David Ligare (born 1945) is a California-based representational painter of landscape, figurative and still life works.Pagel, David. "Country Escapes: David Ligare," Los Angeles Times, November 20, 1998. Retrieved September 5, 2023.Wilson, William. "The Shock of the Old: Four Figure Artists Who've Revolted Against the Modern and Returned to Traditional Forms," Los Angeles Times, March 27, 1988. Retrieved September 5, 2023.Nisbet, James. "History Painting after Conceptual Art," in What Was History Painting and What Is It Now?, Mark Salber Phillips and Jordan Bear (eds), McGill-Queen's University Press, 2019, p. 182–201. His paintings employ formal principles and ideas from Greco-Roman art and Classical history painting in the service of philosophical contemplations of contemporary existence.Knight, Christopher. "Order and Clarity: David Ligare," Los Angeles Times, September 29, 2000. Retrieved September 5, 2023.Holliday, Peter J. American Arcadia: California and the Classical Tradition, New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Retrieved November 1, 2023. He has sometimes been characterized as a photorealist, however, many critics reject that categorization. They identify an uncanny, timeless element in his work focused on moral concerns, the past and idealized subjects rather than the reproduction of photographic reality, which belies the photorealist label.Kuspit, Donald. "Singular Perfection: David Ligare's Figuration," in David Ligare: California Classicist, Scott A. Shields, David Stuart Rodes and Patricia A. Junker, Winterbourne, Berkshire, UK, Papadakis/Crocker Art Museum, 2015. Retrieved December 5, 2023.Geer, Suvan. "La Cienaga Area: David Ligare," Los Angeles Times, November 4, 1988. Retrieved September 5, 2023.Johnson, Eric. "David Ligare's paintings come from the world where beauty was invented," Monterey County Week, February 9, 2006. Retrieved November 1, 2023.Shields, Scott A. "David Ligare and Recurrent Classicism," in David Ligare: California Classicist, Scott A. Shields, David Stuart Rodes and Patricia A. Junker, Winterbourne, Berkshire, UK, Papadakis/Crocker Art Museum, 2015. Retrieved December 5, 2023. Critic Donald Kuspit termed Ligare's paintings "covertly abstract as well as overtly realistic, and thus peculiarly surreal. Formally beautiful as well as insightfully true to appearances, and responsible to the cultural heritage of Classical antiquity, they fuse modernism and traditionalism."
Ligare's work belongs to the public collections of institutions including the Museum of Modern Art,Museum of Modern Art. David Ligare, Artists. Retrieved September 5, 2023. de Young Museum,de Young Museum. Xenia (Still Life with Grape Juice and Sandwiches), David Ligare, Artworks. Retrieved September 5, 2023. San Jose Museum of Art,San Jose Museum of Art. David Ligare, Objects. Retrieved September 5, 2023. and Smithsonian American Art Museum.Smithsonian American Art Museum. Sand Drawing #3, David Ligare, Artwork. Retrieved September 5, 2023. He has appeared in surveys at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA),Janss, Glenn C. and Henry Hopkins. American Realism: Twentieth-Century Drawings and Watercolors from the Collection of Glenn C. Janss, San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1986. Retrieved November 1, 2023. Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art,Glueck, Grace. "When Today's Artists Raid the Past," The New York Times, July 21, 1985, p. 29. Retrieved September 5, 2023. National Museum in Gdansk (Poland)Kuspit, Donald. New Old Masters, Gdansk, Poland: National Museum, Gdansk, 2006. and National Pinakothiki (Athens, Greece),Rose, Barbara. American Painting 1900–1982, Athens, Greece: National Pinakothiki, 1982. and had solo exhibitions at the Crocker Art Museum,Crocker Art Museum. "David Ligare, California Classicist," Exhibitions. Retrieved September 5, 2023. Georgia Museum of Art,Georgia Museum of Art. "David Ligare, California Classicist," Exhibit. Retrieved September 5, 2023. Monterey Museum of ArtRyce, Walter. "Painter David Ligare is a revered iconoclast in the art world and, again, at home," Monterrey County Weekly, November 14, 2013. Retrieved November 1, 2023. and Laguna Art Museum, among other venues.Laguna Art Museum. David Ligare: California Classicist, Exhibitions, 2015. Retrieved January 17, 2023.
He has lived in the Monterey region of California since the late 1960s and is based in the Carmel Valley.Bamsey, Ben. "David Ligare," Eklektx, April 6, 2010. Retrieved September 6, 2023.Popęda Agata. "A visit to painter David Ligare's Drapery series serves as an appetizer for exhibits to come," Monterrey County Weekly, July 6, 2023. Retrieved November 1, 2023.
Life and career Ligare was born in 1945 in Oak Park, Illinois and moved with his family to Manhattan Beach, California at age five.Smithsonian American Art Museum. David Ligare, Artists. Retrieved September 5, 2023.Shields, Scott A., David Stuart Rodes and Patricia A. Junker. David Ligare: California Classicist, Winterbourne, Berkshire, UK, Papadakis/Crocker Art Museum, 2015. Retrieved December 5, 2023. He painted from an early age; a backpacking trip through Europe after high school sparked his interested in classical art. Ligare began studies at the Art Center College of Design in 1964, but left the following year to paint plein air landscapes, despite the prevailing influences of Pop art and Abstract Expressionism.San Jose Museum of Art. David Ligare, Artists. Retrieved September 5, 2023.
In 1965, he was drafted into the U.S. army and eventually worked as an illustrator for United Armed Forces Television at Fort Monmouth in New Jersey. While there, he began exhibiting at New York venues such as ACA Galleries.Kramer, Hilton. "Artists 'Looking West,'" The New York Times, September 23, 1972, p. 27. Retrieved September 5, 2023. In 1968 after his military service, Ligare moved to Big Sur on the California coast. In 1974 he met his partner, Gary Smith, who accepted a position teaching art at Hartnell College in Salinas; they eventually settled in Corral de Tierra, the area of Monterey County that John Steinbeck called "The Pastures of Heaven." Over the next two decades, Ligare had solo exhibitions at the Phoenix Art Museum, Prince of Wales Institute of Architecture, Frye Art Museum, Koplin Gallery (Los Angeles), and Schoelkopf Gallery and Stiebel Modern in New York, among others.Frye Art Museum. David Ligare, Hercules at the Crossroads, Objects, Collection. Retrieved September 5, 2023.Wilson, William. "On the Quiet Side," Los Angeles Times, May 1, 1983. He appeared in classicist-oriented and realist surveys at the Denver Art Museum, deCordova Museum, Long Beach Museum of Art and SFMOMA.Brewer, Donald. Reality of Illusion, Denver, CO: Denver Art Museum, 1979.Lafo, Rachael Rosenfeld. Beyond Antiquity: Classical References in Contemporary Art, Lincoln, MA: DeCordova & Dana Museum, 1992.
In the 2000s, Ligare had solo exhibitions at the Fresno Art Museum, Monterey Museum of Art, Crocker Art Museum (an 80-work retrospective), Georgia Museum of Art,Fresno Art Museum. "Summer 2013 Exhibitions," Exhibitions. Retrieved November 1, 2023. and galleries including Koplin Del Rio (Los Angeles), Hackett-Freedman (San Francisco), Plus One (London), LewAllen Galleries (Santa Fe) and Hirschl & Adler Modern (New York).Ryce, Walter. "Monterey County’s superlative painter, David Ligare, wows with 45 years of work," Monterrey County Weekly, July 15, 2015. Retrieved November 1, 2023. He exhibited in surveys at the Orange County Museum of Art, San Jose Museum of Art, National Museum Gdansk (Poland) and McNay Art Museum, among others.
Work and reception Ligare's work arose in response to 1970s conceptualism and the dominant modernist emphasis on originality, self-expression and irony, instead privileging a then-unfashionable connection to the past.Shields, Scott A. "California Classicist," in David Ligare: California Classicist, Scott A. Shields, David Stuart Rodes and Patricia A. Junker, Winterbourne, Berkshire, UK, Papadakis/Crocker Art Museum, 2015. Retrieved December 5, 2023.Molesky, David. "David Ligare," Juxtapoz, April 2016, p. 96–103. Since the late 1970s, he has sought to revive a sensibility in contemporary art informed by classical formal ideas, a desire for knowledge, and aspirational humanist ideas such as social responsibility and harmonious integration of diversity.Gonzalez, Matt. "Presence of the Past: David Ligare’s Purposeful Representation," Juxtapoz, January 4, 2022. Retrieved January 9, 2024. His creative process seeks a balance between structure (Apollonian order) and randomness of appearances (Dionysian chaos); together those elements convey his third area of focus: content rooted in narrative, allegory and timeless principles.Deragon, Rick. "A Certain Slant of Light," Monterey County Weekly, April 25, 2002.Ackerman, Gerald. Contemporary Humanism: Reconfirmation of the Figure, Fullerton, CA: California State University Fullerton, 1987.
Ligare's imagery celebrates idealized forms—of nature and the human figure—and their harmonic relationships, while considering contemporary moral questions through the lenses of antiquity and Stoic philosophy. Critics suggest that his unblemished subjects and surfaces (intended to erase his own presence) disguise deep-seated tensions in the work between introspection and pleasure, aesthetic distance and erotic interest, classicism and modernism. Ligare often sets his reworkings of traditional stories and morals within the rocky landscape, hills, trees and skies of his native Monterey region, melding the ancient Mediterranean with modern notions of California as an American Arcadia.Molesky, David. "David Ligare 'California Classicist' @ Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento," Juxtapoz, July 8, 2015. Retrieved January 9, 2024.
His wide-ranging influences include the aesthetic and philosophical theories of the Greek sculptor Polykleitos, the philosopher Pythagoras, the art and architecture of the Florentine Quattrocento artists Filippo Brunelleschi and Leon Battista Alberti, and work of French classicists and neoclassicists such as Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain and Jacques-Louis David. Some writers have related Ligare's tactical adaptation of traditional realist genres to the more critically recognized photography of Jeff Wall—who also reworked historical pictorial traditions—and to the postmodernist paintings of Gerhard Richter and Chuck Close, despite clear differences among them.
Early series Ligare's early 1970s work showed an affinity for environmental and process art, isolating aspects of the landscape to express universal concepts.Mecklenburg, Virginia M. Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1987. Retrieved September 5, 2023. His realistic "Sand Drawings" series (1971–1977) transposed blurred markings and abstract patterns he originally drew in wet sand and then meticulously rendered onto paper, creating the illusion of two-dimensional earthworks. He followed with a series of tightly defined watercolors and oils of white cloth bunched on tables overlooking the sea (the "Delphi" series, 1972) or lying on the beach; the mounds of fabric evoked ancient marble sculptural fragments in which only torsos and drapery remained.Marshall, Kerry. "Cloud, Rock and Cloth," Artweek, August 12, 1972, p. 3.