David Park (March 17, 1911 – September 20, 1960) was an American painter and a pioneer of the Bay Area Figurative Movement in painting during the 1950s.
Biography
David Park was born in Boston, the son of Mary Turner and Charles Edward Park. His father was a Unitarian minister. He attended the Loomis Chaffee School in Windsor Connecticut and was recognized for his early talent by the sculptor Evelyn Longman Batchelder, the headmaster's wife.
He moved to Los Angeles at the age of 17, staying with his aunt Edith Park Truesdell who was an artist, so he could study at Otis Art Institute in 1928. During the economic depression, Park returned to Boston to teach art at the Winsor School for Girls. he initially painted what he saw: kids playing in the street, musicians, his friends, people in their houses. Toward the end of the decade he painted classical studio nudes and bathers in a monumental style. After he became too ill to work with oils, he continued working with watercolors which he produced until his early death in 1960, at the age of 49, of cancer. Park was working at the University of California as an Associate Professor of Art up until he died. He was painting his best works in the final years of his life and career.
Legacy
In 1988, Park received a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. Another Park retrospective was held from 2020–2021 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Park's Standing Male Nude in the Shower, painted between 1955 and 1957, sold for $1,160,000 at Sotheby's New York on May 15, 2007.