Elmer Bischoff (1916-1991) is generally regarded as one of the leaders among the artists in the San Francisco Bay Area who, after contributing to the local emergence of Abstract Expressionism during the 1940s and 50s, shifted the terms of their spectacularly sensuous brushwork to recognizable imagery. Bill Berkson writes that if "David Park was the classicist of the founding triad of the Bay Area Figurative painters, and Richard Diebenkorn the modernist, Bischoff was the romantic." Designed to accompany a major retrospective of Bischoff's work, this superb volume is lavishly illustrated with...

Art of Engagement takes the first comprehensive look at the key role of California's art and artists in politics and culture since 1945. Tracing the remarkably fertile confluence of political agitation and passionately engaged art, Peter Selz leads readers on a journey that begins with the Nazi death camps and moves through the Bay Area's Free Speech Movement of 1964, the birth of Beat and hippie countercultures, the Chicano labor movement in the San Joaquin Valley, the beginning of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, and some of the most radical manifestations of the women's movement,...

Chiura Obata, a gifted Japanese-born artist from California, made his first trip to Yosemite in 1927. The trip left a lasting impression in a remarkable collection of sketches, postcards, and letters. This volume includes 80 full-color reproductions of Obata s pencil sketches, watercolor paintings, and day-by-day narratives woven through his correspondences. Named one of the Best Fifty books of 1993? by the American Institute of Graphic Arts, the book is a unique and beautiful presentation of personal artistic experience."