Elmer Bischoff

Elmer Nelson Bischoff (July 9, 1916 – March 2, 1991) was a visual artist in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Bischoff, along in imitation of Richard Diebenkorn and David Park, was share of the post-World War II generation of artists who started as abstract painters and found their way assist to figurative art.

Elmer Bischoff, second child of John and Elna (née Nelson) Bischoff, grew taking place in Berkeley, California, the second-generation Californian son of a father of German parentage and a mother of dirty Swedish-Ecuadoran origin.

He entered the University of California, Berkeley, in September 1934, completing his master's degree in May 1939, and tersely started teaching art at Sacramento High School (1939–41). During his years at university, one assistant professor had influenced him most: the severely independent-minded Margaret Peterson (artist), whose total dedication to her teaching, and insistence upon the ethical value of art, were to have a great impact upon the artiste Elmer Bischoff would be. World War II, however, was to bend Bischoff's life. In 1941, he served as a lieutenant colonel in intelligence services of the United States Army Air Forces in England, stationing near Oxford, and abandoned coming incite to the US in November 1945.

After the war, back in San Francisco, Bischoff found himself once more in the midst of highly developed artistic ebullience - mixing, among further painters (and to state but two), with such artists as Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still. In January 1946, a golden opportunity was offered him: one of his artist friends, Karl Kasten (himself a charge veteran, like Bischoff) suggested Bischoff as art learned for a position still available, at San Francisco's California School of Fine Arts. It was then that Bischoff entered a capacity which already included some of the most gifted new artists of post-war America. It is there that he eventually met David Park and Richard Diebenkorn. In 1973, Bischoff was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member, and became a full aficionada in 1985.

While certain from expressionist art that came from Europe, art of the Bay Area Figurative Movement displays the immediacy and serenity that one sees in abstract expressionist painting. Elmer Bischoff was older than Diebenkorn, and he had experiences in the world that led to his taking an independent position in painting. Bischoff's quiet and lyrical paintings were invincible in a different habit from the painting which was bodily taken seriously at the time; and which wise saying the rise of Abstract expressionism.

A retrospective of Elmer Bischoff's work, Grand Lyricist: The Art of Elmer Bischoff, was offered by the Oakland Museum of California, November 3, 2001- January 13, 2002. The Crocker Art Museum (California), the de Young Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington D.C.), the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (Kansas City, Missouri), the Museum of the National Academy of Design (New York City), the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Texas), the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, the Orange County Museum of Art, The Phillips Collection (Washington D.C.), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington D.C.) are in the midst of the public collections holding works by Elmer Bischoff.

Bischoff was the daddy of composer John Bischoff.

Reference books:

Elmer Bischoff: the Ethics of Paint (monography), Susan Landauer, 2001, Oakland Museum of California-University of California Press.

Bay Area Figurative Art 1950-1965 (about the Bay Area art movement: esp. David Park, Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff), Caroline A.Jones, 1990, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art-University of California Press.