In the corner of Paul Wonner’s San Francisco studio rests a small cot, ready to accommodate a mid-afternoon nap. At 87, Wonner tires easily and no longer has the strength to paint large canvases. Yet the artist, whose voice resonates with calm certainty, sees his age as an advantage. "One of the good things about being this old is that you can do whatever the hell you want," he says, tracing the lines etched in his face with knobby fingers. "When you don’t have to worry about what someone else is going to think, it’s a lot more fun to paint."

Wonner has never cared much about other people’s opinions. For more than five decades, he has confounded critics and curators with paintings that upset orthodoxies. From his ’50s involvement in the Bay Area Figurative School through his ’70s engagement with 17th-century Dutch genre painting through his current exploration of allegory—often referencing ancient myths—Wonner has consistently transformed the retrograde into the avant-garde.

Wonner has abundant classical training on which to draw. Born in Tucson, Arizona, in 1920, he was tutored in high school by an old Spanish academician who had relocated to the small town—still little more than a train station—as a treatment for tuberculosis. Wonner’s Beaux-Arts training continued at the California College of Arts and Crafts after his working-class father concluded that he must be an artist because he wasn’t suitable for anything else. "First we had to draw from plaster casts, which was called ‘antique,’" he recalls, "and then we graduated to life drawing, which we referred to as ‘pink antique.’" Nor was antiquity limited to classical poses: Wonner’s instructor had been a pupil of Jean-Léon Gérôme.

After Army service in Texas and several years as a cosmetics packaging designer in New York, Wonner returned to school in California, pursuing a master’s degree at the University of California, at Berkeley. While only several miles down the road from CCAC, Berkeley was as far from Beaux-Arts traditionalism as any school in the world in 1950. "Abstract Expressionism was what you did there," Wonner says. "If you wanted to do anything else, you were asked to leave." He learned what he could from the push and pull of action painting, but found it as unfulfilling as Academic dabbling. "I began to feel as if Abstract Expressionism was talking about art, that it was always about the process," Wonner explains. "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."

But Wonner wasn’t the only one edging away from full-bodied abstraction. In 1951, the well-respected Bay Area Abstract Expressionist David Park submitted a figurative painting called "Kids on Bikes" to a local competition and won first prize. The general consensus within the avant-garde was that he’d lost his nerve, but several other prominent Bay Area Abstract Expressionists, including Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff, were in sympathy with Park’s curt declaration of independence: "I’d like to break the damn picture plane!"