Paul Wonner
(1920-2008)
"Boy with Flowers," 1961
Oil on canvas
Signed lower right: Paul Wonner; titled on a gallery label and a partial museum label, both affixed to the stretcher, verso
46.5" H x 46.25" W
Provenance: The Artist
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA
Felix Landau Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
Gifted to Bill Brown, Los Angeles, CA, circa 1964
Private Collection, Los Angeles, CA, by descent from the above to current owner, 2018

Exhibited: Richmond, VA, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, "American Painting," March 9-April 15, 1962
Los Angeles, CA, Felix Landau Gallery, "Recent paintings, Paul Wonner," January 7-26, 1963

Other Notes: Notes: Paul Wonner was born in Tucson in 1920 and moved to the Bay Area to study at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland (now California College of the Arts), where he earned a bachelor's degree in 1941. After military service in Texas, Wonner moved to New York, where he worked as a package designer and briefly continued his training at the Art Students League. Residing in New York from 1946 to 1950, Wonner attended programs and lectures at Robert Motherwell’s Studio 35, a gathering place for artists' lectures and events. Wonner returned to the Bay Area to earn his MFA under the direction of Hans Hofmann at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1950.By 1953, Wonner completed both bachelor's and master's degrees in fine arts from UC Berkeley and began to work with the formative members of the Bay Area Figurative Movement. Like other members of the Bay Area Figurative School, Wonner rejected abstraction in the late 1950s and '60s and began painting light-filled landscapes and interiors that often-showed solitary figures absorbed in their own worlds.Wonner’s “Boy with Flowers,” 1961, was created the same year that he and his partner Theophilus Brown moved to Santa Monica, California, where the two artists lived close to the beach. Wonner started a teaching position at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles and UC Santa Barbara during the 1960s. This painting was created the same year that Wonner made his move from the Bay Area to Southern California, and the landscape depicted heavily embraces Wonner’s new environment.In “Boy with Flowers,” it is difficult as a viewer to not get lost in the vast blue hues that dominate the upper half of the painting, suggesting the expansive sunlit sky that is ubiquitous to Los Angeles’ coastline. The painting conveys feelings of spaciousness and tranquility in this new landscape by a hint of the ocean curling into an orange wave in the distance. Whereas Wonner’s Bay Area paintings mostly focus on a subject’s place within dual interior and exterior spaces, the complete lack of man-made elements in “Boy with Flowers” suggests new beginnings, new possibilities, and a new outlook for the artist.Reflecting on this period in his career, Wonner explained, “We experienced living outdoors rather than inside like artists in New York.” Among Wonner’s first explorations of the Los Angeles landscape, “Boy with Flowers” is a transitional painting from his Bay Area works to his new environment in Los Angeles. It was created before the artist shed his Bay Area sensibilities, turning his focus to paintings of Southern California pools and Malibu landscapes.The emergence of this painting at auction comes just after the traveling exhibition that started at the Crocker Museum, titled “Breaking the Rules: Paul Wonner and Theophilus Brown,” where curator and friend Scott Shields Ph.D. argues for Wonner and Brown’s placement in the first generation of Bay Area Figurative Artists, along with David Park, Elmer Bischoff, James Weeks, and Richard Diebenkorn. Shields argues that Wonner and Brown were not celebrated as first-generation Bay Area Figurative artists because of the couple's openly homosexual relationship.Their queer identity has sidelined the artists for too long, and Shields has made a strong argument for the reexamination of the artist’s place as founding members of the Bay Area Figurative Movement. While Wonner and Brown’s sexuality may have excluded them from being praised as founders, their work and influence on other artists speaks for itself.Paul Wonner's work is represented in public collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Boston Museum of Fine Art, the National Museum of American Art in Washington D.C., and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, also in Washington D.C.

Visual: Overall good condition. Stretcher bar creases along each of the four sides. Craquelure throughout. With areas of pigment loss in the outer edges and impasto, the largest areas being a 0.75" H x 2" W loss near the upper left corner, a 3" H x 3" W area of scattered pea-sized or smaller losses near the center of the left edge, and scattered pea-sized losses in the lower right quadrant. Pea-sized or smaller areas of foxing scattered throughout the canvas, verso.

Blacklight: No evidence of restoration.

Frame: 47.5" H x 47.5" W x 2.5" D Condition reports are offered as a courtesy and are typically published in Moran's catalogue or can be made available upon request. The absence of a condition report does not imply that an item is free from defects or restoration, nor does a reference to particular defects imply the absence of others. Buyers are responsible for determining to their own satisfaction the true nature and condition of any lot prior to bidding. Though buyers are not legally required to inspect lots prior to purchase, failure to do so may constitute a waiver of complaint that an item was not delivered in a condition equal to the existent condition at the auction.