SFMOMA, Part 4: Boston Common.
In SFMOMA's collection — not on view at the moment — is a nearly square tempera painting, about two and a half feet on each side. Six boys in swim trunks ring a round pond with a small tiered fountain at its center. One boy is already in the water at the lower left, looking up at the others. Another hangs upside down at the right edge, caught mid-dive or mid-tumble, his body folded over itself. Behind them, across a band of bright blue water, rises a city: red brick blocks, a church spire, and a golden dome unmistakable as the Massachusetts State House. Dark trees frame the scene on both sides like stage curtains. The paint is flat and dry — tempera, not oil — and the figures are simplified to smooth, heavy volumes, their faces calm and unreadable, arranged around the water like pieces in a frieze. In the lower right corner, a signature: David Park 35.
This is David Park's Boston Common, painted in 1935. It is tempera on canvas, 29 1/8 × 25 1/16 inches. It entered SFMOMA in 1997 as part of the bequest of Lydia Park Moore and Roy Moore — the painter's widow and her second husband. The museum's Park holdings run deep: a 1934 set of biblical prints donated by founding trustee Albert Bender in 1935, paintings that span the 1930s through 1960, and the late masterwork Two Bathers (1958), acquired in 2008 as the centerpiece of SFMOMA's Bay Area Figurative collection.
The easy reading is idyll: a summer afternoon, boys at the swimming hole, the world before the war. But Park was twenty-four when he painted it, living through the Depression three thousand miles from the scene. No one in this painting is anyone he was looking at. Everyone in it is someone he was remembering. The pond is the Frog Pond; the golden dome is the State House. This is Boston, painted from California, by a boy who left home at seventeen to become a painter and never moved back. What looks like a genre scene is really a self-portrait of homesickness — and the first evidence, fifteen years early, of what Park would become famous for: painting people, directly, without apology.
1911–1928: Boston
David Park was born in Boston in 1911 and grew up there. Boston Common, the park in the painting, is the oldest public park in America, set aside in 1634; the Frog Pond at its center has been a wading pool in summer and a skating pond in winter for generations of Boston children. Park was one of them. The picnickers, the rowboaters, the sailors on leave — the whole cast of his boyhood — would stay with him for the rest of his short life, resurfacing again and again whenever he put brush to canvas.
At seventeen he left for Los Angeles to study art, then moved north to San Francisco. His training was brief and classical — art schools in Los Angeles and San Francisco — and by his twenties he was living in Berkeley, working as a painter and art teacher. He had traded the oldest city in America for the newest edge of it, and he would spend the next three decades figuring out what a California painter was supposed to paint.
The 1930s: California
The 1930s gave him his first answer: paint the times. Park's early work belongs to the Depression decade — the chunky figures and social-realist gravity of WPA murals, with something of Picasso's neoclassical phase in the simplified, sculptural bodies. He worked at times on New Deal-era government-funded projects, including public murals, the kind of work that put painters on scaffolds and paid them to address ordinary people.
San Francisco in those years was full of lessons. Diego Rivera had painted three frescoes in the Bay Area in 1930 and 1931, and his example — monumental figures, public walls, labor shown with dignity — hung over every young figurative painter in the city. The Making of a Fresco, painted in 1931 at the very art school where Park studied, was still fresh on the wall: a working fresco about the making of frescoes, with engineers and artisans given the scale of heroes. Park absorbed it. A companion painting from the same year as Boston Common, Mother and Child (1935), shows a young woman in a blue sweater staring past the viewer while her naked baby reaches for her face: a Madonna and Child for the Depression, rendered with the same heavy calm as the boys at the pond. The influence of Rivera is there, and so is Picasso. What is not there yet is Park himself — not quite.
1935: Boston Common
Look again at the arrangement. Nobody swims. Nobody splashes. Six boys pose around the water like actors who have been told where to stand — one seated, one standing, one already in the pond looking up, one frozen upside down in a dive that never lands. The composition has the staginess of a mural and the stillness of a dream. That staginess is the tell: this is not a place but an idea of a place, the way a twenty-four-year-old remembers being sixteen.
The choice of tempera matters too. Tempera is a deliberate, old-master medium — egg yolk and pigment, the stuff of altarpieces — and Park chose it over oil for a scene of boys in swim trunks. The flatness it gives the painting, the dry matte surface, makes the whole thing feel lifted out of time, as if memory itself had a texture. The golden dome does the rest of the work: it names the city without naming it, the way a postcard names it. Everything in the painting is specific and nothing in it is observed. That contradiction is the whole painting.
The 1940s: Abstraction
What happened next is the strangest passage in Park's biography. Through the 1940s he tried to be an Abstract Expressionist. The serious painting of the moment was being made in New York, it had no people in it, and Park — ambitious, unsure, watching the center of the art world move three thousand miles east — painted the way the moment demanded. No ponds, no Boston, no boys. For nearly a decade, the painter who would become famous for the figure painted everything but.
It is worth sitting with how complete the detour was. This was not a young artist finding his way; this was a gifted figurative painter suppressing his own gift because history seemed to require it. The 1940s Park is the dog that didn't bark — and Boston Common, sitting in a drawer or on a studio wall through all of it, must have looked to him like evidence of a self he had decided to outgrow.
1950: The return to the figure
Around 1950, Park did what no ambitious American painter was supposed to do: he quit abstraction and went back to painting people. He was not alone for long — Elmer Bischoff and Richard Diebenkorn, both in the Bay Area, made the same turn — but Park was first, and the gesture was the founding act of what got called the Bay Area Figurative Movement: the first serious American challenge to the idea that modern painting had to leave the figure behind.
The art world noticed, mostly with disbelief. To go back to the figure in 1950 was to walk out of the future and into the past, in full view of everyone — New York had declared the argument over, and here was a painter in Berkeley reopening it. Park did it anyway, and the reason is visible fifteen years earlier in Boston Common: he had never stopped believing that a painting of people, plainly seen and plainly felt, was worth making. The detour through abstraction now reads like the exception; the boys at the pond were the rule all along. Within a few years the Bay Area had something it never had before: a second center of American painting, one that did not ask New York's permission.
The 1950s: Berkeley
The 1950s were Park's great decade. He taught at the California School of Fine Arts and at UC Berkeley, and he painted the lush, heavy, sunlit figurative pictures he is remembered for — bathers, musicians, interiors, portraits — with a brushwork that kept everything he had learned from abstraction and spent it on the human body instead. The paint got thicker, the color got hotter, the figures got closer, until they filled the canvas edge to edge. SFMOMA's Two Bathers (1958), all churning paint and physical presence, is the peak of it: the Frog Pond boys grown up, still in the water, still not looking at the viewer.
1959–1960: The scroll
In 1959 Park was diagnosed with cancer. Chronic back pain had already made the easel impossible; now friends built him a special desk for the ground floor of his Berkeley house so he could work sitting down. Lydia bought him all eight colors of felt-tip pen — then a brand-new medium — and a thirty-foot roll of shelf paper. Every day he unspooled more of the roll and drew, one scene melting into the next.
The scenes he kept returning to were Boston Common as a boy: Sunday picnickers, rowboaters, sailors on leave, nearby streetscapes. A friend likened the scroll to a jazz improvisation — spontaneous, rolling, everything happening as he moved along. He died in 1960, at forty-nine. The first place he ever painted from memory was the last place he ever drew. The pond was still there. He never got out of the water.
In 1935 — the year Park painted Boston Common — Albert Bender gave SFMOMA a set of Park's prints. Bender was the same man who spent four years getting Diego Rivera his visa and then asked him for The Flower Carrier. Two souvenirs of home entered the collection that year: Rivera's Mexico, Park's Boston. The museum has been collecting them ever since. 🌁
Timeline — David Park
1911 — born in Boston
1928 — moves to Los Angeles at seventeen to study art
Early 1930s — San Francisco and Berkeley; WPA-era mural and government art work
1935 — paints Boston Common; Albert Bender donates Park's 1934 biblical prints to the new museum
Late 1930s — marries Lydia Newell; returns to Massachusetts
1940s — abstract expressionist phase
ca. 1950 — abandons abstraction, returns to figuration; the Bay Area Figurative Movement begins
1950s — teaches at the California School of Fine Arts and UC Berkeley
1958 — Two Bathers
1959 — cancer diagnosis; begins the felt-tip scroll drawings
1960 — dies in Berkeley at forty-nine
1997 — Boston Common enters SFMOMA (bequest of Lydia Park Moore and Roy Moore)
2008 — SFMOMA acquires Two Bathers (1958)
2020 — David Park: A Retrospective at SFMOMA