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Dimensions: measurements 67 1/2 by 59 1/4 in. alternate measurements 171.5 by 150.5 cm.
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Provenance: Staempfli Gallery, Inc., New York
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Exhibited: Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center; San Francisco, De Young Museum; Buffalo, New York, Albright Knox Art Gallery
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Notes: PROPERTY OF A TRUST OF A PRIVATE COLLECTOR
With the dawn of the 1960s decade, Elmer Bischoff's career was in high gear - he was Chairman of the Graduate Program of the California School of Fine Arts; he was being represented in New York by Staempfli Gallery, who were selling his paintings for ten times, soon to be thirty times, what he'd been getting a couple of years earlier; and his art was controversial, therefore on people's minds. The controversy had its ironic aspect. His art and that of his fellow Bay Area artists Thiebaud, Diebenkorn and Park, challenged by its figurativeness and light anecdotal touches the stern, iconoclastic works of the New York Abstract Expressionists, then the the favored style of the leading art critics. Being figurative, landscapes such as the present work Rooftops and Bay go further than evoking a place, they re-establish to painting the responsibilities of documenting and celebrating the motif. A view from the Berkeley Hills across San Francisco Bay, its offense to avant-garde circles was precisely its lack of irony and its attention to appearances in the real world. Yet the Bay Area artists were not antagonistic to abstraction - some among them were abstract artists, while Diebenkorn would soon abandon both figuration and the Bay Area for the cool abstraction he was to explore in Santa Monica. Bischoff too had painted abstractions early in his career and would revert to abstraction later on. For each of them, the main issue was painting in all its varieties. A dogmatic insistence on abstraction was to them as confining as representational art seemed to the pure abstractionists. Significantly, this return to figuration around 1960 dovetailed historically with the emergence of Pop Art which, during the 1960s decade, would carry the flag for figurative art and effectively triumph over abstraction.
