Background

Wonner was born on April 24, 1920, in Tucson, Arizona, United States. He had a sister Dorothy Kendall.

Education

Paul Wonner was interested in art as an adolescent and his parents hired a tutor to assist him with his drawing during secondary school. Wonner moved to the Bay Area and entered the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland (now California College of the Arts), from which he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1941, before he was drafted into military service.

After his service, Wonner moved from Texas to New York City and continued his studies. To fulfil his enthusiasm for art and painting he took classes at the Art Students League from 1947 and also attended symposiums at Robert Motherwell’s studio. There he got acquainted with various other art professionals, essayists and critics.

After returning to California in 1950, Paul Wonner studied at the University of California, Berkeley, receiving his Bachelor of Arts in 1952, Master of Arts in 1953, and Master of Library and Information Science in 1955. There he was affected by the elements of Cubism.

Career

Early in Paul Wonner's artistic career, he used the principles of abstraction and figuration in order to create his own style. He enjoyed collegial support for his work from originators of the Bay Area Figurative Movement and later became known as one of the "Bridge Generation" artists of the movement. His works were included in the 1957 exhibition at the Oakland Museum, known as Contemporary Bay Area Figurative Painting, which gathered eleven different art specialists.

Wonner worked as a librarian at the University of California, Davis, in the late 1950s. In 1956 Paul Wonner began depicting in his artworks a progression of dreamlike male bathers and young men with bouquets. He moved to Southern California in the 1960s, where from 1962 he began teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles and in 1968 he became a lecturer at the University of California Santa, Barbara and later at the Otis College of Art and Design.

By the end of the 1960s, Paul Wonner’s style had turned from abstraction to a high realism. In 1976 he returned to the San Francisco Bay Area and kept on working as an Abstract Realist artist, creating his still life paintings. Later on, the artist went back to painting human figures in vaguely allegorical arrangements and settings.

Wonner was represented by the John Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco. The painter participated in a number of group and solo exhibitions, including those at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, McNay Museum, and the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum.

Achievements

• 

  Paul Wonner is highly renowned for his still-life depictions done in an abstract expressionist style. His best-known paintings include the following: Still Life with Cup (1959), Figures in Sunlight (1960), Landscape with Trees, Santa Monica (1964), Model On The Floor (1964), Salome Dancing (1966), Still Life with Napkins and Gift Box (1981), etc.
  
  Wonner’s artworks are included in different public collections around the United States, such as the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the the Oakland Museum of California, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Soloman R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, among others.

Works

More photos

• painting

  • Repose

  • Still Life

  • Still Life with Cup

  • Figures in Sunlight

  • Landscape with Trees, Santa Monica

  • Model On The Floor

  • The Model with Pensive Look

  • View of L.A. from Beverly Hills

  • Pitcher, Lemons and Book

  • Salome Dancing

  • Yellow Bowl, Cup And Flowers

  • Lake, Nude, Black Hill

  • Untitled

  • Still Life with Napkins and Gift Box

  • Our Amazing World of Nature

  • Study of Flowers with Art Book

  • Tulips in a Milk Carton

  • Still Life with Bud

  • Self-Portrait Painting

  • Bathers After Cezanne II

  • Untitled (Nude)

  • Untitled (Nude)

  • Woman with Flowers

  • Man with Raised Arms

  • Drawing in the Studio

  • Landscape with Flowering Orchard

  • Model Bending Forward

  • Model Drinking Coffee

  • Spoons

  • Southwest Canyon, Arizona

  • View of the Sea from Malibu

  • Objects on Floor

  • The Waiter

  • The Tempest

  • Zinnias

  • Still Life with Indian Miniature

  • Untitled

  • Study for Still Life with Flowers in a Whiskey Bottle

  • Tulip

  • Dutch Still Life with Cookies and Candy

  • In a Park VII

  • View of Malibu #1

Views

Quotations: "Eventually I realized that I could connect compositional elements with shadows. People thought that was strange, because the shadows were doing things that they couldn’t do naturally."

"I began to feel as if Abstract Expressionism was talking about art, that it was always about the process. And I looked around me and I began to think that there are a lot of things in my life that I’d like to talk about in my painting. So I went outside and started painting Mt. Tamalpais, even though it still looked like Abstract Expressionism at first. The school thought I was out of my mind."

Personality

Paul Wonner was well-liked and had a charming persona.

Quotes from others about the person

• Janet Bishop: "With the passing of Paul Wonner, San Francisco has lost one its finest painters and a truly lovely man."
  
  Gretchen Berggruen: "Of all the artists I've worked with, he [Wonner] was perhaps the kindest. Just a wonderful human being. He was not about anything but the art itself."

Connections

Paul Wonner met and fell in love with his longtime companion and fellow painter, Theophilus Brown, while attending the University of California, Berkeley.

Sister:

Dorothy Kendall

life partner:

Theophilus Brown

Theophilus Brown (1919-2012) was an American artist. He represented the Bay Area Figurative Movement.

References

• Bay Area Figurative Art: 1950-1965 Bay Area Figurative Art 1950-1965 is based on extensive archival research and interviews, it is the first study of the movement as a whole and is the broadest and most accurate account of the careers and interactions of ten Bay Area artists who worked in this new style.
  1990
• Paul Wonner: Abstract Realist Book by San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
  1981
• Paul Wonner Art book by Nancy Grimes.
  1999