| Bischoff, Elmer (1916-1991) , American painter, best known for his moody paintings of human figures. Bischoff, along with California painters Richard Diebenkorn and David Park, played a leading role in the Bay Area Figurative School, a movement that developed in and around San Francisco during the 1950s. The Bay Area artists returned to representing human figures at a time when abstract expressionism dominated the art world. Their figures tended toward flat, partly abstract shapes, however, and instead of occupying the central role in a painting were carefully integrated with other elements in the composition. The painters were also known for the use of intense colors that evoked the light of northern California. Bischoff’s paintings tended to be darker in tone, warmer in color, and gloomier in atmosphere than those of his colleagues. In Two Lampposts (1969, Consolidated Freightways Inc., Palo Alto, California) the shadowy figure of a woman under street lamps almost disappears in the intersection of two sidewalks. In later works, painted from 1970 to 1988, Bischoff moved away from figurative painting and developed his own vision of lyrical abstraction, in which lines and shapes play against a white or tinted canvas. The light and fanciful tone of these works stands in marked contrast to the bleak or ominous atmosphere of his earlier, figurative works. Bischoff was born in Berkeley, California, and studied art at the University of California at Berkeley, receiving his B.A. degree in 1938 and his M.A. degree in 1939. After serving in the United States Air Force from 1942 to 1945, he taught art at the California School of Fine Arts (later renamed the San Francisco Art Institute) on and off from 1946 to 1963, and at the University of California at Berkeley from 1963 to 1985. |
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