David Park

Helen Park Bigelow

--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.

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