SAN FRANCISCO, CA .- Paul Thiebaud Gallery announced its representation of the Estate of Paul Wonner (1920-2008). Best known as a member of the then radical Bay Area Figurative Painting Movement of the 1950s, Wonner’s career stretched over six decades and had a significant second act twenty-five years after he first emerged. Wonner, with his longtime partner and fellow painter, William Theophilus Brown, were equally radical in their personal life, living openly as a gay couple beginning in the 1950s, a period when queerness and homosexuality were socially shunned and illegal under the law.

Wonner’s early works were largely abstract, a result of his attending UC Berkeley for his MFA, which he earned in 1954. Later categorized with Brown as part of the “bridge generation” of the Bay Area Figurative Painting Movement, Wonner’s transition from abstraction to figuration began in 1954 and was going fully in that direction in 1955, at around the same time Richard Diebenkorn’s Berkeley paintings began evolving away from gestural abstraction though Diebenkorn is considered a first generation artist.

Wonner’s work was included in the historic 1957 exhibition Contemporary Bay Area Figurative Painting, curated by Paul Mills at the Oakland Art Museum, which later travelled to the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science, and Art; Dayton Art Institute; and the Colorado Springs Fine Art Center. Wonner’s explorations of figuration continued well into the 1960s, however by the end of the decade they had yielded a series of compositionally spare still lifes, featuring a few objects painted at a small scale on large canvases.

The 1970s initially found Wonner searching for a new direction in his work, as can be seen in the series of surrealistic watercolors he made that are loosely connected to literature and poetry. However, by 1976 had found his next major series in the large-scale still life paintings of contemporary objects in acrylic, which were inspired by Wonner’s love of 17th century Dutch still life painting. Wonner would paint these celebrated works for the next twenty-five years.

The turn of the millennium also brought with it a transition by Wonner to working primarily on paper in acrylic, watercolor, and gouache. Among the important series in the final decade of Wonner’s life, is a group of intimate watercolors depicting the artist working in his studio with models, titled The Youth and Old Age Series. Other series include Bathers After Cezanne, and many works depicting friends, strangers, and dogs in parks around San Francisco. Paul Wonner died in San Francisco in 2008.

Paul Wonner was born in Tucson, Arizona, and earned his Bachelor of Arts in Art Education from the California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland (now California College of the Arts, San Francisco) in 1941. He later earned a second Bachelor of Arts in Art from UC Berkeley in 1952, as well as both a Masters of Art in Art in 1954 and a Masters of Library Science in 1956 from the University. During his career he taught art at a number of schools and institutions, including the University of California, Los Angeles; Otis Art Institute of Los Angeles County; University of California, Santa Barbara; Art Center College of Design, Los Angeles, California State University, Long Beach, CA; and the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, among others.

Wonner was the recipient of the 1953 Anne Bremmer Prize in Art, the 1954 Walter Haas Award for promising young artists from the San Francisco Museum of Art, and was named the 2003 Elder Artist of the Year by the Eldergivers of Napa Valley in collaboration with the di Rosa Preserve: Art and Nature.

Paul Wonner’s paintings, drawings, and prints have been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions across the United States, including a 1981 mid-career retrospective, Paul Wonner: Abstract Realist, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which later travelled to the Marion Kooger McNay Art Institute, San Antonio, TX, and the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. His work was also included in the landmark 1989 retrospective of Bay Area Figurative Art, 1950-1965, organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which later travelled to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia.

In 2023, the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA, organized Breaking the Rules: Paul Wonner and Theophilus Brown, a joint retrospective for both artists, which later travelled to the Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA, and the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, TN.

Paul Wonner’s works can be found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Whitney Museum of American Art; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Smithsonian American Art Museum; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Fine Arts Boston; Art Institute of Chicago; Oakland Museum of California; Crocker Art Museum; San Jose Museum of Art; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; San Jose Museum of Art; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for the Arts at Stanford University; and the Anderson Collection at Stanford University, among many others, as well as in numerous private collections.