Paul Wonner

(American, 1920–2008)

Paul Wonner was an American painter associated with the Bay Area Figurative Movement alongside Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, and David Park. Wonner painted still lifes, landscapes, and figures with the vigorous brushstrokes and dynamic compositions of Abstract Expressionism. “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,” he once said. Born on April 24, 1920 in Tucson, AZ, he went on to attend the College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland before serving in the US Military. Wonner later moved to New York, where he studied at the Art Students League and worked as a package designer. After returning to California in 1950, where he completed a master’s degree in library science, Wonner’s work transitioned from abstraction into the expressive figurative paintings for which he is now known. Later in his career, the artist adopted the delineated realism of 17th-century Dutch still-life painters. Wonner died on April 23, 2008 in San Francisco, CA. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, among others.