Elmer Nelson Bischoff

Staempfli Gallery, Inc., New York

Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center; San Francisco, De Young Museum; Buffalo, New York, Albright Knox Art Gallery

In good condition aside from scattered areas of cracquelure, some with associated losses; upper left corner, upper center at edge, lower right at edge, upper right corner with minute loss, center right in sky, approx. 10 inches from edge, has approx. 1 by 1 1/2 inch loss with adjacent cracked areas lifting but stable. Small scuff mark lower center at edge in pink. Faint circular areas of cracquelure in brown at center and in green hill, long line of cracquelure to the left of hill and faint lines center left at edge. Under UV: 2-3 minute scattered specks of white paint, in the lower left quadrant, are possibly house paint but may also be studio paint. Two spots fluoresce in the dark green area in the lower left quadrant. Each spot is less than 1-inch in diameter. A circular scribble of red crayon fluoresces in the powder blue area in the lower right quadrant. The varnish does not appear to be extremely dirty.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

With the dawn of the 1960s decade, Elmer Bischoff's career was in high gear – he was Chairman of the Graduate Program of the California School of Fine Arts; he was being represented in New York by Staempfli Gallery, who were selling his paintings for ten times, soon to be thirty times, what he'd been getting a couple of years earlier; and his art was controversial, therefore on people's minds.

The controversy had its ironic aspect. His art and that of his fellow Bay Area artists Thiebaud, Diebenkorn and Park, challenged by its figurativeness and light anecdotal touches the stern, iconoclastic works of the New York Abstract Expressionists, then the the favored style of the leading art critics.  Being figurative, landscapes such as the present work Rooftops and Bay go further than evoking a place, they re-establish to painting the responsibilities of documenting and celebrating the motif.  A view from the Berkeley Hills across San Francisco Bay, its offense to avant-garde circles was precisely its lack of irony and its attention to appearances in the real world.

Yet the Bay Area artists were not antagonistic to abstraction – some among them were abstract artists, while Diebenkorn would soon abandon both figuration and the Bay Area for the cool abstraction he was to explore in Santa Monica.  Bischoff too had painted abstractions early in his career and would revert to abstraction later on. 

For each of them, the main issue was painting in all its varieties. A dogmatic insistence on abstraction was to them as confining as representational art seemed to the pure abstractionists.  Significantly, this return to figuration around 1960 dovetailed historically with the emergence of Pop Art which, during the 1960s decade, would carry the flag for figurative art and effectively triumph over abstraction.