This generously illustrated volume is the first comprehensive publication devoted to the powerfully expressive work of David Park (1911–60). Best known as the founder of Bay Area Figurative art, Park moved from Boston to California at the age of seventeen and spent most of his adult life in and around San Francisco. In the immediate postwar years, like many avant-garde American artists, he engaged with Abstract Expressionism and painted non-objectively. In a moment of passion in 1949, he made the radical decision to abandon nearly all of his abstract canvases at the Berkeley city dump and return to the human figure, in so doing marking the beginning of the Bay Area Figurative movement. The astonishingly powerful paintings he made in the decade that followed brought together his long-held interest in classic subjects such as portraiture, domestic interiors, musicians, rowers, and bathers with lush, gestural paint handling and an extraordinary sense of color. In 1958–59 Park reached his expressive peak, reveling in the sensuous qualities of paint to create intensely physical, psychologically charged, and deeply felt canvases. This fertile period cut short by illness in 1960, Park transferred his creative energy to other mediums when he could no longer work on canvas. In the last months of his life, bedridden, he produced an extraordinary thirty-foot-long felt-tip-pen scroll and a poignant series of gouaches. Published to accompany the first major museum exhibition of Park’s work in more than thirty years, David Park: A Retrospective traces the full arc of the artist’s career, from his early social realist and cubist-inspired efforts of the 1930s to his mature figurative paintings of the 1950s and his astounding final works on paper. An overview of Park’s full body of work by Janet Bishop, SFMOMA’s Thomas Weisel Family Curator of Painting and Sculpture, will be joined by approximately ninety full-color plates of paintings and works on paper; an essay by Tara McDowell on the figure drawing sessions held by Park, Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, Frank Lobdell, and others in their studios starting in 1953; short essays on Park’s scroll, his gouaches, and the portraits that Imogen Cunningham and Park made of each other; and an illustrated chronology. Published in association with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Exhibition schedule: Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth: June 2–September 8, 2019 Kalamazoo Institute of Arts: December 21, 2019–March 15, 2020 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: April 11–September 7, 2020

In this beautifully illustrated biography, compiled from comprehensive and sweeping interviews, Nancy Boas traces Parks resolute search for a new kind of figuration, one that would penetrate abstract expressionisms thickly layered surfaces and infuse them with human presence.

--First full-length book in two decades devoted to the art and life of this important American artist. Includes more than 90 plates illustrating Park's development and career --Park's paintings have seen a resurgence of interest among collectors and institutions, with 2009 exhibitions at Washington's Phillips Collection and Stanford University's Cantor Arts Center; pieces recently auctioned for $2.7 million at Christie's and $1.4 million at Sotheby's David Park, Painter: Nothing Held Back chronicles the brief but remarkably prolific career of this American artist, who died in 1960 at age 49. He was an integral part of the San Francisco Bay art community from the early 1930s on, and is counted as one of the group of immensely gifted artists who made up the Bay Area Figurative Painting movement in its nascent years of the 1950s. A painter deeply committed to humanity as a subject in an era that exalted abstraction, Park's work can be startling for its depth of feeling even today. Writing about him recently, San Francisco critic Kenneth Baker noted: Park's freedom from irony will strike anyone sated by postmodernist flippancy as enviable and almost beyond achievement today.

"Should be the classic, central, definitive work on the emergence of Bay Area Figurative painting."--Paul Mills, author of The New Figurative Painting of David Park

The extraordinary paintings and watercolors of this contemporary British abstract artist, deeply influenced by the romantic English landscape tradition of Constable and Turner. This is the first major look at the work of the renowned yet intensely private and reclusive artist William Tillyer (b. 1938), best known for his abstract oil paintings, watercolors, and prints. Tillyer’s skill and hugely varied body of work make him one of Britain’s most respected artists, in the same generation as Lucian Freud and David Hockney. Tillyer is finally getting the recognition he deserves. While Tillyer’s paintings are largely abstract, they are based on the landscape of North Yorkshire, where he has lived and worked for most of his life. The book covers Tillyer’s experiments with nontraditional materials and techniques—his 3D panels, cut canvases, constructed works with found objects, printmaking with a wide range of processes, and paintings on wire mesh.

This richly illustrated and insightful publication will be the First truly comprehensive exhibition catalogue on the work of George Bellows (1182-1925), with ten thematic essays by leading art and social historians that will provide a rigorous analysis of Bellows' life and career. The catalogue will document the range of Bellow's artistic achievements in all mediums, reconsidering his standing in relationship to artists such as Hopper, Picasso and Manet in order to better understand his unique place in the history of both American and Western art.0Exhibition: National Gallery of Art, Washington (10.6.2012-8.10.2012), The Royal Academy of Arts, London (16.3.2013-9.6.2013).