative art continued to evolve even after the charismatic Park's death from cancer in 1960 at age 49. Joan Brown, Manuel Neri and Bruce McGaw had all studied with the movement's pioneers. In the early '60s, these younger artists introduced more personal subject matter, along with something akin to the new spirit then percolating among San Francisco's Beat poets. Their work displayed the sensibility of the evolving "underground" scene -- angrier and more confrontational, yet also funnier.
Joan Brown exaggerated gesturalism and surface texture by troweling mortar- thick layers of paint on canvas. Her exuberant, gloppy subjects ranged from youthful nudes (Girls in the Surf with Moon Casting a Shadow, 1962) to kitchen appliances (Refrigerator Painting, 1964) and the goofy, squinting face of her pet dog (Models with Manuel's Sculpture, 1961). In Brown's anything-goes color schemes, brooding burgundies, hot pinks and Velveeta-cheese yellows oozed from the canvas with gooey gusto. In drawings on paper, she even collaged strips of fake fur. McGaw produced more straightforward self-portraits and still lifes, while sculptor Neri's headless, armless mannequins tried to take the figurative program into three dimensions.
By the mid-'60s the movement was winding down. Faced with the geometric, industrial forms of Pop and early minimalist art, paint-laden expressionism seemed exhausted and out of date. The second-generation artists moved on. Figures eventually vanished completely from Diebenkorn's work as he returned, in his Ocean Park series, to a refined and elegant abstraction.
Examining the Bay Area output today, viewers will recognize strong affinities to later styles. Brown's dense canvases helped lay the groundwork for San Francisco's subsequent funk explosion; Park's blank-faced male nudes anticipated Eric Fischl's anxious, naked suburbanites. Much of the vigorous Bay Area brushwork was reflected, more than a quarter-century later, in paint- happy neoexpressionism. Despite some occasional heavy-handedness, though, the works displayed in this show are far more engaging than their irony-loaded grandchildren of the '80s.
"I'd like to break down the damn picture plane!" Park declared at the outset of his daring venture. He and his followers never accomplished so complete a rupture. Nonetheless, they turned out what Park, had he lived to see them, might have called some very fine pictures.