Elmer Bischoff

American, 1916 - 1991

BiographyElmer Bischoff was born on July 6, 1916 in Berkeley, California. He studied at the University of California at Berkeley. Bischoff grew up in a home that valued the arts, painting and making music were important to him since childhood. As an art student he had spent about ten years painting in the style of Picasso. Following graduation from Berkeley in 1939, Bischoff became a ceramics and jewelry teacher at a high school in Sacramento, California and then served in the military for three years In 1946 he joined the faculty of the California School of Fine Arts, the wellspring of the Abstract Expressionist movement on the West Coast. The close friendships formed there with painters Richard Diebenkorn, Frank Lobdell, David Park and Hassel Smith greatly influenced him. This group began to revitalize the figurative tradition; these artists came to be known as the Bay Area figurative school. But in 1952 Bischoff resigned when his friend Hassel Smith was dropped from the faculty.

About this same time, Bischoff made a transition from pure abstraction to figurative painting. To earn money, he drove a truck for Railway Express and sketched during his lunch hour. From 1953 to 1956 he was an art instructor at Yuba College. In 1956 he had a very successful one-man show at the California School of Fine Arts and from that time he chaired their graduate school and became one of the school's most influential teachers. He taught at the University of California from 1963 until he died in 1991.
second child of John Bischoff and his wife, Elna (née Elna Nelson), grew up in Berkeley, California, the second-generation Californian son of a father of German descent and a mother of mixed Swedish-Ecuadoran origin.

He entered the University of California, Berkeley in September 1934, completing his master's degree in May 1939, and immediately started teaching art at a Sacramento High School (1939-1941). During his years at university, one teacher had influenced him most: the highly independent-minded Margaret Peterson, whose total dedication to her teaching, and insistence on the ethical value of art, were to have a great impact on the artist Elmer Bischoff would be. World War II, however, was to change Bischoff's life. In 1941, he served as a lieutenant colonel in intelligence services in England, stationing near Oxford, and only coming back to the US in November 1945.

After the War, back in San Francisco, Bischoff found himself once more in the midst of avant-garde artistic ebullience - mixing, among other painters (and to name 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 war veteran, like Bischoff) suggested Bischoff as art teacher for a position still available, at San Francisco's California School of Fine Arts. It was then that Bischoff entered a faculty which already included some of the most talented new artists of post-war America. It is there that he eventually met David Park and Richard Diebenkorn.

While distinct from expressionist art that came from Europe, art of the Bay Area Figurative Movement displays the immediacy and warmth 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 turn in painting. Bischoff's quiet and lyrical paintings were serious in a different way than the painting which was being taken seriously at the time; and which saw 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 Academy of Arts, 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 The Phillips Collection (Washington D.C.), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington D.C.) are among the public collections holding works by Elmer Bischoff.

Person TypeIndividual