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Peter WitwerPortrait of Man San Francisco Bay Area Figurative Movement Peter Witwer1958-68
1958-68
About the Item
Portrait of Man San Francisco Bay Area Figurative Movement
Figurative portrait of a man by San Francisco artist Peter Witwer (American, 1928-1968). Unsigned from a collection of his work. Provenance estate of Peter Witwer, Lost Art Solon.
Image 32"H x 26"W
Frame, 32.5"H x 26.5"W x 1.75"D
Posthumous show of the artists work exhibit card on verso.
Born George Peter Witwer on September 6th, 1928, Peter was the son of a prominent real estate developer in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He attended school in New York City in the late 1940s and moved West in 1958 a part of San Francisco’s emerging gay scene.
While living in New York from 1945-1958, Witwer was a contemporary of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Hans Hoffman and witnessed their massive influence on Post WWII painting first hand. Shortly after Witwer’s arrival to San Francisco in 1958, he exhibited alongside David Park and Elmer Bischoff in the 1959 California Painters’ Annual at the Oakland Art Museum, where the first exhibition of Bay Area Figurative painting took place in 1957. The 1957 show, entitled “Contemporary Bay Area Figurative Painting” also included seminal works by Richard Diebenkorn, James Weeks, Bruce McGaw and Paul Wonner.
Peter Witwer would never achieve the recognition of the afore mentioned artists. In fact, he spent his life in relative obscurity, working during the day at the Rincon Post Office and City of Paris department store, and painting at night in the studio of his apartment on Waller Street in the Haight. In spite of this, his recently uncovered body of work brilliantly reflects two of the most important art movements of the last 60 years. The collection showcases a newly-discovered artist working on the leading edge of contemporary painting during his time.
Within the Witwer collection, several distinct art movements can be seen. Works from 1961-1963 period show a strong tendency towards the New York school of Abstract Expressionism (Hans Hoffman, Jackson Pollock and others). Highly textured Colour-Field pieces from this early 60s period also reflect the influence of the European Décollage artists that tore into built-up surfaces to reveal the shreds of paper below. Witwer experimented with plaster-like compounds for sculpting under the surface of paintings; house paints; textile and found object collage; and large-scale canvases. As his work progressed through the 1960s, the paintings take-on distinct qualities of the Bay Area Figurative movement. These works merge the human form with painterly abstraction, drawing strong comparisons to the art of his contemporaries, David Park, Elmer Bischoff, Manuel Neri and Nathan Oliveira.
In the Fall of 1968 Peter Witwer was shot dead as he walked home through his Haight Ashbury neighborhood. Since then, his life’s work of nearly a hundred finished paintings has been in hiding for four decades. Reflecting the dynamic evolution of American Mid-Century painting from the Abstract Expressionism of the 1940s/50s into the Bay Area Figurative movement of the 1950s/60s Witwer’s work is a spectacular timeline of the Bay Area art scene.
- Creator:Peter Witwer (1928 - 1968)
- Creation Year:1958-68
- Dimensions:Height: 32.5 in (82.55 cm)Width: 26.5 in (67.31 cm)Depth: 1.75 in (4.45 cm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Condition:Very good to excellent paint finish. Some paint streaks cleaned and touched up right center side of face. Basic slat frame included.
- Gallery Location:Soquel, CA
- Reference Number:
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