Bay Area Figurative Movement

The Bay Area Figurative Movement (also known as the Bay Area Figurative School, Bay Area Figurative Art, Bay Area Figuration, and similar variations) was a mid-20th-century art movement centered in the San Francisco Bay Area. Emerging in the 1950s and 1960s, it brought together a group of artists who abandoned working in the prevailing style of Abstract Expressionism, embracing a renewed focus in figuration in painting. The New York School of Abstract Expressionism was the first American style of art to have international importance. The San Francisco Bay Area was the center for an independent variant of Abstract Expressionism. The Bay Area Figurative Movement was in response to both. Because Bay Area Figuration often employed the spontaneity of Abstract Expressionism, it is considered a hybrid style that produced challenging or problematic pictures. The first exhibition to present this movement, Contemporary Bay Area Figurative Painting was organized by Paul Mills for the Oakland Art Museum. The exhibition ran September 8 - 29, 1957 and then traveled to the following museums: Los Angeles County Museum, Exposition Park, Los Angeles, California, 13 November 1957 - 22 December 1957, Dayton Art Institute, Ohio, 7 January 1958 - 9 February 1958, The Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Colorado, 1 March 1958 - 1 March 1958.¶

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Bay Area Figurative Movement”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.¶

Bay Area Figurative Movement is American art movement, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition.¹¶

The source record links this tradition to 3 external registers, which can be verified through the citation.¹¶