Site of David Park's Studio
BERKELEY HISTORY
SITE OF DAVID PARK’S STUDIO
In the 1940’s painter David Park (1911–1960) had a studio in a brick
building that once occupied this site. Despite a well-received exhibition
of his abstract expressionist works at the San Francisco Museum of Art
in 1948, Park rejected abstraction and took many of his paintings of
the previous three years to the city dump. Discovering a new freedom
in “the natural development of the painting,” Park began creating richly
colored and textured works depicting the human figure and scenes from
everyday life. In his shift from abstraction lay the origin of what
subsequently came to be known as the Bay Area Figurative style. Soon
adapted by fellow Berkeley painters Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer
Bischoff and others, this style became an important West Coast postwar
indigenous school of art.
Berkeley Historical Plaque Project
2003