Narrative Imagism and the Figurative Tradition in Northern California Painting

The revolt of the Bay Area figurative painters against the canons of Abstract Expressionism in the early 1950s confirmed earlier tendencies in northern California art and made possible an art less preoccupied with modernist values than its New York and Los Angeles counterparts. The significance of this heritage for succeeding generations of artists, its endorsement of an anti-aesthetic stance initiated by Surrealism's arrival in the area in the late 1930s, and its persistence and manipulation by younger painters have been less fully documented.