New Acquisition
‘North Sea Coast’, 1954 oil on canvas by Paul Wonner,
American, 1920 – 2008, 50 by 50 inches.
This is one of the best examples we have seen of Paul Wonner’s transition from abstraction to his landscape figurative style of the late 1950s and 60s.
At first glance the composition appears to be an abstraction, but upon contemplation a horizon appears of mountain ridgeline dropping down to a coastline that meanders into a frothy cove of breaking surf with a resting skiff pulled up to the sandy beach. The painting has a vigorously worked lush impasto surface of blues, greens and white typical of Wonner’s palette of that era.
This painting comes to us after more than a year of touring in the exhibition ‘ Paul Wonner and Theophilus Brown, Breaking the rules curated and organized by The Crocker Museum of Art in Sacramento. This show also traveled to The Laguna Museum in Laguna Beach California and the Dixon Galleries and Gardens in Memphis TN.
Paul Wonner was born in Tucson, Arizona in 1920, and moved to the Bay Area to study at California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland (now California College of the Arts), where he earned a Bachelor's degree in 1941. He returned to the Bay Area in 1950 and by 1953 completed Bachelor's and Master's degrees in fine arts at UC Berkeley. Wonner taught at the Otis Institute of Art in Los Angeles and UC Santa Barbara during the 1960s.
Wonner was included in the 1957 ground breaking exhibition ‘Figurative Painting of the San Francisco Bay Area’ curated by Paul Mills at the Oakland Museum along with David Park, 1911 – 1960, Richard Diebenkorn, 1922 – 1993, Elmer Bischoff, 1916 - 1991 and his lifelong companion William Theophilus Brown, 1919-2012.
Major museums throughout the United States have collected his work including the Smithsonian Museums in Washington DC, The d Young, Museum and SFMOMA in San Francisco.
New Acquisition - Paul Wonner