Artists - Part 28

 Paul Wonner

Paul Wonner (1920-2008) met his artistic partner and lover, William Theophilus Brown, in 1952 when they were both postgrad students at the University of California, Berkeley.  His early work was in the Abstract Expressionist style, but in the 1950s, Wonner and Brown joined the Bay Area Figurative movement that was reacting against abstraction in art.

(Above: self portrait, Youth and Old Age, Artist and Model and Red Carpet, 2003.)

Figurative art was representational, not abstract.  In the 1950s among all the other abstract artists, this was actually avant-garde.

(Above: Nude and Statue, 1969, compares a nude man to a Greek kouros statue.  Note that the background is still rather abstract.)

Wonner became known for still life paintings that featured traditional subjects like fruit, separated by almost surrealistic empty spaces.  He painted dozens and dozens of still lifes.  I haven't included any examples here, because this is The Unashamed Male, not The Unashamed Fruit and Kitchen Towels on a Table.

But he also painted a large number of male nudes, and I will show you some of those.

(Above: 1970-1975 untitled (nude on rug).)

A favorite theme of his was the self portrait of the artist painting the model.  This is Artist and Model, 2001-2006.

This is Artist and Model with a Rose, 2002.

This is Artist and Model with Red Robe, 2002.

This is Youth and Old Age, Artist, Model, Pots of Flowers, 2003.  There are many more examples of artist-model paintings (I found 19 of them), and in every one of them, the model is a naked male.

Another recurring theme was paintings of bathers in the style of Cézanne.  This is Bathers After Cézanne, 2003.  The difference is that Cézanne's paintings depicted nude female bathers, and Wonner's paintings depicted males.

This is Bathers After Cézanne, 2004.

We end with an undated, untitled painting of a nude man on a rug that exemplifies what Wonner loved to paint.  Today, his works are found in major art museums, including the Smithsonian in Washington, DC and the Guggenheim in New York.