Diebenkorn:Pollock::Baker:Davis.
How Chet Baker taught me to stop worrying and love the Apocalyptic Wallpaper of the Bay Area.
You don’t know what love is until you know the meaning of the blues.1
It’s true, but I never believed it until I heard it from jazz singer and trumpet player Chet Baker. Chet, while having a much lower profile, had a lot in common with Miles Davis. Born only two years apart, they both made names with their horns and struggled with heroin addiction. Davis was a force beyond mortal measure, while Baker’s substance struggles led him to incidents of violent dental extraction and a grisly death, and I’m not equating the two, but Chet gave me something special that Miles never could. Miles was the first jazz I was exposed to, and his standards are the definitive versions in my mind. Of course his own compositions are greater still, but in my brain, “You Don’t Know What Love Is” is Miles’s alone. He made formal innovations using old show tunes as the launchpad—a launchpad he would later jettison, but which served him marvelously on dozens of records. Chet was far less adventurous and far less innovative, but when, decades after getting into Miles, I heard Chet’s versions of the same songs, I was floored. Chet seemed to take the lyrics seriously; he filled even the flimsiest numbers with a sadness of unfathomable depth. Miles’s cut is essential listening, but when I need a good cry, I need Chet to deliver the devastating news.
What’s any of this got to do with painting anyway?
There’s a schism in the treatment of standards in jazz that occurs around the same time and the same places as a schism in figuration in painting. Miles was fundamentally a New Yorker, and he worked away from standards—away from content and narrative, and towards this iterative, cyclical, formalist structure. It was exactly the same thing that New York painters like Jackson Pollock were doing: Pollock began with a Regionalist platform,2 only to explosively jettison that platform for his famous all-over compositions—all form, no content.
Chet also moved around and took some very peculiar work over the years, but he was essentially a Californian. And while the New York School moved emphatically away from pictures of things, in the Bay Area, a school of painting emerged that embraced of-ness. From 1950 to 1965, the Bay Area Figurative Movement produced an alternative picture of the future of modern art—it had a subject; it looks surprisingly fresh today. Writing as the sweatiest man in Sweatiest Manhattan, I need some California cool.
II. California School?
The question of “content” is a central problem of mid-century modernism, hotly debated in New York. But it’s a counterproductive lens to view the “California School” through.
Here’s the problem: in New York, the critical debate centered not on whether Abstract Expressionism was Great, but on what the rules of the style were. Was it all about action and gesture, as Harold Rosenberg thought? Or all about Significant Form, as Clement Greenberg hazily postulated? Was it necessarily abstract, or did the splashes of paint sublimate repressed images?3 Was it, as Rothko wrote, “that the subject matter is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is both tragic and timeless?”4 Or, as Rosenberg had it, that “the most comfortable intercourse with the void is mysticism”5—whatever that means!?
And the problematic thing was that Clyfford Still became California’s ambassador to the New York School. A North Dakota native, Still moved to San Francisco in 1941, becoming a hugely influential teacher at California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) before leaving for New York in 1950. The scene that coalesced around Still at the Institute was a diverse crowd of figurative painters, abstract painters, and painters like Richard Diebenkorn who went back and forth. New York chauvinism claimed Still as a non-negotiable member of the New York School, and the rest of these granola-munching hippies couldn’t even render a simple manifesto about how best to intercourse with the void! Was the Bay Area movement too diverse to be a “school” at all?
This was a real question that smart people asked. The French critic Michel Tapié shoehorned his favorite Californians together in 1953 as the École du Pacifique;6 Hubert Crehan ran an article in Art News asking the question, “Is there a California School?” in 1956; and in 1971, ArtForum ran the post-mortem “Was there a San Francisco School?”7
The answer seems obvious if you leave aside the crude measuring stick of Figuration vs. Abstraction—because there was clearly a rich conversation among painters at the time and place, all taking up similar methods to grapple with similar problems. Figuration was a concern, but it was just one: so much more holds the movement together than drives it apart. The movement painted aggressively in a latter-day Fauvist mode with a palette that is all its own—and while these tools were wielded to a wide array of effects, perhaps David Park summarized the problem of subject matter:
“Art ought to be a troublesome thing, and one my reasons for painting representationally is that this makes for much more troublesome pictures.”8
Diebenkorn and Parks and Elmer Bischoff all found different ways to trouble their pictures, but their work has an edge and an acerbic grace that binds them. It’s some of the most exciting work on canvas in the twentieth century, and over the next few weeks, we’ll take a look at the big names of the Bay Area School or Scene or Movement—and at the strange career of curator and CIA puppet, David McAgy, the ringmaster of the whole circus.
Join us for a little California sun this August for a deep dive into the Bay.
Thanks for reading,
Jonathan
Jonathan@jonathanmillerspies.com
Apparently the song was written by Don Raye and Gene de Paul for a 1941 Abbott and Costello movie, but deleted from the final cut.
Read our article on Pollock’s training under Thomas Hart Benton here.
See our article on the Greenberg/Rosenberg debate here.
As quoted by Robert Hughes, The Spectacle of Skill, 2015, p. 179.
Howard Rosenberg, “The Tradition of the New,” Art News, Dec. 1952.
Michel Tapié, Peintres américains en France, Galerie Craven, Paris 1953, p.138.
Mary Fuller, “Was there a San Francisco School?” January 1971 ArtForum, pp. 47-53.
Caroline A. Jones, Bay Area Figurative Art: 1950-1965, 1989, p. 12.